A few variants are also found, in which the maiden is rescued, not from death by the dragon, but only from thraldom. Such is the tale of Ragnar Lodbrog as developed in his Saga. As told by Saxo, Herodd, king of the Swedes, found some snakes in the woods and gave them to his daughter Thora to bring up. They grew and became such a nuisance to the whole country-side that at last the king was forced to issue a proclamation, offering his daughter in marriage to any one who would remove the pest. Ragnar procured a woollen mantle and thigh-pieces thick with hair that would protect him from snake-bites. To make assurance doubly sure he plunged into water on a frosty night and froze his clothing stiff. Thus defended, and armed with his sword and spear, he attacked and killed two serpents; the courtiers, meanwhile, flying from the struggle and hiding like frightened little girls. After the combat the king, laughing at his uncouth garb, nicknamed him Lodbrog, or Shaggy-brogues.[63.2] The Saga, however, gives a somewhat different version. It only mentions one worm, found when quite small in a vulture’s egg which Thora’s father had brought to her as a gift from Bjarmeland. She took a fancy to the creature and made a bed of gold for it in a little box. There it grew, and the gold with it, until at length it lay coiled round the house and allowed no one to approach except the man who brought its daily food. The Jarl Herraud was moved to offer his daughter and the dragon’s hoard to any one who would kill it. Ragnar’s shaggy mantle and leggings were boiled in pitch and then rolled in sand. He attacked the monster with his lance early in the morning while all men yet slept, and drove the weapon home. So mighty were the worm’s death-struggles that the building shook with them and Thora was awakened. She cried out, inquiring the hero’s name. He replied by singing some verses in which he hardly gave her more than his age, and hastened away, leaving the iron spear-head imbedded in the carcase, but carrying the shaft with him. The Jarl forthwith summoned an assembly and passed round the spear-head, that it might be found who owned the shaft it would fit and who was entitled to the reward.[64.1] Note here the inveterate habit of the adventurer in these tales: the habit of running away after performing the deed and thus necessitating his discovery by a token. This is wanting in Saxo’s account; but we cannot infer that it was unknown to him. A careful examination of his narrative shows, in more than one place, evidence of omissions not unconnected, probably, with his purpose of turning popular traditions into serious history.[64.2]
A story of the deliverance of a maiden imprisoned by a dragon, still current in the mouths of the people, places the scene of the captivity on a little island, called Lindwerder, in the Lake of Dratzig, in Pomerania. After many knights had essayed the task in vain one came who, with a song, threw a spell over the monster and slew him. The lady, however, refused marriage with her deliverer, having vowed her life to God; and she became a nun.[65.1] I might refer to other cases of rescue from the toils of a serpent or some such monster, but it is needless to pursue this form of the tale, since it seems connected rather with the myth of the Enchanted Princess, which I have studied elsewhere,[65.2] than with that of Perseus and Andromeda.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA: ITS RELATION TO HUMAN SACRIFICES.
Popular as the story of the rescue of the devoted maiden is, and appealing as it does to the imagination, it is not a little remarkable that it appears to be indigenous only in the Old World. Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are by no means so confined in their range, where there is no specific human being to deliver; and not infrequently they form part of the cosmogony of peoples alien in race and occupying distant portions of the globe. Few of them exhibit any details in common with those of the Perseus cycle. I have already mentioned some, and to others I shall have occasion to refer hereafter. The rest it would little avail us to analyse. Enough to note that the thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is preternatural and hostile to mankind. The suggestion has often been made that these stories are traditions of the saurians which abounded in geologic times. Of this, not a particle of evidence has been adduced; and it is in itself so wildly improbable as hardly to deserve notice. None of the giant reptiles of the secondary period were contemporary with man. The process of evolution was still far short of that consummation. And when man appeared in the Quaternary, or perhaps at an advanced stage of the Tertiary, period, the remains of iguanodons and pterodactyles had long been peacefully fossilised beyond his reach. It is true that he made war on the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros; but these could have furnished no hints for the construction of the winged dragon or the lindwurm. We may indeed reasonably ask what hints were needed beyond the existence of snakes and birds or bats? The conscious weakness of humanity, the mystery of serpentine motions, the magnifying, the combining and the distorting powers of human imagination, amply account for the result. The hero who is believed to have succeeded in vanquishing a monster thus created, is regarded as somewhat more than man; he is frequently worshipped as a god. This, however, we know, was comparatively late in civilisation. There was a time when gods, in the sense of beings distinct from and above man, though human in their passions, and more or less human in their proper form, did not exist in the belief of mankind. The worship of confessedly human ancestors, totemism, and other and ruder superstitions preceded them. Science has not yet determined the exact relations of ancestor-worship and totemism. But it is at least certain that the dead were constantly held to assume animal shape. Multitudes of the lower animals—even noxious and repulsive creatures like snakes—were venerated as totems. Veneration grows easily into worship; the totem-feast develops into what we understand by a sacrifice. That many of the classical deities themselves emerged into anthropomorphism from an earlier and less advanced existence is probable from the tales which represented them on various occasions and for various purposes “disguised in brutish forms,” and from the wolves, the horses, the swine, the dogs, the mice and even the flies associated with them, or dedicated to them in the ordinary offerings of the temples or in the more secret and solemn cult of the Mysteries. Egypt, down to the latest moment of its independence, in spite of the political vicissitudes of its long and splendid history, and the consequent evolution of its manifold religious faith, never got beyond its zoomorphic deities. The crocodile and the goose, the ibis and the ram, the jackal, the cat and the bull, decorated with divine names, received in their proper bestial persons the adoration of their worshippers. To living gods like these food was a daily necessity; and for such as were carnivorous flesh, doubtless part of the daily sacrifices, must have been provided. A savage nation on days of festival, or under stress of some great impending calamity, would not hesitate to give human flesh. If, by the concurrence of an advance in civilisation and a political revolution, the worship of any such divinity were suppressed, he would become in tradition a deadly monster; and the milder divinity who succeeded to his place in popular regard would be credited with his conquest and destruction.
The hypothesis I venture to put forward to explain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda is, that it is the record of some such religious reformation. In dealing with the previous incidents I was able to show that they were founded on beliefs, which, if we may not call them primitive, at least go down very deep into savage life. Here it is different. Considerable progress in civilisation must have been made before such a reformation could have been effected, though it would still be compatible with the continuance of a vast amount of wilful and deliberate cruelty constantly inflicted on human beings in the service of the gods. The Church, that zealously propagated the legend of Saint George, regarded the tortures inflicted on the hero as highly improper for an orthodox knight, but quite suitable for a heretic. Even the polished Greeks occasionally offered human sacrifices—if we may trust some of the reports, with torments which would have done no dishonour to the genius of Saint Dominic or the most amiable of his “sons.” But the practice of presenting such offerings to wild beasts in their capacity as gods had been abandoned; and the story of the Slaughter of the Dragon would seem to be the mode wherein tradition preserved the effect upon the collective mind, not indeed of a specific event, so much as of the total result. Tradition loves to be pictorial, dramatic. While its presentations are usually wide of the actual series of occurrences, they often embody in imaginative shape some genuine memory; and it is the task of the historian or the scientific student to bid them render up the secrets they enclose.
The traces of human sacrifice among the Egyptians are faint and uncertain. Classical writers, indeed, alleged it; but they brought forward hardly any tangible evidence, beyond the statement of Plutarch—and that at second-hand—that the engraving on the seals of the Sphragistai, whose business it was to seal the beasts intended for the offerings, was a man bound and kneeling, with a knife at his throat.[69.1] Nor is there reason to suppose that in any case men or women were given during historical times to their sacred animals. We must turn to a lower range of culture for such a custom. At Bonny, on the West Coast of Africa, a virgin was bound to a stake on the sea-shore at the first low water of every spring-tide, and left there as a sacrifice to the shark-god.[70.1] In the East Indies we find many traditions of such practices. “It has been somewhere related that the Rájá of Kupang, on the island of Timor, formerly sacrificed a young virgin of royal descent to the Alligator, by throwing her into the sea in order to be swallowed by that monster.”[70.2] Dr. Pleyte, the friend and pupil of the late Professor Wilken, relates “how in Boeroe at sunset, after the day’s work, the notables of the island would gather round him [Professor Wilken] and go down to the cool sea-shore, where he would sit on a rock in the midst of an improvised assembly, and the old men would tell traditions of past glories in the days when every year a maiden, chosen for her beauty, was led down to the sea as a sacrifice to the crocodile-god for the prosperity of the people.”[70.3] In the seventeenth century, Gautier Schouten, a medical man in the service of the Dutch East India Company, heard a story on the same island, which discloses a somewhat different motive for the sacrifice. A holy crocodile, it runs, having fallen in love with one of the daughters of the king of the island, who was very beautiful, ravaged the coast every day, carrying off and devouring men, women, and children. The inhabitants assembled in arms to surprise the brute and to kill it. The crocodile was prepared for this, and cried out to them in their own tongue that they should beware of insulting him, for he was mighty enough to destroy them and all their island; and that he would do so unless they delivered up to him the king’s daughter; but, on the other hand, if they did this he would become the protector of the island and would load it with benefits. The islanders could not resist these promises and threats. They led the princess to the beach, and bound her to a pillar, whence the crocodile carried her off in due course, and by her became the parent of all crocodiles; on which account they are honoured as gods.[71.1] If Archdeacon Gray’s information is to be trusted, the Shurii-Kia-Miau, one of the aboriginal tribes of China, still offer human sacrifices to their canine deity, though not exactly to a living dog. They possess a large temple in which is an idol in the form of a dog. There they hold an annual religious festival, when the wealthy members of the tribe “entertain their poorer brethren at a banquet given in honour of one who has agreed, for a sum of money paid to his family, to allow himself to be offered as a sacrifice on the altar of the dog idol. At the end of the banquet, the victim, having drunk wine freely, is put to death before the idol.” And the people “believe that, were they to neglect this rite, they would be visited with pestilence, famine, or the sword.”[71.2] Among the South Sea Islanders, themselves cannibals, human offerings were frequent. Their idols, it is true, were roughly human in form; yet the divinities often took the shape of other animals. Ellis relates that “birds resorting to the temple were said to feed upon the bodies of the human sacrifices, and it was imagined that the god approached the temple in the birds, and thus devoured the victims placed upon the altar. In some of the islands ‘man-eater’ was an epithet of the principal deities.” To the king, who was a sacred being descended from the gods, and who often personated the god, the eye, as the most precious part of the victim, the organ or emblem of power, was presented. He feigned to eat it; the simulation being, there can be little doubt, a relic of a former period when he actually did eat the eye and probably other parts of the body. Portions of some of the victims were also eaten by the priests, who of course were also representatives of the gods.[72.1] The legends of the Greeks and Romans afford us glimpses of a belief like that of the Polynesians. How else may we interpret the stories, reported by Plutarch, of Helena, a noble virgin of Lacedæmon, who, in obedience to an oracle, was prepared for sacrifice, but was saved by an eagle carrying away the sword and laying it upon a heifer; and of Valeria Luperca, a maiden of Falerii to whom a similar adventure happened—an adventure commemorated still by a yearly ceremony in the days of Plutarch, or at least of Aristides, the author whom he cites?[72.2] The tradition of Lycaon points in the same direction. He, having offered an infant to Zeus, was changed into a wolf; and it was believed that any one who imitated his example would share his fate, though with the chance of regaining his own form if for ten years he abstained from human flesh.[72.3]
Several of the foregoing examples exhibit the being to whom the sacrifice is offered as a crocodile, or some analogous inhabitant of the waters. Nor will it pass unnoticed that many of the tales of the Rescue of Andromeda represent the dragon as inhabiting a spring or lake, or keeping the waters and giving them only in exchange for the victim. A shark- or crocodile-god has, it would seem, a natural tendency to pass into a purely mythical being. Such is Ju-ju, an object of worship in the delta of the Niger, to which a young girl is commonly sacrificed in the way already described as customary at Bonny in sacrificing to the shark-god.[73.1] To this origin we may probably ascribe the numerous Eastern tales of dragons and evil spirits taking possession of rivers, lakes and tanks, and demanding sacrifices to induce them to release the water. The Chinese annals of Khotan, a city in Cashgar, have preserved a legend concerning a river that dried up, to the injury of the inhabitants of the city. The king, having consulted his ecclesiastical advisers, was informed that the river-dragon had interrupted the current, and advised to mollify him by a sacrifice. No sooner was the sacrifice offered than a lady came (so we are told, if the translation be accurate) out of the waters, though it is hard to know how she could do this when the river-bed was dry. But whencesoever she may have come, she declared that her husband had prematurely died, and that his demise had stopped the flow. And she required of the monarch one of his grandees as a new husband, so that the stream might resume its course. One of the nobles, named Mieou, offered himself to supply the place of the late lamented he-dragon. Mounted on a white steed, he rode into the river-bottom, and boldly advanced till he met the returning waters. Nor then did he hesitate, but opening a passage amid them with his whip, he entered and was seen no more. The horse in a short time reappeared, on his back a drum of sandalwood and a letter assuring the king that Mieou had been elevated to the rank of a god, and would thenceforth watch over the prosperity of the realm. Meanwhile, the new deity begged his majesty’s acceptance of the accompanying magical drum, which, if suspended at the south-eastern gate of the city, would give warning in case of any hostile attack. Since that time the people of the city have had no cause to complain of deficiency in their water-supply.[74.1] A somewhat different cause for the human sacrifice is alleged in the following Hindu story. The Talao Lake was made by a Bargújar rajah named Menh or Mehan. When it was finished the water all became blood-red. The pandits, consulted by the rajah, declared that the water had become impure, because the work had been done by low-caste labourers; and the only way of purifying it was by sacrificing the rajah’s son, Chattar-bhuj, with his wife, his horse, and his servants, in the lake. With the consent of the principal victim the foul water was drained off, and a room was built in the floor of the lake for the reception of Chattar-bhuj and his household. They accordingly entered it, provided with six months’ food. The room was then closed, and a temple built over it. The result was satisfactory, for when the pool was filled at the next rainy season the water remained pure. “It is the universal belief that whenever the lake overflows,” the rajah’s son “is seen by night riding down the hill from the highest point on a blue horse. Some say that two torches are carried before him, and that his servants follow behind, until all disappear into the lake. Others say that his appearance on the blue horse precedes the fall of rain.”[75.1] Both these cases look like legends which have grown up, in consequence of a change of population or religion, to account for an ancient worship, and for a divinity still believed to haunt the spot, and still regarded with awe, though no longer the object of the special honours at one time rendered to him.[75.2] In the latter story, as it reaches us, there is no mention of a dragon or other supernatural being. It would seem, however, to be implied in the sacrifice, as well as in the temple erected by the rajah.
But, though this may be a true explanation of the story of the Talao Lake, it will generally be agreed that the legend could not have assumed its present form had not human sacrifices to water and water-gods been familiar to the natives of India. The sacred books of the Aryans prescribe human sacrifices on divers occasions to various deities; and it is doubtful whether even yet British rule has entirely extinguished them. Among the aboriginal tribes they have been put down with extreme difficulty. All over India the folktales are full of them; and many are the sagas relating to the consecration of tanks in this way. I need only add two instances. “At Ahmadábád, by the advice of a Brahman, a childless Ványa was induced to dig a tank to appease the goddess Sítalá. The water refused to enter it without the sacrifice of a man. As soon as the victim’s blood fell on the ground the tank filled, and the goddess came down from heaven to rescue the victim. The Vadála lake in Bombay likewise refused to hold water till the local spirit was appeased by the sacrifice of the daughter of the village headman.”[76.1] Among the records of actual sacrifices to water, the author of the treatise on the names of rivers and mountains attributed to Plutarch cites Archelaus (a philosopher of the fifth century before Christ, whose works have perished) for the statement that virgins were nailed to wooden crosses and flung into the Hydaspes, one of the five great rivers (tributaries of the Indus) from which the Panjáb takes its name. These offerings were accompanied by hymns addressed to a goddess called by the writer Aphrodite—probably Párvatí, to whom in her character of Kálí there is reason to suspect that human victims are still presented in remote places.[76.2] As Párvatí, however, she is still, with her husband Siva, the joint object of an instructive rite in the Kánagrá district during some part of March and April. The girls of the village procure two clay images, the one of Siva and the other of Párvatí, which they marry together with full ceremonial. A feast follows; and on the Sankránt of Baisákh (in April) “they all go together to the riverside, throw the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place, as though they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the neighbourhood often annoy them by diving after the images, bringing them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over them.” The custom is called Ralí Ka melá or the Fair of Ralí, “the Ralí being a small painted earthen image of Siva or Párvatí”; and its object is said to be to secure good husbands.[77.1] “Until the beginning of the present century,” says Mr. Crooke, “the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common”; and he goes on to suggest that “akin to this is the Gangá Játra, or murder of sick relatives on the bank of the sacred river, of which a case occurred quite recently at Calcutta.” However this may be, the natives are still suspicious when a bridge is built. “The Narbadá, it was believed, would never allow herself to be bridged until she carried away part of the superstructure and caused the loss of lives as a sacrifice.” And the rumours that a victim was required when the Hooghly Bridge at Calcutta was built, and when the waterworks of Benares were constructed, point to a wide prevalence of the superstition that these and other great public works demand a human sacrifice.[77.2]
On the western continent there lingers among the Zuñi, one of the four stocks of Pueblo Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, a tradition pointing to the prevalence at one time of human sacrifices to water. Zuñi is built upon a knoll in a broad valley walled by picturesque mesas or tablelands, of red and white sandstone. The waters of the valley once rose in a flood and compelled the inhabitants to flee to a mesa several hundred feet high for safety. And still the waters rose, threatening to submerge the mesa itself, until the priests determined to sacrifice a youth and a maiden to propitiate them. The two were dressed in their most beautiful clothes, adorned with many necklaces of turquoise and other precious beads, and cast into the flood. The offering stayed the calamity; and the victims, turned to stone, are yet to be seen in a columnar rock broken near the top into two parts, which are capped with head-like forms and called by the people the father and mother rocks.[78.1]
Europe furnishes numerous remains of human sacrifice to water. At Rome, during historical times, the Vestal Virgins threw from the Sublician bridge into the Tiber, every year on the Ides of May, thirty human effigies formed of rushes. We cannot doubt that at an earlier period living men were hurled into the flood. This was the opinion entertained by the Romans themselves, who held that it was Hercules who first substituted images of straw.[78.2] A similar substitution is practised in India by the Gonds in their offerings to Burha deo; and, we are told, they find it answers the purpose;[78.3] as did the Romans.