[71] Ibid. ii. 725.
[72] Weber, ‘Ueber Menschenopfer bei den Indern der vedischen Zeit,’ in Indische Streifen, i. 72 sq.
[73] See supra, [i. 445 sq.]
[74] See Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 352, 353. 366.
[75] Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 211; ii. 144 sqq.; iv. 286, 291, 294, 296, 297, 299 sq.
In various other instances human flesh or blood is supposed to have a supernatural or medicinal effect upon him who partakes of it. The Banks Islanders in Melanesia believe that a man or woman may obtain a power like that of Vampires by stealing and eating a morsel of a corpse; the ghost of the dead man would then “join in a close friendship with the person who had eaten, and would gratify him by afflicting any one against whom his ghostly power might be directed.”[76] Australian sorcerers are said to acquire their magic influence by eating human flesh.[77] The Egyptian natives who accompanied Baker on one of his expeditions imagined that the rite of consuming an enemy’s liver would give a fatal direction to a random bullet.[78] Among the aborigines of Tasmania a man’s blood was often administered as a healing draught.[79] In China the heart, the liver, the gall, and the blood of executed criminals are used for life-strengthening purposes;[80] thus at Peking, when a person has been executed by the sword, certain large pith balls are steeped in the blood and, under the name of “blood-bread,” sold as a medicine for consumption.[81] Tertullian speaks of those “who at the gladiatorial shows, for the cure of epilepsy, quaff with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain in the arena, as it flows fresh from the wound.”[82] So also in Christian Europe the blood of criminals has been drunk as a remedy against epilepsy, fever, and other diseases.[83] In these cases the ascription of a healing effect to the blood of the dead may perhaps have been derived from a belief in the transference of some quality which they possessed in their lifetime; the blood or life of a sound and strong individual might impart health to the sickly. But the mystery of death would also give to the corpse a miraculous power of its own, especially when combined with the horror or awe inspired by an executed felon.
[76] Codrington, op. cit. p. 221 sq.
[77] Eyre, Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, ii. 255.
[78] Baker, Ismailïa, p. 393.
[79] Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, p. 89.