We know that in times of national calamity the Phoenicians used thus to sacrifice their dearest to Baal. Phoenician history, we know from Porphyry, is full of such sacrifices. When the Carthaginians were defeated and besieged by Agathocles, they ascribed their disasters to the anger of the god; for whereas in former times they used to sacrifice to him their own children, they had latterly fallen (as we shall see hereafter the Khonds did) into the habit of buying children and rearing them as victims. So two hundred young people of the noblest families were picked out for sacrifice; and these were accompanied by no less than three hundred more, who volunteered to die for the fatherland. They were sacrificed by being placed, one by one, on the sloping hands of the brazen image, from which they rolled into a pit of fire. So too at Jerusalem, in moments of great danger, children were sacrificed to some Molech, whether Jahweh or another, by being placed in the fiery arms of the image at the Tophet. I will admit that in these last cases we approach very near to the mere piacular human sacrifice; but we shall see, when we come to deal with gods of cultivation, and the doctrine of the atonement, that it is difficult to draw a line between the two; while the fact that a dearly-beloved or only-begotten son is the victim—especially the son of a king of divine blood—links such cases on directly to the more obvious instances of deliberate god-making. Some such voluntary sacrifice seems to me to be commemorated in the beautiful imagery of the 53d of Isaiah. But there the language is distinctly piacular.
That annual human sacrifices originated in deliberate god-making of this sort is an inference which has already been almost arrived at by more orthodox thinkers. “Among the Semites,” says Dr. Robertson Smith, “the most current view of annual piacula seems to have been that they commemorate a divine tragedy—the death of some god or goddess. The origin of such myths is easily explained from the nature of the ritual. Originally, the death of the god was nothing else than the death of the theanthropic victim; but when this ceased to be understood, it was thought that the piacular sacrifice represented an historical tragedy in which the god was killed.” But we shall see hereafter that the idea of expiation in sacrifice is quite a late and derivative one; it seems more probable that the victim was at first a human god, for whom later an animal victim was substituted. In the Athenian Thar-gelia, the victims were human to the very end, though undoubtedly they were thought of as bearing vicariously the sins of the people. We shall come across similar intrusions of the idea of expiation in later chapters; that idea belongs to a stage of thought when men considered it necessary to explain away by some ethical reference the sanguinary element of primitive ritual. Thus in two Greek towns, as we learn from Pausanias—at Potniæ and Patræ,—an annual sacrifice existed which had once been the sacrifice of a human victim; but this was later explained as an expiation of an ancient crime for which satisfaction had to be made from generation to generation. Indeed, as a rule, later ages looked upon the murder of a god as obviously criminal, and therefore regarded the slaughter of the victim, who replaced the god, as being an atonement for his death, instead of regarding it as a deliberate release of his divine spirit.
I have dwelt here mainly on that particular form of artificial god-making which is concerned with the foundation of houses, villages, cities, walls, and fortresses, because this is the commonest and most striking case, outside agriculture, and because it is specially connected with the world-wide institution of the village or city god. But other types occur in abundance; and to them a few lines must now be devoted.
When a ship was launched, it was a common practice to provide her with a guardian spirit or god by making her roll over the body of a human victim. The Norwegian vikings used to “redden their rollers” with human blood. That is to say, when a warship was launched, human victims were lashed to the round logs over which the galley was run down to the sea, so that the stem was sprinkled with their spurting blood. Thus the victim was incorporated, as it were, in the very planks of the vessel. Captain Cook found the South Sea Islanders similarly christening their war-canoes with blood. In 1784, says Mr. William Simpson, at the launching of one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, “a black slave was led forward and fastened at the prow of the vessel to influence a happy reception in the ocean.” And Mr. Speth quotes a newspaper account of the sacrifice of a sheep when the first caique for “Constantinople at Olympia” was launched in the Bosphorus. In many other cases, it is noted that a victim, human or animal, is slaughtered at the launching of a ship. Our own ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over the bows is the last relic of this barbarous practice. Here as elsewhere red wine does duty for blood, in virtue of its colour. I do not doubt that the images of gods in the bow of a ship were originally idols in which the spirits thus liberated might dwell, and that it was to them the sailors prayed for assistance in storm or peril. The god was bound up in the very fabric of the vessel. The modern figure-head still represents these gods; figure-heads essentially similar to the domestic idols occur on New Zealand and Polynesian war-canoes.
The canoes of the Solomon Islanders, for example, “often have as figure-head a carved representation of the upper half of a man, who holds in his hands a human head.” This head, known as the “canoe-god” or “charm,” “represents the life taken when the canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for its inauguration,” says Dr. Codrington.
Another curious instance is to be found in the customs and beliefs regarding river gods. Rivers, I have suggested, are often divine because they spring near or are connected with the grave of a hero. But often their divinity has been deliberately given them, and is annually renewed by a god-making sacrifice: just as at the Jewish Passover an annual animal-victim was slain, and his blood smeared on the lintels, as a renewal of the foundation sacrifice. The best instance I have found of this curious custom is one cited by Mr. Gomme from Major Ellis. Along the banks of the Prah in West Africa there are many deities, all bearing the common name of Prah, and all regarded as spirits of the river. At each town or considerable village along the stream, a sacrifice is held on a day about the middle of October. The usual sacrifice was two human adults, one male and one female. The inhabitants of each village believe in a separate spirit of the Prah, who resides in some part of the river close to their own hamlet. Everywhere along the river the priests of these gods officiate in groups of three, two male and one female, an arrangement which is peculiar to the river gods. Here, unless I mistake, we have an obvious case of deliberate god-making.
This savage instance, and others like it, which space precludes me from detailing, suggest the conclusion that many river gods are of artificial origin. The Wohhanda in Esthonia received offerings of little children, whom we may fairly compare with the children immured in buildings or offered to the Molech. Many other rivers spontaneously take their victim annually; thus the Devonshire rhyme goes,=
River of Dart, river of Dart,
Every year thou claimest a heart.=
The Spey also takes one life each year, and so do several British rivers elsewhere. Originally, no doubt, the victim was deliberately chosen and slain annually; but later on, as a mitigation of the custom, the river itself seems to have selected its own spirit by divine chance, such as we have already seen in action more than once in the earlier cases. In other words, if a passer-by happened to be accidentally drowned, he was accepted in place of a deliberate victim. * Hence the danger of rescuing a man from drowning; you interfere with the course of divine selection, and you will pay for it yourself by being the next victim. “When, in the Solomon Islands, a man accidentally falls into a river, and a shark attacks him, he is not allowed to escape. If he succeeds in eluding the shark, his fellow-tribesmen throw him back to his doom, believing him to be marked out for sacrifice to the god of the river.” Similarly, in Britain itself, the Lancashire Ribble has a water-spirit called Peg o’ Nell, represented by a stone image, now headless, which stands at the spring where the river rises in the grounds of Waddon. (Compare the Adonis tomb and grove by the spring at Aphaca.) This Peg o’ Nell was originally, according to tradition, a girl of the neighbourhood; but she was done to death by incantations, and now demands every seven years that a life should be quenched in the waters of the Ribble. When “Peg’s night” came round at the close of the septennate, unless a bird, a cat, or a dog was drowned in the river, it was sure to claim its human victim. This name of Peg is evidently a corruption of some old local Celtic or pre-Celtic word for a nymph or water-spirit; for there is another Peg in the Tees, known as Peg Powler; and children used there to be warned against playing on the banks of the stream, for fear Peg should drag them into the water. Such traces of a child-sacrifice are extremely significant.