The origin and development of the moral ideas

As an instance of the close relationship which exists between human sacrifices offered for agricultural purposes and other human sacrifices, the following case may also be mentioned. According to Strachey, the Indians in some part of Virginia had a yearly sacrifice of children. These sacrifices they held so necessary that if they should omit them, they supposed their gods “would let them no deare, turkies, corne, nor fish,” and, besides, “would make a great slaughter amongst them.”125

In India, in former times, human victims were offered to several minor gods “whenever a newly excavated tank failed to produce sufficient water.”126 In Kâthiâwâr, for instance, if a pond had been dug and would not hold water, a man was sacrificed; and the Vadala lake in Bombay “refused to hold water till the local spirit was appeased by the sacrifice of the daughter of the village headman.”127 There is a legend that, when the bed of the Saugor lake remained dry, the builder “was told, in a dream, or by a priest, that it would continue so till he should consent to sacrifice his own daughter, then a girl, and the young lad to whom she had been affianced, to the tutelary god of the place. He accordingly built a little shrine in the centre of the valley, which was to become the bed of the lake, put the two children in, and built up the doorway. He had no sooner done so than the whole of the valley became filled with water.”128 When Colonel Campbell was rescuing Meriahs among the Kandhs, it was believed by some that he was collecting victims for the purpose of sacrificing them on the plains to the water deity, because the water had disappeared from a large tank which he had constructed.129 According to a story related by Pausanias, the district of Haliartus was originally parched and waterless, hence one of the rulers went to Delphi and inquired how the people should find water in the land. “The Pythian priestess commanded him to slay the first person he should meet on his return to Haliartus.

On his arrival he was met by his son Lophis, and, without hesitation, he struck the young man with his sword. The youth had life enough left to run about, and where the blood flowed water gushed from the ground. Therefore the river is called Lophis.”130

Human sacrifices are offered with a view to averting perils arising from the sea or from rivers.

When the Greeks were afflicted by stress of weather at Aulis, they were bidden to sacrifice Iphigenia, in order to lull the winds.131 Menelaus was persecuted by the Egyptians for sacrificing two children when he was desirous of sailing away and contrary winds detained him.132 According to an Athenian writer, the colonists who first went to Lesbos were directed by an oracle to throw a virgin into the sea, as an offering to Poseidon.133 Sextus Pompeius cast men into the sea as an offering to Neptune.134 Hamilcar, also, following a custom of his country, threw a company of priests into the sea, as a sacrifice to the sea god.135 The Saxons, when they were about to leave the coast of Gaul and sail home, sacrificed the tenth part of their captives.136 The Vikings of Scandinavia, when launching a new ship, seemed to have bound a victim to the rollers on which the vessel slipped into the sea, thus reddening the keel with sacrificial blood.137 In 1784, 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.138 The Fijians launched their canoes over the living bodies of slaves as rollers,139 or, according to another account, when a large canoe was launched, they laid hold of the first person, man or woman, whom they encountered, and carried the victim home for a feast.140 On the deck of a new boat belonging to the most powerful chief in the group, ten or more men were slaughtered, in order that it might be washed with human blood.141

The Zuñi Indians have a tradition that the waters of their valley once rose in a flood and compelled the inhabitants to flee to a table-land several hundred feet high for safety; and when the waters still rose, threatening to submerge the table-land itself, the priest determined to sacrifice a youth and a maiden to propitiate them.142 When Seleucus Nicator founded Antioch on the Orontes, the high priest sacrificed a virgin at a place between the town and the river,143 presumably in order to prevent the town from being flooded by the river. When the converted Franks marched to Italy under their king, Theodebert, to fight against the Goths under Vitigis, and were on the point of crossing the Po, they sacrificed what children and wives of Goths they found, and threw their corpses into the river, according to Procopius, “as the first fruits of the war.”144 At Rome, every year on the Ides of May, the Vestal Virgins threw from the Sublician bridge into the Tiber thirty human effigies formed of rushes; the Romans themselves were of opinion that at an earlier period living men had been hurled into the river, and that it was Hercules who first substituted images of straw.145 In West Africa human sacrifices are often offered to rivers.

Major Ellis states that at each town or considerable village upon the banks of the river Prah sacrifice is held on a day about the middle of October, to Prah. “As loss of life frequently occurs in this river, from persons attempting to cross it when flooded, from a sudden rise, or from those hundred minor accidents which must always occur in the neighbourhood of a deep and strong stream, the gods of the Prah are considered very malignant. The sacrifice is, in consequence, proportionate. The usual sacrifice in former times was two human adults, one male and one female. They … were decapitated on the bank of the river, and the stool and image of the god washed with their blood. The bodies were then cut into a number of pieces, which were distributed amongst the mangroves, or the sedge bordering the river, for the crocodiles to eat; crocodiles being sacred in Prah.”146 According to M. le Comte de Cardi, all the river-side tribes of the Niger Delta used to propitiate the river deity by the sacrifice of a copper-coloured girl, procured from a tribe of Ibos inhabiting a country away in the hinterland of New Calabar, or in some places an Albino; and it seems that this custom is still practised in the British Protectorate.147 The Ibos themselves were in the habit of throwing human beings into the river to be eaten by alligators or fishes, or to fasten them to trees or branches, close to the river, where they were left to perish by hunger.148 In Eastern Central Africa, also, human sacrifices are offered to rivers.149 And in the East Indies there are various traditions of such

sacrifices being made to the divine crocodiles of the sea.150

In Guatemala, in the case of a dangerous illness, human sacrifice was resorted to when all other attempts to cure the patient failed. Of the Indians of Guayaquil, Cieza de Leon states:—“When the chiefs were sick, to appease the wrath of their gods, and pray for health, they made … sacrifices of a superstitious nature, killing men (as I was told), and believing that human blood was a grateful offering.”151 Acosta writes:—“They vsed in Peru to sacrifice yong children of foure or six yeares old vnto tenne; and the greatest parte of these sacrifices were for the affaires that did import the Ynca, as in sickness for his health, and when he went to the warres for victory, or when they gave the wreathe to their new Ynca, which is the marke of a King, as heere the Scepter and the Crowne be. In this solemnitie they sacrificed the number of two hundred children, from foure to ten yeares of age….