The extent of these foundation sacrifices had been revealed by Dr. Trumbull in his Threshold Covenant, all going to show that different branches of the human family, though far removed, mounted much the same steps in their endeavour to achieve the truth about the world in which they lived.
Among the Danes, when the fortifications were first being built around Copenhagen many years ago, the walls, as they were built, kept sinking in, and it did not seem possible that they would ever stand firmly.
“The workmen finally took a little girl, placed her at a table, and gave her play toys and sweetmeats. Then, as she sat there enjoying herself, the masons built an arch over her and in this way the walls were made solid.”[218]
A similar story is told[219] of a castle of Liebenstein. It was made fast and impregnable by buying a child from its mother and walling it in.
Slavensk, a Slavonic town on the Danube, had been devastated by the plague and when it was built anew the wise men of the town agreed that there must be a human victim. Messengers were sent out before sunrise to seize the first living creature they met. The victim was a child and it was buried alive under the foundation stone of the citadel, and from that time on, a citadel was called a Dyetinet, from Dyetina[220], a child.
In Africa in Galam, Tylor says[221] that a boy and a girl were buried alive before the gate of the city in order to make it impregnable. In other places, such as Great Bassam and Yarriba, such sacrifices were usual even when the foundation was only that of a house.
In some places, such as among the Tantis of Africa, the sacrifice was made at every new moon. In Sargos, a girl was offered up that there might be good crops. In Bonny, they sacrificed every year a beautiful virgin to Juju that the evil spirits might be kept away.
“The connection between cannibalism and human sacrifice,” says Dr. Waitz, “is manifest enough in the festivals of Dahomey.”[222]
There were two principal and solemn sacrifices among the Pipiles, a Maya people in Central America—one at the commencement of summer and one at the beginning of winter. Little boys of ten and twelve years of age were the victims, and their blood was sprinkled in the direction of the four cardinal points.[223]