We saw that in West Africa the belief in another world is so matter-of-fact and material that a chief who wishes to communicate with his dead father kills a slave as a messenger, after first impressing upon him the nature of the message he will have to deliver. If he forgets anything, says Mr. Duff Macdonald, he kills a second and sends him after “as a postscript.” A Khond desired to be avenged upon an enemy; so he cut off the head of his mother, who cheerfully suggested this domestic arrangement, in order that her ghost might haunt and terrify the offender. Similar plenitude of belief in the actuality and nearness of the Other World makes attendants, wives, and even friends of a dead man, in many countries, volunteer to kill themselves at his funeral, in order that they may accompany their lord and master to the nether realms. All these examples combine to show us two things: first, that the other life is very real and close to the people who behave so; and second, that no great unwillingness habitually exists to migration from this life to the next, if occasion demands it.
Starting with such ideas, it is not surprising that many races should have deliberately made for themselves gods by killing a man, and especially a man of divine or kingly blood, the embodiment of a god, in order that his spirit might perform some specific divine function. Nor is it even remarkable that the victim selected for such a purpose should voluntarily submit to death, often preceded by violent torture, so as to attain in the end to a position of trust and importance as a tutelary deity. We have only to remember the ease with which Mahommedan fanatics will face death, expecting to enjoy the pleasures of Paradise, or the fervour with which Christian believers used to embrace the crown of martyrdom, in order to convince ourselves of the reality and profundity of such a sentiment. The further back we go in time or culture, the stronger does the sentiment in question become; it is only the civilised and sceptical thinker who hesitates to exchange the solid comforts of this world for the shadowy and uncertain delights of the next.
The existence of such artificially-manufactured gods has been more or less recognised for some time past, and attention has been called to one or other class of them by Mr. Baring Gould and Mr. J. G. Frazer; but I believe the present work will be the first in which their profound importance and their place in the genesis of the higher religions has been fully pointed out in systematic detail.
The best known instances of such deliberate godmaking are those which refer to the foundation of cities, city walls, and houses. In such cases, a human victim is often sacrificed in order that his blood may be used as cement, and his soul be built in to the very stones of the fabric. Thereafter he becomes the tutelary deity or “fortune” of the house or city. In many cases, the victim offers himself voluntarily for the purpose; frequently he is of kingly or divine ancestry. As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. In Polynesia, where we usually stand nearest to the very core of religion, Ellis heard that the central pillar of the temple at Mæva was planted upon the body of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed to death under the first post of a house. In October 1881, the king of Ashanti put fifty girls to death that their blood might be mixed with the “swish” or mud used in the repair of the royal buildings. Even in Japan, a couple of centuries since, when a great wall was to be built, “some wretched slave would offer himself as a foundation.” Observe in this instance the important fact that the immolation was purely voluntary. Mr. Tylor, it is true, treats most of these cases as though the victim were intended to appease the earth-demons, which is the natural interpretation for the elder school of thinkers to put upon such ceremonies; but those who have read Mr. Frazer and Mr. Baring Gould will know that the offering is really a piece of deliberate god-making. Many of the original witnesses, indeed, correctly report this intention on the part of the perpetrators; thus Mason was told by an eyewitness that at the building of the new city of Tavoy in Tennasserim “a criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon” or rather deity. So in Siam, when a new city gate was being erected, says Mr. Speth, officers seized the first four or eight people who passed, and buried them under it “as guardian angels.” And in Roumania a stahic is defined as “the ghost of a person who has been immured in the walls of a building in order to make it more solid.” The Irish Banshee is doubtless of similar origin.
Other curious examples are reported from Africa. In Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of a city, to make it impregnable; and I gather here that the sacrifice was periodically renewed, as we shall see it to have been in many other cases. In Great Bassam and Yarriba, similar sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village. Clearly the idea in these cases was to supply the site with a tutelary deity, a god whose existence was bound up with the place thus consecrated to him. He and the town henceforth were one; he was its soul, and it was his body. Human victims are said to have been buried “for spirit-watchers” under the gates of Mandelay. So too, according to legend, here a tolerably safe guide, a queen was drowned in a Burmese reservoir, to make the dyke safe; while the choice for such a purpose of a royal victim shows clearly the desirability of divine blood being present in the body of the future deity. When Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjaub, the foundation gave way so often that he consulted a soothsayer. The soothsayer advised that the blood of an only son should be shed on the spot; and the only son of a widow was accordingly killed there. I may add that the blood of “an only-begotten son” has always been held to possess peculiar efficacy.
In Europe itself, not a few traces survive of such foundation-gods, or spirits of towns, town-walls, and houses. The Piets are said to have bathed their foundation-stones in human blood, especially in building their forts and castles. St. Columba himself, though nominally a Christian, did not scruple thus to secure the safety of his monastery. Columbkille said to his people, “‘It would be well for us that our roots should pass into the earth here.’ And he said to them, ‘It is permitted to you that some one of you go under the earth to consecrate it.’” St. Oran volunteered to accept the task, and was ever after honoured as the patron saint of the monastery. Here again it may be noted that the offering was voluntary. As late as 1463, when the broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired, the peasants, being advised to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk (in which state he would of course be “full of the god”) and utilised him for the purpose. In 1885, on the restoration of Hols-worthy church in Devon, a skeleton with a mass of mortar plastered over the mouth was found embedded in an angle of the building. To make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother, and walled into the building. Again, when the church at Blex in Oldenburg was being built, the authorities of the village crossed the Weser, “bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built it alive into the foundations.” We shall see hereafter that “to be brought with a price” is a variant, as it were, on the voluntary offering; great stress is often laid when a victim is offered on this particular fact, which is held to absolve the perpetrators from the crime of god-murder. So, we shall see in the sequel, the divine animal-victim, which is the god offered to himself, his animal embodiment to his image or altar, must always consent to its own sacrifice; if it refuse or show the slightest disinclination, it is no good victim. Legend says that the child in the case of the Liebenstein offering was beguiled with a cake, probably so as to make it a consenting party, and was slowly walled up before the eyes of the mother. All these details are full of incidental instructiveness and importance. As late as 1865, according to Mr. Speth, some Christian labourers, working at a-block-house at Duga, near Scutari, found two young Christian children in the hands of Mahommedan Arnauts, who were trying to bury them alive under the block-house.
It is about city walls, however, that we oftenest read such legendary stories. Thus the wall of Copenhagen sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent little girl, and set her at a table with toys and eatables. Then, while she played and eat, twelve master masons closed a vault over her. With clanging music, to drown the child’s cries, the wall was raised, and stood fast ever after. In Italy, once more, the bridge of Arta fell in, time after time, till they walled in the master builder’s wife; the last point being a significant detail, whose meaning will come out still more clearly in the sequel. At Scutari in Servia, once more, the fortress could only be satisfactorily built after a human victim was walled into it; so the three brothers who wrought at it decided to offer up the first of their wives who came to the place to bring them food. (Compare the case of Jephtha’s daughter, where the first living thing met by chance is to be sacrificed to Jahweh.) So, too, in Welsh legend, Vortigern could not finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with “the blood of a child born of a mother without a father”—this episode of the virgin-born infant being a common element in the generation of man-gods, as Mr. Sidney Hartland has abundantly proved for us.
In one case cited above, we saw a mitigation of the primitive custom, in that a criminal was substituted for a person of royal blood or divine origin—a form of substitution of which Mr. Frazer has supplied abundant examples in other connexions. Still further mitigations are those of building-in a person who has committed sacrilege or broken some religious vow of chastity. In the museum at Algiers is a plaster cast of the mould left by the body of one Geronimo, a Moorish Christian (and therefore a recusant of Islam), who was built into a block of concrete in the angle of the fort in the sixteenth century. Faithless nuns were so immured in Europe during the middle ages; and Mr. Rider Haggard’s statement that he saw in the museum at Mexico bodies similarly immured by the Inquisition has roused so much Catholic wrath and denial that one can hardly have any hesitation in accepting its substantial accuracy. But in other cases, the substitution has gone further still; instead of criminals, recusants, or heretics, we get an animal victim in place of the human one. Mr. St. John saw a chicken sacrificed for a slave girl at a building among the Dyaks of Borneo. A lamb was walled-in under the altar of a church in Denmark, to make it stand fast; or the churchyard was hanselled by burying first a live horse, an obvious parallel to the case of St Oran. When the parish church of Chumleigh in Devonshire was taken down a few years ago, in a wall of the fifteenth century was found a carved figure of Christ, crucified to a vine—a form of substitution to which we shall find several equivalents later. In modern Greece, says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe many of these instances, a relic of the idea survives in the belief that the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid will die within the year; so the masons compromise the matter by killing a cock or a black lamb on the foundation-stone. This animal then becomes the spirit of the building.
We shall see reason to suspect, as we proceed, that every slaughtered victim in every rite was at first a divine-human being; and that animal victims are always substitutes, though supposed to be equally divine with the man-god they personate. I will ask the reader to look out for such cases as we proceed, and also to notice, even when I do not call attention to them, the destination of the oracular head, and the frequent accompaniment of “clanging music.”
Elsewhere we find other customs which help to explain these curious survivals. The shadow is often identified with the soul; and in Roumania, when a new building is to be erected, the masons endeavour to catch the shadow of a passing stranger, and then lay the foundation-stone upon it. Or the stranger is enticed by stealth to the stone, when the mason secretly measures his body or his shadow, and buries the measure thus taken under the foundation. Here we have a survival of the idea that the victim must at least be not unwilling. It is believed that the person thus measured will languish and die within forty days; and we may be sure that originally the belief ran that his soul became the god or guardian spirit of the edifice. If the Bulgarians cannot get a human shadow to wall in, they content themselves with the shadow of the first animal that passes by. Here again we get that form of divine chance in the pointing out of a victim which is seen in the case of Jephtha’s daughter. Still milder substitutions occur in the empty coffin walled into a church in Germany, or the rude images of babies in swaddling-clothes similarly immured in Holland. The last trace of the custom is found in England in the modern practice of putting coins and newspapers under the foundation-stone. Here it would seem as if the victim were regarded as a sacrifice to the Earth (a late and derivative idea), and the coins were a money payment in lieu of the human or animal offering. I owe many of the cases here instanced to the careful research of my friend Mr. Clodd. But since this chapter was written, all other treatises on the subject have been superseded by Mr. Speth’s exhaustive and scholarly pamphlet on “Builder’s Rites and Ceremonies,” a few examples from which I have intercalated in my argument.