I do not affirm that the practice of human sacrifice is in every case based on the idea of substitution; the notion that a certain god has a desire for such sacrifices may no doubt induce his worshippers to gratify this desire for a variety of purposes. But I think there is sufficient evidence to prove that, when men offer the lives of their fellow-men in sacrifice to their gods, they do so as a rule in the hopes of thereby saving their own. Human sacrifice is essentially a method of life-insurance—absurd, no doubt, according to our ideas, but not an act of wanton cruelty. When practised for the benefit of the community or in a case of national distress, it is hardly more cruel than to advocate the infliction of capital punishment on the ground of social expediency, or to compel thousands of men to suffer death on the battle-field on behalf of their country. The custom of human sacrifice admits that the life of one is taken to save the lives of many, or that an inferior individual is put to death for the purpose of preventing the death of somebody who has a higher right to live. Sometimes the king or chief is sacrificed in times of scarcity or pestilence, but then he is probably held personally responsible for the calamity.237 Very frequently the victims are prisoners of war or other aliens, or slaves, or criminals, that is, persons whose lives are held in little regard. And in many cases these are the only victims allowed by custom.

This was generally the case among the ancient Teutons,238 though they sometimes deemed a human sacrifice the more efficacious the more distinguished the victim, and the nearer his relationship to him who offered the sacrifice.239 The Gauls, says Cæsar, “consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or robbery, or any other offence, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.”240 Diodorus Siculus states that the Carthaginians in former times used to sacrifice to Saturn the sons of the most eminent persons, but that, of later times, they secretly bought and bred up children for that purpose.241 The chief aim of the wars of the ancient Mexicans was to make prisoners for sacrificial purposes; other victims were slaves who were purchased for this object, and many criminals “who were condemned to expiate their crimes by the sacrifice of their lives.”242 The Yucatans sacrificed captives taken in war, and only if such victims were wanting they dedicated their children to the altar “rather than let the gods be deprived of their due.”243 In Guatemala the victims were slaves or captives or, among the Pipiles, illegitimate children from six to twelve years old who belonged to the tribe.244 In Florida the human victim who was offered up at harvest time was chosen from among the Spaniards wrecked on the coast.245 Of the Peruvian Indians before the time of the Incas, Garcilasso de la Vega states that, “besides ordinary things such as animals and maize, they sacrificed men and women of all ages, being captives taken in wars which they made against each other.”246 Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast, “the persons ordinarily sacrificed to the gods are prisoners of war or slaves. When the latter, they are usually aliens, as a protecting god is not so well satisfied with the sacrifice of his own people.”247 In Great Benin, according to Captain Roupell, the people who were kept for sacrifice were bad men, or men with bad sickness, and they were all slaves.248 In Fiji the victims were generally prisoners of war, but sometimes they were slaves procured by purchase from other tribes.249 In Nukahiva “the custom of the country requires that the men destined for sacrifice should belong to some neighbouring nation, and accordingly they are generally stolen.”250 In Tahiti “the unhappy wretches selected were either captives taken in war, or individuals who had rendered themselves obnoxious to the chiefs or the priests.”251 The Muruts of Borneo “never sacrifice one of their own people, but either capture an individual of a hostile tribe, or send to a friendly tribe to purchase a slave for the purpose.”252 It is said to be contrary to the Káyán custom to sell or sacrifice one of their own nation.253 The Gāro hill tribes “generally select their victims out of the Bengali villages in the plains.”254 The Kandhs considered that the victim must be a stranger. “If we spill our own blood,” they said, “we shall have no descendants”;255 and even the children of Meriahs, who were reared for sacrificial purposes, were never offered up in the village of their birth.256

We find that various peoples who at a certain period have been addicted to the practice of human sacrifice, have afterwards, at a more advanced stage of civilisation, voluntarily given it up. The cause of this is partly an increase, or expansion, of the sympathetic sentiment, partly a change of ideas. With the growth of enlightenment men would lose faith in this childish method of substitution, and consequently find it not only useless, but objectionable; and any sentimental disinclination to the practice would by itself, in the course of time, lead to the belief that the deity no longer cares for it, or is averse to it. Brahmanism gradually abolished the immolation of human victims, incompatible as it was with the precept of ahimsâ, or respect for everything that has life; “the liberation of the victim, or the substitution in its stead and place of a figure made of flour paste, both of which were at first matter of sufferance, became at length matter of requirement.”257 According to the Mahabharata, the priest who performs a human sacrifice is cast into hell.258 In Greece, in the historic age, the practice was held in horror at least by all the better minds, though it was regarded as necessary on certain occasions.259 It was strongly condemned by enlightened Romans. Cicero speaks of it as a “monstrous and barbarous practice” still disgracing Gaul in his day;260 and Pliny, referring to the steps taken by Tiberius to stop it, declares it impossible to estimate the debt of the world to the Romans for their efforts to put it down.261

The growing reluctance to offer human sacrifice led to various practices intended to replace it.262 Speaking of the Italian custom of dedicating as a sacrifice to the gods every creature that should be born in the following spring, Festus adds that, since it seemed cruel to kill innocent boys and girls, they were kept till they had grown up, then veiled and driven beyond the boundaries.263 Among various peoples human effigies or animals were offered instead of men.

Among the Malays of the Malay Peninsula dough models of human beings, actually called “the substitutes,” are offered up to the spirits on the sacrificial trays; and in the same sense are the directions of magicians, that “if the spirit craves a human victim a cock may be substituted.”264 We are told that, in Egypt, King Amosis ordered three waxen images to be burned in the temple of Heliopolis in lieu of the three men who in earlier times used to be sacrificed there.265 The Romans offered dolls;266 and in old Hindu families belonging to the sect of the Vámácháris a practice still obtains of sacrificing an effigy instead of a living man.267 In India, Greece, and Rome, animals, also, were substituted for human victims.268 Of a similar substitution there is probably a trace in the Biblical story of Isaac being exchanged for a ram, and in the paschal sacrifice.269 On the Gold Coast the human victim who was formerly sacrificed to the god of the Prah is nowadays replaced by a bullock which is specially reserved and fattened for the purpose.270

In other cases human sacrifices have been succeeded by practices involving the effusion of human blood without loss of life. We are told that, in Laconia, Lycurgus established the scourging of lads at the altar of Artemis Orthia, in place of the sacrifice of men, which had previously been offered to her;271 and Euripides represents Athena as ordaining that, when the people celebrate the festival of Artemis the Taurian goddess, the priest, to compensate her for the sacrifice of Orestes, “must hold his knife to a human throat, and blood must flow to satisfy the sacred claims of the goddess, that she may have her honours.”272 There are also many instances of bleeding or mutilation practised for the same purpose as human sacrifice, probably according to the principle of pars pro toto, though it is impossible to decide whether they really are survivals of an earlier sacrifice.

Besides the ceremony of nawgia, already described,273 the Tonga Islanders had another ceremony called tootoo-nima, or cutting off a portion of the little finger, as a sacrifice to the gods, for the recovery of a superior relation who was ill; and so commonly was this done that, in Mariner’s days, there was scarcely a person living in the Tonga Islands who had not lost one or both little fingers, or at least a considerable portion of them.274 In Chinese literature there are frequently mentioned instances of persons cutting off flesh from their bodies to cure parents or paternal grandparents dangerously ill. In most cases it remains unmentioned how the flesh was prepared; but it is sometimes stated that porridge or broth was made of it, or that it was mixed with medicine. Dr. de Groot maintains that it was in the first place the ascription of therapeutic virtues to parts of the human body that prompted such filial self-mutilation. But he adds that “often also we read of thigh-cutters invoking Heaven beforehand, solemnly asking this highest power to accept their own bodies as a substitute for the patients’ lives they wanted to save; their mutilation thus assuming the character of self-immolation.”275 According to the testimony of a native writer, there is scarcely a respectable house in all Bengal, the mistress of which has not at one time or other shed her blood, under the notion of satisfying the goddess Chandiká by the operation. “Whenever her husband or a son is dangerously ill, a vow is made that on the recovery of the patient, the goddess would be regaled with human blood… The lady performs certain ceremonies, and then bares her breast in the presence of the goddess, and with a nail-cutter (naruna) draws a few drops of blood from between her breasts and offers them to the divinity.”276 Garcilasso de la Vega states that, whilst some of the Peruvian Indians before the time of the Incas sacrificed men, there were others who, though they mixed human blood in their sacrifices, did not obtain it by killing anyone, but by bleeding the arms and legs, according to the importance of the sacrifice, and, in the most solemn cases, by bleeding the root of the nose where it is joined by the eyebrows.277

There is one form of human sacrifice which has outlived all others, namely, the penal sacrifice of offenders. There can be no moral scruples in regard to a rite which involves a punishment regarded as just. Indeed, this kind of human sacrifice is even found where the offering of animals or lifeless things has fallen out of use or become a mere symbol. For this is the only sacrifice which is intended to propitiate the deity by the mere death of the victim; and gods are believed to be capable of feeling anger and revenge long after they have ceased to have material needs. The last trace of human sacrifice has disappeared only when men no longer punish offenders capitally with a view to appeasing resentful gods.

Human beings are sacrificed not only to gods, but to dead men, in order to serve them as companions or servants, or to vivify their spirits, or to gratify their craving for revenge.

From various quarters of the world we hear of the immolation of men for the service of the dead, the victims generally being slaves, wives, or captives of war, or, sometimes, friends.278 This rite occurs or has occurred, more or less extensively, in Borneo279 and the Philippine Islands,280 in Melanesia and Polynesia,281 in many different parts of Africa,282 and among some American tribes.283 In America, however, it was carried to its height by the more civilised nations of Central America and Mexico, Bogota and Peru.284 There is evidence to show that the funeral ceremonies of the ancient Egyptians occasionally included human sacrifice at the gate of the tomb, although the practice would seem to have been exceptional, at any rate after Egypt had entered upon her period of greatness.285 It has been suggested that in China the burial of living persons with the dead dates from the darkest mist of ages, and that the cases on record in the native books are of relatively modern date only because in high antiquity the custom was so common, that it did not occur to the annalists and chroniclers to set down such everyday matters as anything remarkable.286 In the fourteenth century of our era, the funeral sacrifice of men was abolished, even for emperors and members of the imperial family,287 but it has assumed a modified shape under which it still maintains itself in China. “Daughters, daughters-in-law, and widows especially imbued with the doctrine that they are the property of their dead parents, parents-in-law, and husbands, and accordingly owe them the highest degree of submissive devotion, often take their lives, in order to follow them into the next world.” And though it has been enacted that no official distinctions shall be awarded to such suttees, whereas honours are granted to widowed wives, concubines, and brides who, instead of destroying themselves, simply abjure matrimonial life for good, sutteeism of widows and brides still meets with the same applause as ever, and many a woman is no doubt prevailed upon, or even compelled, by her own relations, to become a suttee.288 Professor Schrader observes that “it is no longer possible to doubt that ancient Indo-Germanic custom ordained that the wife should die with her husband.”289 It has been argued, it is true, that the burning of widows begins rather late in India;290 yet, though the modern ordinance of suttee-burning be a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual, the practice seems to be, not a new invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but the revival of an ancient rite belonging originally to a period even earlier than the Veda.291 In the Vedic ritual there are ceremonies which obviously indicate the previous existence of such a rite.292 From Greece we have the instances of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile of her husband,293 and of the suicide of the three Messenian widows mentioned by Pausanias.294 Sacrifice of widows occurred, as it seems as a regular custom, among the Scandinavians,295 Heruli,296 and Slavonians.297 “The fact,” says Mr. Ralston, “that, in Slavonic lands, a thousand years ago, widows used to destroy themselves in order to accompany their dead husbands to the world of spirits, seems to rest on incontestable evidence”; and if the dead was a man of means and distinction, he was also solaced by the sacrifice of his slaves.298 Funeral offerings of slaves occurred among the Teutons299 and the Gauls of Cæsar’s time;300 and in the Iliad we read of twelve captives being laid on the funeral pile of Patroclus.301