The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

It is certain, according to the story of Sieur le Moyne de Mourgues, that “in that part of Florida which is near Virginia,—and where the French are under the leadership of Sieur le Laudonnière—the people of this country regard their chiefs as sons of the Sun and, for this reason, they pay them divine honours, sacrificing to them their first-born.”[205]

“Their custom is,” according to Le Moyne, “to offer up the first-born son to the chief. When the day for the sacrifice is notified to the chief, he proceeds to a place set apart for the purpose, where there is a bench for him on which he takes his seat. In the middle of the area before him is a wooden stump two feet high and as many thick, before which a mother sits on her heels, her face covered in her hands, lamenting the loss of her child. The principal one of her female relatives or friends now offers the child to the chief in worship, after which the women who have accompanied the mother form a circle and dance around with demonstrations of joy, but without joining hands. She who holds the child goes and dances in the middle, singing some praises to the chief. Meanwhile, six Indians, chosen for the purpose, take their stand in a certain place in the open area; and midway among them the sacrificing officer, who is decorated with a sort of magnificence, and holds a club. The ceremony being through, the sacrificer takes the child and slays it in honour of the chief, before them all, upon the wooden stump. This offering was, on one occasion, performed in our presence.”[206]

“It was the Custom in Peru, to sacrifice Children from four to ten Years of Age, which was chiefly done when the Inga was sick, or going to War, to pray for Victory, and at the Coronation of those Princes they sacrific’d two hundred Children. Sometimes they strangl’d, and bury’d them, and other times they cut their Throats, and the Priests besmear’d themselves with the Blood from Ear to Ear, which was the Formality of the Sacrifice. Nor were the Virgins (Mamaconas) of the Temple exempt from being sacrific’d and, when any Person of Note was sick, and the Priest said he must die, they sacrific’d his son, desiring the Idol to be satisfied with him, and not take away his Father’s life. The Ceremonies us’d at this Sacrifice were strange, for they behav’d themselves like mad Men. They believ’d that all Calamities were occasion’d by Sin, and that Sacrifices were the Remedy.”[207]

Further evidence of the attitude of the Indians is given by the first secretary of the Colony of Virginia Brittania, who asserted that the Indians in Florida sacrificed the first-born male child. According to this writer, their Quiyoughquisocks, or prophets to the Indians, persuaded the warriors to resist the settlements of the white people because their Okeus, who was god of the tribe, would not be appeased by the sacrifice of a thousand children if they permitted the white people, who despised their religion, to dwell among them.[208]

In parts of New South Wales[209] such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan, or MacQuarie, the first-born of every lubra was eaten by the tribe as a part of the religious ceremony. Here, too, it was the male infant that was more desirable as a sacrifice, the female infants being sometimes allowed to live. In this connection, it is interesting to note that where children are killed without any other excuse than that they are a drain on the resources of their parents, it is the female children who are slaughtered. When, however, there is a so-called religious reason for the infanticide, it is the male child that suffers.

In India, as we shall see, children were frankly killed for economic reasons; but here too there are evidences of the sacrifice theory. Up to the beginning of the present century, the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common. A custom akin to this was that of the Ganga Jatra, the murder of sick relatives on the banks of the sacred river. As late as 1812, a mother and sister burned a leper at Katwa near Calcutta, their excuse being that by so doing he would be given a pure body in the next world.

Women, too, who had been long barren dedicated their first child, if one were given them, to Omkar Mandharta.[210]

Bathing in blood, especially the blood of children, in Northern India was regarded as a powerful remedy for disease. In 1870, a Mussulman butcher, losing his child, was told by a Hindu conjurer that in order to make the next child healthy, he should wash his wife in the blood of a boy, with the result that a child was murdered. At Muzaffar Nagar a child was killed and the blood drunk by a barren woman.[211]

In the city of Saugor in India, human sacrifices were offered up in the year 1800, when they were stopped by the local governor, Assa Sahib, although the Brahmin priests objected strenuously to the innovation. Outside the city, there was a spot where the young men sacrificed themselves in order to fulfil the vows of their mothers. The belief was that when a woman was without a child, she could overcome barrenness by promising her first-born, if a male, to the god of destruction, Mahadea. If a boy was born after this vow, she concealed from him the vow until he attained the age of puberty, when it was his duty to obey his mother’s call and throw himself, at the annual fair on the sandstone hills, from a perpendicular height of four or five hundred feet and be dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.[212]