Normally and originally, I believe, all gods grow spontaneously. They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or chieftains. The household gods are the dead of the family; the greater gods are the dead chiefs of the state or town or village. But upon this earlier and spontaneous crop of gods there supervenes later an artificial crop, deliberately manufactured. The importance of this later artificial class is so great, especially in connexion with the gods of agriculture, and with the habit of eating the god’s body as corn and drinking his blood as wine, that it becomes necessary for us here to examine their nature in due order. We shall find that some knowledge of them is needed preliminary to the comprehension of the Christian system.

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 248at 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, 249and 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 M忙va 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, 250a 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, 251the 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, 252the 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 253at 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. 254If 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.

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 255echo 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 256the 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 257his 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 258triple 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. 259I 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 me............