Other implications must be briefly treated. The best ghost or god for this purpose seems to be a divine or kingly person; and in stages when the meaning of the practice is still quite clear to the builders, the dearly-be-loved son or wife of the king is often selected for the honour of tutelary godship. Later this notion passes into the sacrifice of the child or wife of the master mason; many legends or traditions contain this more recent element. In Vortigern’s case, however, the child is clearly a divine being, as we shall see to be true a little later on in certain Semitic instances. To the last, the connexion of children with such sacrifices is most marked; thus when in 1813 the ice on the Elbe broke down one of the dams, an old peasant sneered at the efforts of the Government engineer, saying to him, “You will never get the dyke to hold unless you first sink an innocent child under the foundations.” Here the very epithet “innocent” in itself reveals some last echo of godship. So too, in 1843, when a new bridge was to be built at Halle in Germany, the people told the architects that the pier would not stand unless a living child was immured under the foundations. Schrader says that when the great railway bridge over the Ganges was begun, every mother in Bengal trembled for her infant. The Slavonic chiefs who founded Detinez sent out men to catch the first boy they met and bury him in the foundation. Here once more we have the sacred-chance victim. Briefly I would say there seems to be a preference in all such cases for children, and especially for girls; of kingly stock, if possible, but at least a near relation of the master builder.
Mr. Speth points out that horses’ heads were frequently fastened on churches or other buildings, and suggests that they belong to animal foundation-victims. This use of the skull is in strict accordance with its usual oracular destination.
Some notable historical or mythical tales of town and village gods, deliberately manufactured, may now be considered. We read in First Kings that when Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho, “he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest Segub.” Here we see evidently a princely master builder, sacrificing his own two sons as guardian gods of his new city. Abundant traces exist of such deliberate production of a Fortune for a town. And it is also probable that the original sacrifice was repeated annually, as if to keep up the constant stream of divine life, somewhat after the fashion of the human gods we had to consider in the last chapter. Dido appears to have been the Fortune or foundation-goddess of Carthage; she is represented in the legend as the foundress-queen, and is said to have lept into her divine pyre from the walls of her palace. But the annual human sacrifice appears to have been performed at the same place; for “It can hardly be doubted,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that the spot at which legend placed the self-sacrifice of Dido to her husband Sicharbas was that at which the later Carthaginian human sacrifices were performed.” At Laodicea, again, an annual sacrifice took place of a deer, in lieu of a maiden; and this sacrifice, we are expressly told, was offered to the goddess of the city. Legend said that the goddess was a maiden, who had been similarly sacrificed to consecrate the foundation of the town, and was thenceforth worshipped as its Fortune, like Dido at Carthage; “it was therefore the death of the goddess herself,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that was annually renewed in the piacular rite.” (I do not admit the justice of the epithet “piacular.”) Again, Malalas tells us that the 22d of May was kept at Antioch as the anniversary of a maiden sacrificed at the foundation of the city, and worshipped thereafter as the Tyche, or luck, of the town. At Durna in Arabia an annual victim was similarly buried under the stone which formed the altar.
In most of the legends, as they come down to us from civilised and lettered antiquity, the true nature of this sanguinary foundation-rite is overlaid and disguised by later rationalising guesses and I may mention that Dr. Robertson Smith in particular habitually treats the rationalising guesses as primitive, and the real old tradition of the slaughtered virgin as a myth of explanation of “the later Euhemeristic Syrians.” But after the examples we have already seen of foundation-gods, I think I can hardly be doubted that this is to reverse the true order; that a girl was really sacrificed for a tutelary deity when a town was founded, and that the substitution of an animal victim at the annual renewal was a later refinement. Mr. Speth quotes a case in point of a popular tradition that a young girl had been built into the castle of Nieder-Manderschied; and when the wall was opened in 1844, the Euhemeristic workmen found a cavity enclosing a human skeleton. I would suggest, again, that in the original legend of the foundation of Rome, Romulus was represented as having built-in his brother Remus as a Fortune, or god, of the city, and that to this identification of Remus with the city we ought to trace such phrases as turba Remi for the Roman people. The word forum in its primitive signification means the empty space left before a tomb—the llan or temenos. Hence I would suggest that the Roman Forum and other Latin fora were really the tomb-enclosures of the original foundation-victims. * So, too, the English village green and “play-field” are probably the space dedicated to the tribal or village god—a slain man-god; and they are usually connected with the sacred stone and sacred tree. I trust this point will become clearer as we proceed, and develop the whole theory of the foundation god or goddess, the allied sacred stone and the tree or trunk memorial.
* In the case of Rome, the Forum would represent the grave
of the later foundation-god of the compound Latin and Sabine
city.
For, if I am right, the entire primitive ritual of the foundation of a village consisted in killing or burying alive or building into the wall a human victim, as town or village god, and raising a stone and planting a tree close by to commemorate him. At these two monuments the village rites were thereafter performed. The stone and tree are thus found in their usual conjunction; both coexist in the Indian village to the present day, as in the Siberian woodland or the Slavonic forest. Thus, at Rome, we have not only the legend of the death of Remus, a prince of the blood-royal of Alba Longa, intimately connected with the building of the wall of Roma Quadrata, but we have also the sacred fig-tree of Romulus in the Forum, which was regarded as the embodiment of the city life of the combined Rome, so that when it showed signs of withering, consternation spread through the city; and hard by we have the sacred stone or Palladium, guarded by the sacred Vestal Virgins who kept the city hearth-fire, and still more closely bound up with the fortune of that secondary Rome which had its home in the Forum. Are not these three the triple form of the foundation-god of that united Capitoline and Palatine Rome? And may not the sacred cornel on the Palatine, again, have been similarly the holy foundation-tree of that older Roma Ouadrata which is more particularly associated with the name of Romulus? Of this tree Plutarch tells us that when it appeared to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry, which was soon responded to by people on all sides rushing up with buckets of water to pour upon it, as if they were hastening to put out a fire. Clearly, here again we have to deal with an embodied Fortune.
We do not often get all three of these Fortunes combined—the human victim, the stone, and the tree, with the annual offering which renews its sanctity. But we find traces so often of one or other of the trio that we are justified, I think, in connecting them together as parts of a whole, whereof here one element survives, and there another. “Among all primitive communities,” says Mr. Gomme, “when a village was first established, a stone was set up. To this stone, the headman of the village made an offering once a year.” To the present day, London preserves her foundation-god in the shape of London Stone, now enclosed in a railing or iron grill just opposite Cannon Street Station. Now, London Stone was for ages considered as the representative and embodiment of the entire community. Proclamations and other important state businesses were announced from its top; and the defendant in trials in the Lord Mayor’s court was summoned to attend from London Stone, as though the stone itself spoke to the wrong-doer with the united voice of the assembled citizens. The first Lord Mayor, indeed, was Henry de Lundonstone, no doubt, as Mr. Loftie suggests, the hereditary keeper of this urban fetish,—in short, the representative of the village headman. I have written at greater length on the implications of this interesting relic in an article on London Stone in Longman’s Magazine, to which I would refer the reader for further information. I will only add here the curious episode of Jack Cade, who, when he forced his way, under his assumed name of Mortimer, into the city in 1450, first of all proceeded to this sacred relic, the embodiment of palladium of ancient London, and having struck it with his sword exclaimed, “Now is Mortimer lord of this city.”
A similar sacred stone exists to this day at Bovey Tracey in Devon, of which Ormerod tells us that the mayor of Bovey used to ride round it on the first day of his tenure of office, and strike it with a stick,—which further explains Jack Cade’s proceeding. According to the Totnes Times of May 13, 1882, the young men of the town were compelled on the same day to kiss the magic stone and pledge allegiance in upholding the ancient rights and privileges of Bovey. (I owe these details to Mr. Lawrence Gomme’s Village Community.) I do not think we can dissociate from these two cases the other sacred stones of Britain, such as the King’s Stone at Kingston in Surrey, where several of the West Saxon kings were crowned; nor the Scone Stone in the coronation-chair at Westminster Abbey; nor the Stone of Clackmannan, and the sacred stones already mentioned in a previous chapter on which the heads of clans or of Irish septs succeeded to the chieftainship of their respective families. These may in part have been ancestral and sepulchral monuments: but it is probable that they also partook in part of this artificial and factitious sanctity. Certainly in some cases that sanctity was renewed by an animal sacrifice.
With these fairly obvious instances I would also connect certain other statements which seem to me to have been hitherto misinterpreted. Thus Mesha, king of Moab, when he is close beleaguered, burns his son as a holocaust on the wall of the city. Is not this an offering to protect the wall by the deliberate manufacture of an additional deity? For straightway the besiegers seem to feel they are overpowered, and the siege is raised. Observe here once more that it is the king’s own dearly-be-loved son who is chosen as victim. Again, at Amathus, human sacrifices were offered to Jupiter Hospes “before the gates”; and this Jupiter Hospes, as Ovid calls him, is the Amathusian Herakles or Malika, whose name, preserved for us by Hesychius, identifies him at once as a local deity similar to the Tyrian Melcarth. Was not this again, therefore, the Fortune of the city? At Tyre itself, the sepulchre of Herakles Melcarth was shown, where he was said to have been cremated. For among cremating peoples it was natural to burn, not slaughter, the yearly god-victim. At Tarsus, once more, there was an annual feast, at which a very fair pyre was erected, and the local Herakles or Baal was burned on it in effigy. We cannot doubt, I think, that this was a mitigation of an earlier human holocaust. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of this instance: “This annual commemoration of the death of the god in fire must have its origin in an older rite, in which the victim was not a mere effigy, but a theanthropic sacrifice, i.e., an actual man or sacred animal, whose life, according to the antique conception now familiar to us, was an embodiment of the divine-human life.” This is very near my own view on the subject.
From these instances we may proceed, I think, to a more curious set, whose implications seem to me to have been even more grievously mistaken by later interpreters. I mean the case of children of kings or of ruling families, sacrificed in time of war or peril as additional or auxiliary deities. Thus Philo of Byblos says: “It was an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land, and having an only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenicians tongue Jeoud signifies only-begotten), dressed him in royal robes and sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when the country was in great danger from the enemy.” I do not think Philo is right in his gloss or guess about “the avenging demons,” but otherwise his story is interesting evidence. It helps us more or less directly to connect the common Phoenician and Hebrew child-sacrifices with this deliberate manufacture of artificial gods. I do not doubt, indeed, that the children were partly sacrificed to pre-existent and well-defined great gods; but I believe also that the practice first arose as one of deliberate manufacture of gods, and retained to the end many traces of its origin.