* Here is an analogue in foundation sacrifices. A house was
being built at Hind Head while this book was in progress. A
workman fell from a beam and was killed. The other workmen
declared this was luck for the house and would ensure its
stability.
I cannot do more than suggest here in passing that we have in these stories and practices the most probable origin of the common myth which accounts for the existence of river gods or river nymphs by some episode of a youth or maiden drowned there. Arethusa is the example that occurs to everyone. Grossly Euhemeristic as it may sound to say so, I yet believe that such myths of metamorphosis have their origin in the deliberate manufacture of a water-deity by immolation in the stream; and that the annual renewal of such a sacrifice was due in part to the desire to keep alive the memory of the gods—to be sure they were there, to make them “fresh and fresh,” if one may venture to say so—and in part to the analogy of those very important artificial gods of agriculture whose origin and meaning we have still to consider. I would add that the commonness of sea-horses and river-horses in the mythology of the world doubtless owes its origin partly to the natural idea of “white horses” on the waves, but partly also to the deliberate sacrifice of horses to the sea or rivers, which this notion suggested, and which tended to intensify it. It is as though the worshipper wished to keep up a continuous supply of such divine and ghostly steeds. At Rhodes, for example, four horses were annually cast into the sea; and I need hardly refer to the conventional horses of Poseidon and Neptune. The Ugly Burn in Ross-shire is the abode of a water-horse; in the remains of the Roman temple at Lydney, the god Nodens, who represents the Severn, is shown in the mosaic pavement as drawn in a chariot by four horses; and the Yore, near Middleham, is still infested by a water-horse who annually claims at least one human victim. Elsewhere other animals take the place of the horse. The Ostyaks sacrifice to the river Ob by casting in a live reindeer when fish are scanty.
I do not deny that in many of these cases two distinct ideas—the earlier idea of the victim as future god, and the later idea of the victim as prey or sacrifice—have got inextricably mixed up; but I do think enough’ has been said to suggest the probability that many river-gods are artificially produced, and that this is in large part the origin of nymphs and kelpies. Legend, indeed, almost always represents them so; it is only our mythologists, with their blind hatred of Euhemerism, who fail to perceive the obvious implication. And that even the accidental victim was often envisaged as a river-god, after his death, we see clearly from the Bohemian custom of going to pray on the river bank where a man has been drowned, and casting into the river a loaf of new bread and a pair of wax candles, obvious offerings to his spirit.
Many other classes of manufactured gods seem to me to exist, whose existence I must here pass over almost in silence. Such are the gods produced at the beginning of a war, by human or other sacrifice; gods intended to aid the warriors in their coming enterprise by being set free from fleshly bonds for that very purpose. Thus, according to Phylarchus, a human sacrifice was at one time customary in Greece at the beginning of hostilities; and we know that as late as the age of Themistocles three captives were thus offered up before the battle of Salamis. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a good legendary case in point, because it is one of a virgin, a princess, the daughter of the leader, and therefore a typical release of a divine or royal spirit. Here, as usual, later philosophising represents the act as an expiation for mortal guilt; but we may be sure the original story contained no such ethical or piacular element. Among the early Hebrews, the summons to a war seems similarly to have been made by sending round pieces of the human victim; in later Hebrew usage, this rite declines into the sacrifice of a burnt offering; though we get an intermediate stage when Saul sends round portions of a slaughtered ox, as the Levite in Judges had sent round the severed limbs of his concubine to rouse the Israelites. In Africa, a war is still opened with a solemn sacrifice, human or otherwise; and Mr. H. O. Forbes gives a graphic account of the similar ceremony which precedes an expedition in the island of Timor.
In conclusion, I will only say that a great many other obscure rites or doubtful legends seem to me explicable by similar deliberate exercises of god-making. How common such sacrifice was in agricultural relations we shall see in the sequel; but I believe that even in other fields of life future research will so explain many other customs. The self-immolation of Codrus, of Sardanapa-lus, of P. Decius Mus, as of so many other kings or heroes or gods or goddesses; the divine beings who fling themselves from cliffs into the sea; M. Curtius devoting himself in the gulf in the Forum; the tombs of the lovers whom Semiramis buried alive; all these, I take it, have more or less similar implications. Even such tales as that of T. Manlius Torquatus and his son must be assimilated, I think, to the story of the king of Moab killing his son on the wall, or to that of the Carthaginians offering up their children to the offended deity; only, in later times, the tale was misinterpreted and used to point the supposed moral of the stern and inflexible old Roman discipline.
Frequent reiteration of sacrifices seems necessary, also, in order to keep up the sanctity of images and sacred rites—to put, as it were, a new soul into them. Thus, rivers needed a fresh river-god every year; and recently in Ashantee it was discovered that a fetish would no longer “work” unless human victims were abundantly immolated for it.
This is also perhaps the proper place to observe that just as the great god Baal has been resolved by modern scholarship into many local Baalim, and just as the great god Adonis has been reduced by recent research in each case to some particular Adon or lord out of many, so each such separate deity, artificially manufactured, though called by the common name of the Prah or the Tiber,’ yet retains to the last some distinct identity. In fact, the great gods appear to be rather classes than individuals. That there were many Nymphs and many Fauni, many Silvani and many Martes, has long been known; it is beginning to be clear that there were also many Saturns, many Jupiters, many Junones, many Vestæ. Even in Greece it is more than probable that the generalised names of the great gods were given in later ages to various old sacred stones and holy sites of diverse origin: the real object of worship was in each case the spontaneous or artificial god; the name was but a general title applied in common, perhaps adjectivally, to several such separate deities. In the Roman pantheon, this principle is now, quite well established; in the Semitic it is probable; in most others, the progress of modern research is gradually leading up to it. Even the elemental gods themselves do not seem in their first origin to be really singular; they grow, apparently, from generalised phrases, like our “Heaven” and “Providence,” applied at first to the particular deity of whom at the moment the speaker is thinking. The Zeus or Jupiter varies with the locality. Thus, when the Latin prætor, at the outbreak of the Latin war, defied the Roman Jupiter, we may be sure it was the actual god there visible before him at whom he hurled his sacrilegious challenge, not the ideal deity in the sky above his head. Indeed, we now know that each village and each farm had a Jovis of its own, regarded as essentially a god of wine, and specially worshipped at the wine-feast in April, when the first cask was broached. This individuality of the gods is an important point to bear in mind; for the tendency of language is always to treat many similar deities as practically identical, especially in late and etherealised forms of religion. And mythologists have made the most of this syncretic tendency.
A single concrete instance will help to make this general principle yet clearer. Boundaries, I believe, were originally put under the charge of local and artificial deities, by slaughtering a human victim at each turning-point in the limits, and erecting a sacred stone on the spot where he died to preserve his memory. Often, too, in accordance with the common rule, a sacred tree seems to have been planted beside the sacred stone monument. Each such victim became forthwith a boundary god, a protecting and watching spirit, and was known thenceforth as a Hermes or a Terminus. But there were many Hermæ and many Termini, not in Greece and Italy alone, but throughout the world. Only much later did a generalised god, Hermes or Terminus, arise from the union into a single abstract concept of all these separate and individual deities. Once more, the boundary god was renewed each year by a fresh victim. Our own practice of “beating the bounds” appears to be the last expiring relic of such annual sacrifices. The bounds are beaten, apparently, in order to expel all foreign gods or hostile spirits; the boys who play a large part in the ceremony are the representatives of the human victims. They are whipped at each terminus stone, partly in order to make them shed tears as a rain-charm (after the fashion with which Mr. Frazer has made us familiar), but partly also because all artificially-made gods are scourged or tortured before being put to death, for some reason which I do not think we yet fully understand. The rationalising gloss that the boys are whipped “in order to make them remember the boundaries” is one of the usual shallow explanations so glibly offered by the eighteenth century. The fact that the ceremony takes place at sacred stones or “Gospel oaks” sufficiently proclaims its original meaning.
The idea underlying Christian martyrdom, where the martyr voluntarily devotes himself or herself to death in order to gain the crown and palm in heaven, is essentially similar to the self-immolation of the artificial gods, and helps to explain the nature of such self-sacrifice. For Christianity is only nominally a monotheistic religion, and the saints and martyrs form in it practically a secondary or minor rank of deities.
On the other hand, the point of view of the god-slayers cannot be more graphically put than in the story which Mr. William Simpson relates of Sir Richard Burton. Burton, it seems, was exploring a remote Mahommedan region on the Indian frontier, and in order to do so with greater freedom and ease had disguised himself as a fakir of Islam. So great was his knowledge of Muslim devotions that the people soon began to entertain a great respect for him as a most holy person. He was congratulating himself upon the success of his disguise, and looking forward to a considerable stay in the valley, when one night one of the elders of the village came to him stealthily, and begged him, if he valued his own safety, to go away. Burton asked whether the people did not like him. The elder answered, yes; that was the root of the trouble. They had conceived, in fact, the highest possible opinion of his exceptional sanctity, and they thought it would be an excellent thing for the village to possess the tomb of so holy a man. So they were casting about now how they could best kill him. Whether this particular story is true or not, it at least exhibits in very vivid colours the state of mind of the ordinary god-slayer.