Among the Milanau Dyaks when the largest house was being erected, a deep hole was dug and a slave girl was placed in it. An enormous timber was then allowed to descend on her and crush her to death.[224]
As late as 1843 in Germany, when a new bridge was being built at Halle, the common people fancied that a child was wanted to be walled into the foundations. According to Grimm, the tower called the Reichenfels Castle was built on a live child and a projecting stone marks the place. If that were pulled out, the wall, it is said, would tumble down.[225]
According to a Servian legend, three hundred masons laboured for three years at the foundation stones of Scutari, but what they built by day, the Vila tore down at night. At last she made known to the kings that the place would never be finished until two brothers or sisters “of like name” were built into the foundations. Nowhere could such be found. Then the Vila required that one of the wives of the kings should be walled up in the ground. The next day the consort of the youngest king, never dreaming of such a decree, brought out some dinner to the workmen; thereupon the three hundred masons dropped their stones around her and began to wall her in. At her entreaty, they left a small opening and there she continued to suckle her babe who was held up to her once a day.[226]
The foundation sacrifice is well known in India. At Madras, it has long been a tradition that when the fort was first built a girl was built into it to render it impregnable.[227] A Raja was once building a bridge over the river Jargo at Chunar and when it fell down several times, he was advised to sacrifice a Brahman girl to the local deity. She has now become the Mari or ghost of the place and is regularly worshipped in time of trouble. In Kumaun, there are professional kidnappers known as Doqhutiya, or two-legged beasts of prey, who go about capturing boys that they may be used in foundation sacrifices.
Up to 1867, when a house was built among the Tlinkits tribe in Alaska, the relatives and friends of the chief or wealthy man were invited to appear on the spot that he had chosen for the site. Addressing them at great length, he referred with pride to the various deeds of his ancestors and promised to so conduct himself as to shed more lustre on the family name. The space for the house was then cleared, a spot for the fireplace designated, and four holes dug wherein the corner posts were to be set. A slave, or the descendant of a slave who had been captured in war, was then blind-folded and compelled to lie down face uppermost on the spot selected for the fireplace. A sapling was then cut, laid across the throat of the slave, and, at a given signal, the two nearest relatives of the house sat upon the respective ends of the sapling, thereby choking the wretch to death.[228]
CHAPTER X
HEBREW WRITERS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY—CHILD SACRIFICE CONDEMNED IN THE STORY OF ISAAC—CIRCUMCISION SUBSTITUTED—REVERSION TO BARBARIC HABITS IN CANAAN—TRIUMPH OF THE PROPHETS.
HAVING reviewed the ethnological and archæological aspect of the attitude of the Semitic people toward the sacrifice of the first-born, we turn to the written record of the small bands of Semites who gave to the world the humane ideas that dominate it today. From that written record we will learn that nowhere among the civilization of the world was there the same spirit that there was in that outlandish corner of Syria. Israel was never content with the abuses of the world and in this her philosophy differed from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Indian philosophies as we have been able to judge of them in the writing of the civilizations they produced. If, to make one more comparison, the Greeks were wanting in humanity the Israelites were passionately human. “The Israelitish prophets were impetuous writers such as we of the present day should denounce as socialists and anarchists. They were fanatics in the cause of social justice.”[229]