September 3, 2025 • 29 mins
In this intriguing essay, Lord Acton responds to the exchange of letters between Sir Robert Peel and Lord Macaulay, aiming to challenge the widely held belief that human sacrifice was solely the practice of barbaric and uncivilized societies. Acton argues that in some instances, such rituals may stem from sophisticated theological developments. At the urging of Lord Stanhope, Acton‚s thought-provoking piece was published in the Home and Foreign Review in 1863. Summary by Jeff Allen.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part three of Human Sacrifice. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Jeff Allen. Human Sacrifice by John Emerich Edward Dalber
(00:22):
Part three. The Teutonic Odin, whom the Romans identified with
the Celtic Tutetes, likewise exacted human victims. But the Germans
offered such sacrifices before the time will be here of Odin. Caesar,
who thought that they had no personal gods, relates that
they thrice determined by lot whether they should sacrifice a
(00:44):
Roman prisoner. It seems to have been long their custom
to let the gods thus select the victim. Thirty years later,
before fighting with Marcus Crassus, the Pannonians vowed they would
sacrifice and devour the officers they captured in their wars
with the Simbri. The Romans believed that the prisoners whom
they lost would be sacrificed. The Getae, who deemed death
(01:08):
better than life and mourned their birthday, buried the widows
with the husband. So did the heru Lie down to
the sixth century in the early times. However, before the
struggle with the Empire, the idea of sacrifice was undeveloped
in the German mind. But the mythology of the ruthless
Odin which arose during the migrations and expeditions of the Northmen,
(01:32):
found in these ancient customs the nucleus of its sanguinary cultists,
and elevated the slaughter of captives and widows into a
religious rite. In the times described by Tacitus, the thoughtless
barbarity of a nation of warriors co existed with the
religious notions to which it afterwards gave way. The officers
(01:54):
of the army of Barus were slain upon the Altars,
and in the wars between the Hermundry and the Chattis,
the vanquished were sacrificed to mercury and Mars. The slaughter
of captives was gradually softened down, probably by being more
and more assimilated into a religious rite. At first the
(02:14):
officers captured were slain. Later on the Saxons, the most
cruel of the German tribes, decimated their prisoners. The daily
sacrifice of a Christian Roman by Radagascus was an unusual
act of mingled ferocity and fanaticism. The practice was one
of the great obstacles which Christianity had to overcome among
(02:37):
the Germans. In the time of Saint Boniface, Christians sold
their serfs to the pagans of the Baltic for sacrifice.
The Saxons must have clung to the right even after
their conversion, for it is punished with death in the
very next paragraph of Charlemagne's Capitularies, to that which makes
the refusal of baptism a capital crime. The Franks practic
(03:00):
to state long after the death of Clovis, in their
Italian invasion of five point thirty nine, they sacrificed the
women and children of the Goths on the bridge of Pavia.
Procopius enumerates it among the relics of the paganism which
they retained. Were like the Saxons and the Hessians. They
were converted not when their national paganism had become a
(03:21):
listless in decrepid form, but while it was in all.
The energy of expanding vigor and the resistance of the
priests of Odin to the Christian champions left profound impressions
on the idea and forms of the German Church. The
gods were too keenly loved and believed in to be
rejected as mere creatures of the imagination. The missionaries did
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not believe them to be all illusions, and they considered
those gods which were worshiped within human rights to be
really infernal spirits. This belief of the primitive church was
forced upon the clergy, who did battle against the paganism
of northern Europe, which the theology of ancient Rome did
not afford. It was admitted then that the German gods
(04:06):
were real beings, not divine, however, but devilish. The substance
was carefully distinguished from the attributes, and those qualities which
were not inconsistent with Christian morality were transferred to the saints.
Churches were built on the sites of the heathen sanctuaries
and dedicated to the saint, whose legend bore most resemblance
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to the myth of the dispossessed deity. A strange fusion ensued.
The fallen gods were not believed to be powerless because
they were demons and their anger had been provoked to
the utmost by the destruction of their altars.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Thus, the images of perun at Novgorod broke out into
a loud lament for the faithlessness of its ungrateful worshipers.
When it was thrown down and dragged to the river,
it might still be prudent, therefore, to conciliate the deposed
and dishonored deities, so far as was compatible with the
newly adopted faith. Thus a mass of superstition clustered round
(05:05):
the old divinities, and they survived in many a legend
of the wild huntsman, or the cave of Venus, or
the spirits of the mountain and stream, peopling with supernatural figures,
the menstrully of the Middle Ages, and our own fairy
and nursery tales. But pagan reminiscences not only created and
(05:25):
supplied one whole moiety of this dualistic tendency, but also
penetrated into the conception of Christianity. Figures in human shape
were carried about on certain festivals in memory of the
forbidden victims, and sacrifices were offered in the eighth century
to the saints. These abuses were rigidly put down by
(05:46):
the Church, but she tolerated a species of accommodation, of
which two remarkable memorials remain. One is a Saxon poem
of the ninth century in which the Gospel is translated
into a kind of Teutonic legends, and our Lord represented
as a German warrior king surrounded by his faithful liegemen.
(06:06):
The other as a poem of southern Germany and of
the same date, in which the apocalyptic vision is related
with the names and scenery of the Eto. Long after
the worship of Odin was extinct in Germany, it was
flourishing enough in Scandinavia to put forth a new theology.
For centuries. The fierce Northmen were ceaselessly battling against the
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Christian nations along the ocean coasts, and in the violence
of the struggle, their religious rights and their social character
grew more and more savage, prodigal of others blood, and
reckless of their own. They afforded a congenial soil for
the plant of human sacrifice, which put forth some of
its Rankeish shoots just as paganism was about to fail.
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The native tradition assigns the origin of the right to
the remotest antiquity, and makes it prevalent among the Northmen
from their first appearance among the nations. It was Frey,
the second king after Odin, who, in a period antcedent
to all chronology, changed the primitive right and instituted human sacrifice.
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Man was the noblest victim, and therefore the first prisoner
taken in any expedition was offered up to the god
of war. These sacrifices, which were perhaps partly an artifice
of the priesthood to mitigate the horrors of war and
prevent the general massacre of prisoners, lasted as long as
Pagodism itself, and in the most various forms there was
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a regular form of imprecation to devote the enemy to Odin.
Before the battle in eight ninety three, the Jar of
the Orkneys sacrificed the son of the King of Norway
and offered up his lungs to Odin, and then compassed
a war song and memory of his deed. Harold hildetand
in return for Odin's protection and battle, promised him all
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the souls that his sword should separate from their bodies.
The Swedish regent Erik vowed to sacrifice himself to Odin
at the end of ten years if he gained the
victory over the Deanes. In nine ninety three, Achandjarl, the
hero of Ohenschlager's powerful drama, though he had been baptized,
offered all kinds of victims to ensure the success of
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his arms, but could only propitiate the gods by the
sacrifice of his son. The delay of an expedition by
contrary winds was occasion enough for the sacrifice, and a
Norwegian king was chosen by lot to die for this cause.
It was not unusual to compel the king to die
for his people. There was a famine in Sweden in
(08:45):
the reign of Domaud. In the first year, oxen were
sacrificed at Epsalah, in the second men and in the
third the king was immolated and the altar smeared with
his blood. Another scarcity under Olave Tretelgia being attributed, like
all other evil or good, to the influence of the king,
(09:07):
who was sparing in his sacrifices. His house was surrounded
and he was burnt in it as a sacrifice. To Odin,
a mythical king of Uppsala, was promised ten years additional
life for each of his sons that he sacrificed. One
Icelander is even related to have offered his son that
he might have grace to find a tree to serve
(09:28):
as a column and a temple. These narratives, though of
no value as records of events, proved half familiar was
the right to the Scandinavian mind, for there were certain
fixed solemnities at which human victims were sacrificed, and traces
of the custom, as Bishop Munter tells us, may still
be found in the soil of all three Scandinavian kingdoms.
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In Denmark, ninety nine victims were sacrificed every ninth year
till the beginning of the tenth century. A similar right
existed at a salah till the middle of the eleventh,
and Christians were obliged to purchase exemption by a fine.
One of them told Adam of Bremen that he had
seen seventy two bodies hanging at one time. In Iceland,
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and probably in the other kingdoms, the usual victims were
condemned criminals, owing to the efforts of the missionaries to
save the victims. This horrible rite figures in the history
of the planting of the church in several countries. Sometimes
a strange mixture is seen in the Laws of Friesland.
After many enactments entirely Christian in character, the code ends
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with punishing sacrilege by immolation immolator sacriligius diese quorum templar
voila vite. Christianity co existed with paganism for some time
among the Frisians, who were much scandalized at being told
by Saint Wolfram that they would not meet their ancestors
in heaven. While this saint was preaching, a youth named
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Ovo was once led forth to be sacrificed. Wolfrim interceded
for him and was told that the victim should be
his slave if his God would save him. Wolfrim prayed,
and the rope by which Ovo was hanging broke and
let him fall to the ground. He declared that he
had been half asleep and felt as if he were
(11:20):
held up by the Saint's girdle. Upon this great numbers
were baptized, and the rescued victim became a priest and
died in seven forty nine at the habbey of Fontanelle.
The demonical possession, so frequent in the Gospels, often broke
out with similar frequency and intensity in countries where the
Gospel was being preached for the first time. So it
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was with human sacrifice in the final conflict of paganism.
It was the most signal proof of the intense tenacity
of error and of the power of the heathen gods
over their worshippers, and at the same time the most
flagrant act of defiance and contradiction to the new teaching.
It was, as it were, the demonical possession of paganism.
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No system which had once admitted it ever cast it
out by natural and esoteric progress, though it sometimes disappeared
with the diminished energy of belief or by the conquest
of another system. In the reign of King oleav Dragvasen,
the Christian scowled Alfred o Tarsan narrowly escaped immolation among
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the Heathens of Gothland. In Iceland, the struggle between the
new faith and the old was arduous. Olav endeavored to
enforce baptism, and the Pagans insisted that he should sacrifice
to the gods like his predecessors. In nine ninety nine,
he promised the Norwegians to do so, and declared that
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to propitiate the gods whom he had deserted, he would
offer the most splendid sacrifice ever known. For the victims,
instead of slaves and malefactors, should be chosen from the
Norwegian chiefs. One thousand, the Heathen party in Iceland resolved
to sacrifice two men from each province to defend them
against Christianity. The Christians answered the challenge by two men
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of each province, devoting their lives to religion as nobler
victims to obtain the conversion of their country. This is
the last instance of human sacrifice among the Northmen. The
memory of the barbarous rite long survived among their descendants.
Dudo of San Quentin and William of Jumiege and Roger Wass,
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who borrowed from them the subject of his poem, probably
did not know that the ancient rites which they described
had been continued almost down to their time. Jaffari, the
profoundest scholar of the Slavonic world, gives in his Slavonic
Antiquities an idyllic picture of the primitive manners of the race.
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They were not barbarians as the Germans described them, nor restless,
warlike adventurers like the Germans themselves. Their happiness was in
the peaceful cultivation of the soil and it was their
expulsion of the Germanic tribes from the rich plains of
the Vistula which gave the first impulse to the great migrations.
They were civilized, humane and free, in spite of the
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Russian writers who maintained that the natural condition of the
people is one of oppression and servitude. In consonance with
this cheerful description, Cheveric affirms that human sacrifice was unknown
to the Great Slavonic race, or only transiently introduced by
strangers among some of the northern tribes. His patriotism was
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incapable of acknowledging that human sacrifice in various forms not
only prevailed in the race, but continued in spite of Christianity. Perhaps,
we may say, by reason of the conflict with Christianity
down to a period when it had long disappeared throughout
the rest of Europe. One type of it common to
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all the nations, the Baltic to the Altai mountains, is
described by Herodotus and his account of the funeral of
a Scythian king. One of his wives and many of
his servants were compelled to share his grave together with
his horses and precious vessels. In the first fruits of
all products. After a year, fifty men and horses were
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slain and stuffed, and set round the monument as guards.
The Scythians gashed and wounded themselves in presence of the
royal corpse. The ruling idea was that the king was
deified by death, and that the gods were no other
than the dead. They were supplied therefore with all that
was most needful to them in order to continue in
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existence not very different from that which they had lost.
The sacrifice of deposition was for use the anniversary one
for honor. This notion of providing the dead monarch with
attendants was capable of an indefinite extension, and led in
and a subsequent age to some of the most appalling
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scenes in the Sanguinary Annals of Central Asia. The wounding
of the survivors and the offering of the first fruits
seemed to point to a distinct order of ideas and
indicate a more spiritual conception of divinity and sacrifice. The
earliest notice of similar customs among the Slavonic people in
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the Middle Ages is furnished by Saint Boniface in the
year seven forty five. Among the Wends. Quote bodhissimus et
deterimum genus aminum Unquote, the widows refused to survive their husbands,
but slew themselves to be burnt with them quote tam
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magno zilo matrimony amorum mutumb servant. If the practice had
sprung from pure attachment, it would have indicated the existence
of centemas highly favorable to the adoption of Christianity, whereas,
being a religious rite, it proved to be a stubborn
support of Paganism. Three hundred years later, the wends, though
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spoken of very favorably by the Catholic clergy, still shed
human blood upon their altars. All their sacrifices were expiatory,
and all therefore were bloody. They made no difference in
kind between human and animal sacrifices, nor did they understand
that bullocks or sheep might be offered up vicariously for
human victims. These were selected from Christian captives. One was
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sacrificed every year, and on great occasions large numbers suffered
a lingering death. Dithmar, Bishop of Murzburg, who died in
ten eighteen, does not particularize the victims, especially Christian Quo
dominum akt sanguine perkudum in ballibus forum theaorum fuerer mitigar.
(17:57):
But Helmold, who wrote toward the end of the year
eleven sixty eight, is only of Christian victims quote Megtanteciu.
Theese suis ostheis de bobos et ovibus cleerique etium de
omnibus christianis enuatum ominum christicolim thettari consueverant. It seems, therefore,
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that the original notion of human sacrifice was extinct, and
that the practice was kept alive down to the twelfth
century only by the antagonism to Christianity. As practiced among
the ancient Prussians, human sacrifice exhibits far higher notions of
theology than the ordinary immolation of prisoners and slaves. Not
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only captives, but children and the priests themselves were sacrificed
to the God patrimpos a perpetual fire burnt before his
sacred oak, and the supreme reward of the priests was
to perish in its hollowed flames. If it was allowed
to go out. The priest, who was responsible, was burnt
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as soon as it was lighted again. The priest was
mediator between mankind and the gods. When he grew old,
he mounted a pyre and exhorted the people to desert
their evil ways, and if they professed sorrow, he caused
the logs to be set on fire and offered himself
up in satisfaction for their sins. But the right lost
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much of its religious significance and became a mere act
of vengeance and ferocity. During the long warfare with the
Teutonic Knights, a Christian who approached the holy places was
put to death in order to appease the outraged gods.
Before an expedition, a captive belonging to the hostile nation
was slaughtered in order to ascertain its result. The practice
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resembling that which, according to Livy and Plenty, prevailed for
centuries in Rome. Prisoners taken in battle were put to
death with solemn rites, and the sword of the warriors
were dipped in their blood. Maidens were crowned with flowers,
and slain commanders were burnt with their horses. A knight
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of the Order was sacrificed in this way in the
year twelve sixty one, and another so late as thirteen twenty.
This is the latest instance of the rite in the
history of European paganism, and it is almost entirely stripped
of its original religious character. The Estonians exhibited the same
ferocity against the Christian enemy. In twelve twenty one, they
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sacrificed a Danish captive and devoured his heart in order
to give themselves courage for the fray. But they were
not content with the victims they could obtain. In war.
A regular trade was carried on by which Christian slaves
were supplied for their altars, and nobles used to sell
their serfs for this purpose. The classic historian of Poland
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tells us that the Heathen Poles occasionally sacrificed enemies in war,
and adds that the rights were accompanied by those acts
which in Asia and America, though not in Northern Europe,
seem almost inseparable from the sacrifice of human beings. In Russia,
it cannot be proved that human sacrifices were known before
the Warajian conquest, but in the tenth century there were
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many gods to whom parents sacrificed their children. We know
no other case in which the right was practiced promiscuously
without distinguishing the deity to whom it was specially grateful
sacrifices to the dead are described with greatfulness by an
Arabian writer who was sent by the Caliph in the
year nine twenty one to convert the Russians to Islam.
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A man of note, having died, his family asked who
would die with him. A girl of his house volunteered,
and the particulars of her death are remarkable, for they
are described by an eye witness. It is evident that
matrimonial affection had is little to do with it, as
the idea of expiation for the victim is not the wife.
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And she exclaims, quote, my Lord calls me, so take
me to him, unquote, and speaks not a word about
the gods, but dies solely to be the company of
the dead. On the other hand, we are strongly reminded
of the Phoenician rites when we read that the men
beat their shields in order to drown her cries, and
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that a scene of cold debauchery immediately preceded her death.
On the twelfth of July. The Russians still commemorate the
festival of Theodore and Ewaine, the only martyrs of the
Church at Kiev. Their legend is connected with the last
human sacrifice recorded of the pagan Russians five years before
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their conversion. In nine eighty three, Vladimir proposed to celebrate
his victories in Galatia by offering up the usual human
victims to the gods. The lot fell on his son,
a Warajian, who had been converted at Constantinople. He refused
to deliver him up and denounce the false gods of
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the people, who thereupon slew both father and son. The
Russian Church soon canonized them and has continued to venerate
them ever since. The memory of the blood he has
shed wanted Vladimir after his baptism, and great disorders were
caused by the mildness of his later rule. He feared
to provoke the anger of God if he destroyed a
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human life, and the clergy were compelled to admonish him.
That severity was an important duty of kings. The conversion
of the people did not deliver the soil of Russia
from the horrors of human sacrifice. It was universally practiced
by the Tartars, says Mikhand, but apparently only at the
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burial of chieftains, and not in honor of the divinity.
Those who dug the grave of Fatila were immediately slain
in order that that place might be concealed from the
knowledge of mankind. One hundred years later, a similar custom
prevailed among the Turks, but with a somewhat deeper significance.
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Turxanthus slew together with his father's horses, four captive huns
at his grave, bidding them inform him of the state
of his affairs. At the death of Genghis Khan, forty
maidens followed him to the other world, and in order
that the secret might be kept, his followers slew all
whom they met while carrying his body from the place
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where he died on the hong Ko to the sepulcher
of the Khans. In the al Thai, Marco Polo says
that this became the regular practice thenceforward at the funeral
of the Khans, and that the victims were told that
they must go to serve their master in the other world.
When Mengu died in twelve fifty nine, many thousand corps
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marked the passage of his funeral procession across the plains
of Tartary. The favorite wife of Attay died upon his grave,
and maidens covered with jewels were buried with Hullugo. The
long and arduous struggle of the gentler religion of Buddho
against this ancient rite has been recorded by one of
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the descendants of Genghis. In fifteen seventy eight, it was
forbidden to destroy even horses or camels at funerals. Nevertheless,
when all Tan Kanankhan lost his only son, the mother
of the boy, regardless of the sin, says the Mongol historian,
ordered one hundred children to be slaughtered as companions for
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her child. More than forty perished. When the threats of
the people put an end to the massacre, the guilt
of the mother caused strange things to befall. When she
was dead, the devil would not abandon the corpse and
made it move, a horrible imitation of real life, the
Bagda Lama invoked, the most awful of the gods. The
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upper garment of the dead was laid in a triangular
grave into which the Bogdi Lama also flung as many
passing demons as he could catch, whereupon a lizard appeared.
Bogdi Lama then discourse so impressively on inevitable death that
the creature, having bowed its head, three times gave up
the ghost. Then the garment and the lizard were consumed
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by fire, from which preceded a stench so foul that
many of those who were present fainted. But the faith
of those who preserved their senses was wonderfully confirmed when
they beheld a great white pillar rising out of the smoke,
bearing on its summit a heavenly figure. So great is
the force of this superstition that it survives to the
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present day among a race which has professed for centuries
of religion, which condemns it as a monstrous crime. Tuck
relates that young slaves of both sexes are even now
poisoned with quicksilver and placed around the body of a
Mongol prince. There can be no more conclusive proof that
the custom can subsist without the slightest reference to the
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religious idea of sacrifice. Buddhism encountered human sacrifices of another
and far more spiritual kind. In India. Hegel has very
correctly explained how the pantheism of the Hindu religion led
to the sanctification of suicide. The Hindus deprecate and despise
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the life of man. It has no more value, they say,
than the life of nature, and it can only acquire
dignity by the negation of itself, to which all concrete
existences are essentially opposed. Hence, in their ritual men sacrifice
themselves and parents, their children, and widows are burnt after
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their husband's death, not in satisfaction for guilt and kurd
or to expiate a wrong, but only for the purpose
of becoming meritorious. Hence these acts must be spontaneous, for
the victim dies not for others, but for himself. And
be he, ever so great a sinner, he becomes by
the act of self sacrifice, pure from sin. In this
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form the right is peculiar to India, but it existed
there in many other forms, whether of native growth or
as aryan imports. In later times it was confined to
the worship of Cali, but although recognized and regulated in
the Betas, it was discouraged and prevailed chiefly among the sects.
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Ritter and his great work on the Geography of Asia,
has collected many instances of human sacrifice, either known by
memorials or still practiced early in this century and about
the time of Herber's travels. Since the volumes were published.
The investigations of English officers have proved that a kind
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of vicarious sacrifice prevailed very extensively in southern India. Macpherson
and Campbell discovered sex by whom human victarctims were regularly
put to death in incredible numbers. Generally, they were bought
for the purpose and were kept in comfort for years
until the moment of their doom arrived when they were slain,
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in order to secure fine weather and rich crops, but
seldom at the dictation of a subtle theology, such as
that which devotes crowds of voluntary and cheerful victims to Cali,
and of Part three
Part three of Human Sacrifice. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Jeff Allen. Human Sacrifice by John Emerich Edward Dalber
(00:22):
Part three. The Teutonic Odin, whom the Romans identified with
the Celtic Tutetes, likewise exacted human victims. But the Germans
offered such sacrifices before the time will be here of Odin. Caesar,
who thought that they had no personal gods, relates that
they thrice determined by lot whether they should sacrifice a
(00:44):
Roman prisoner. It seems to have been long their custom
to let the gods thus select the victim. Thirty years later,
before fighting with Marcus Crassus, the Pannonians vowed they would
sacrifice and devour the officers they captured in their wars
with the Simbri. The Romans believed that the prisoners whom
they lost would be sacrificed. The Getae, who deemed death
(01:08):
better than life and mourned their birthday, buried the widows
with the husband. So did the heru Lie down to
the sixth century in the early times. However, before the
struggle with the Empire, the idea of sacrifice was undeveloped
in the German mind. But the mythology of the ruthless
Odin which arose during the migrations and expeditions of the Northmen,
(01:32):
found in these ancient customs the nucleus of its sanguinary cultists,
and elevated the slaughter of captives and widows into a
religious rite. In the times described by Tacitus, the thoughtless
barbarity of a nation of warriors co existed with the
religious notions to which it afterwards gave way. The officers
(01:54):
of the army of Barus were slain upon the Altars,
and in the wars between the Hermundry and the Chattis,
the vanquished were sacrificed to mercury and Mars. The slaughter
of captives was gradually softened down, probably by being more
and more assimilated into a religious rite. At first the
(02:14):
officers captured were slain. Later on the Saxons, the most
cruel of the German tribes, decimated their prisoners. The daily
sacrifice of a Christian Roman by Radagascus was an unusual
act of mingled ferocity and fanaticism. The practice was one
of the great obstacles which Christianity had to overcome among
(02:37):
the Germans. In the time of Saint Boniface, Christians sold
their serfs to the pagans of the Baltic for sacrifice.
The Saxons must have clung to the right even after
their conversion, for it is punished with death in the
very next paragraph of Charlemagne's Capitularies, to that which makes
the refusal of baptism a capital crime. The Franks practic
(03:00):
to state long after the death of Clovis, in their
Italian invasion of five point thirty nine, they sacrificed the
women and children of the Goths on the bridge of Pavia.
Procopius enumerates it among the relics of the paganism which
they retained. Were like the Saxons and the Hessians. They
were converted not when their national paganism had become a
(03:21):
listless in decrepid form, but while it was in all.
The energy of expanding vigor and the resistance of the
priests of Odin to the Christian champions left profound impressions
on the idea and forms of the German Church. The
gods were too keenly loved and believed in to be
rejected as mere creatures of the imagination. The missionaries did
(03:43):
not believe them to be all illusions, and they considered
those gods which were worshiped within human rights to be
really infernal spirits. This belief of the primitive church was
forced upon the clergy, who did battle against the paganism
of northern Europe, which the theology of ancient Rome did
not afford. It was admitted then that the German gods
(04:06):
were real beings, not divine, however, but devilish. The substance
was carefully distinguished from the attributes, and those qualities which
were not inconsistent with Christian morality were transferred to the saints.
Churches were built on the sites of the heathen sanctuaries
and dedicated to the saint, whose legend bore most resemblance
(04:26):
to the myth of the dispossessed deity. A strange fusion ensued.
The fallen gods were not believed to be powerless because
they were demons and their anger had been provoked to
the utmost by the destruction of their altars.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Thus, the images of perun at Novgorod broke out into
a loud lament for the faithlessness of its ungrateful worshipers.
When it was thrown down and dragged to the river,
it might still be prudent, therefore, to conciliate the deposed
and dishonored deities, so far as was compatible with the
newly adopted faith. Thus a mass of superstition clustered round
(05:05):
the old divinities, and they survived in many a legend
of the wild huntsman, or the cave of Venus, or
the spirits of the mountain and stream, peopling with supernatural figures,
the menstrully of the Middle Ages, and our own fairy
and nursery tales. But pagan reminiscences not only created and
(05:25):
supplied one whole moiety of this dualistic tendency, but also
penetrated into the conception of Christianity. Figures in human shape
were carried about on certain festivals in memory of the
forbidden victims, and sacrifices were offered in the eighth century
to the saints. These abuses were rigidly put down by
(05:46):
the Church, but she tolerated a species of accommodation, of
which two remarkable memorials remain. One is a Saxon poem
of the ninth century in which the Gospel is translated
into a kind of Teutonic legends, and our Lord represented
as a German warrior king surrounded by his faithful liegemen.
(06:06):
The other as a poem of southern Germany and of
the same date, in which the apocalyptic vision is related
with the names and scenery of the Eto. Long after
the worship of Odin was extinct in Germany, it was
flourishing enough in Scandinavia to put forth a new theology.
For centuries. The fierce Northmen were ceaselessly battling against the
(06:29):
Christian nations along the ocean coasts, and in the violence
of the struggle, their religious rights and their social character
grew more and more savage, prodigal of others blood, and
reckless of their own. They afforded a congenial soil for
the plant of human sacrifice, which put forth some of
its Rankeish shoots just as paganism was about to fail.
(06:53):
The native tradition assigns the origin of the right to
the remotest antiquity, and makes it prevalent among the Northmen
from their first appearance among the nations. It was Frey,
the second king after Odin, who, in a period antcedent
to all chronology, changed the primitive right and instituted human sacrifice.
(07:14):
Man was the noblest victim, and therefore the first prisoner
taken in any expedition was offered up to the god
of war. These sacrifices, which were perhaps partly an artifice
of the priesthood to mitigate the horrors of war and
prevent the general massacre of prisoners, lasted as long as
Pagodism itself, and in the most various forms there was
(07:38):
a regular form of imprecation to devote the enemy to Odin.
Before the battle in eight ninety three, the Jar of
the Orkneys sacrificed the son of the King of Norway
and offered up his lungs to Odin, and then compassed
a war song and memory of his deed. Harold hildetand
in return for Odin's protection and battle, promised him all
(08:01):
the souls that his sword should separate from their bodies.
The Swedish regent Erik vowed to sacrifice himself to Odin
at the end of ten years if he gained the
victory over the Deanes. In nine ninety three, Achandjarl, the
hero of Ohenschlager's powerful drama, though he had been baptized,
offered all kinds of victims to ensure the success of
(08:24):
his arms, but could only propitiate the gods by the
sacrifice of his son. The delay of an expedition by
contrary winds was occasion enough for the sacrifice, and a
Norwegian king was chosen by lot to die for this cause.
It was not unusual to compel the king to die
for his people. There was a famine in Sweden in
(08:45):
the reign of Domaud. In the first year, oxen were
sacrificed at Epsalah, in the second men and in the
third the king was immolated and the altar smeared with
his blood. Another scarcity under Olave Tretelgia being attributed, like
all other evil or good, to the influence of the king,
(09:07):
who was sparing in his sacrifices. His house was surrounded
and he was burnt in it as a sacrifice. To Odin,
a mythical king of Uppsala, was promised ten years additional
life for each of his sons that he sacrificed. One
Icelander is even related to have offered his son that
he might have grace to find a tree to serve
(09:28):
as a column and a temple. These narratives, though of
no value as records of events, proved half familiar was
the right to the Scandinavian mind, for there were certain
fixed solemnities at which human victims were sacrificed, and traces
of the custom, as Bishop Munter tells us, may still
be found in the soil of all three Scandinavian kingdoms.
(09:51):
In Denmark, ninety nine victims were sacrificed every ninth year
till the beginning of the tenth century. A similar right
existed at a salah till the middle of the eleventh,
and Christians were obliged to purchase exemption by a fine.
One of them told Adam of Bremen that he had
seen seventy two bodies hanging at one time. In Iceland,
(10:14):
and probably in the other kingdoms, the usual victims were
condemned criminals, owing to the efforts of the missionaries to
save the victims. This horrible rite figures in the history
of the planting of the church in several countries. Sometimes
a strange mixture is seen in the Laws of Friesland.
After many enactments entirely Christian in character, the code ends
(10:37):
with punishing sacrilege by immolation immolator sacriligius diese quorum templar
voila vite. Christianity co existed with paganism for some time
among the Frisians, who were much scandalized at being told
by Saint Wolfram that they would not meet their ancestors
in heaven. While this saint was preaching, a youth named
(11:00):
Ovo was once led forth to be sacrificed. Wolfrim interceded
for him and was told that the victim should be
his slave if his God would save him. Wolfrim prayed,
and the rope by which Ovo was hanging broke and
let him fall to the ground. He declared that he
had been half asleep and felt as if he were
(11:20):
held up by the Saint's girdle. Upon this great numbers
were baptized, and the rescued victim became a priest and
died in seven forty nine at the habbey of Fontanelle.
The demonical possession, so frequent in the Gospels, often broke
out with similar frequency and intensity in countries where the
Gospel was being preached for the first time. So it
(11:42):
was with human sacrifice in the final conflict of paganism.
It was the most signal proof of the intense tenacity
of error and of the power of the heathen gods
over their worshippers, and at the same time the most
flagrant act of defiance and contradiction to the new teaching.
It was, as it were, the demonical possession of paganism.
(12:06):
No system which had once admitted it ever cast it
out by natural and esoteric progress, though it sometimes disappeared
with the diminished energy of belief or by the conquest
of another system. In the reign of King oleav Dragvasen,
the Christian scowled Alfred o Tarsan narrowly escaped immolation among
(12:27):
the Heathens of Gothland. In Iceland, the struggle between the
new faith and the old was arduous. Olav endeavored to
enforce baptism, and the Pagans insisted that he should sacrifice
to the gods like his predecessors. In nine ninety nine,
he promised the Norwegians to do so, and declared that
(12:47):
to propitiate the gods whom he had deserted, he would
offer the most splendid sacrifice ever known. For the victims,
instead of slaves and malefactors, should be chosen from the
Norwegian chiefs. One thousand, the Heathen party in Iceland resolved
to sacrifice two men from each province to defend them
against Christianity. The Christians answered the challenge by two men
(13:11):
of each province, devoting their lives to religion as nobler
victims to obtain the conversion of their country. This is
the last instance of human sacrifice among the Northmen. The
memory of the barbarous rite long survived among their descendants.
Dudo of San Quentin and William of Jumiege and Roger Wass,
(13:33):
who borrowed from them the subject of his poem, probably
did not know that the ancient rites which they described
had been continued almost down to their time. Jaffari, the
profoundest scholar of the Slavonic world, gives in his Slavonic
Antiquities an idyllic picture of the primitive manners of the race.
(13:53):
They were not barbarians as the Germans described them, nor restless,
warlike adventurers like the Germans themselves. Their happiness was in
the peaceful cultivation of the soil and it was their
expulsion of the Germanic tribes from the rich plains of
the Vistula which gave the first impulse to the great migrations.
They were civilized, humane and free, in spite of the
(14:16):
Russian writers who maintained that the natural condition of the
people is one of oppression and servitude. In consonance with
this cheerful description, Cheveric affirms that human sacrifice was unknown
to the Great Slavonic race, or only transiently introduced by
strangers among some of the northern tribes. His patriotism was
(14:37):
incapable of acknowledging that human sacrifice in various forms not
only prevailed in the race, but continued in spite of Christianity. Perhaps,
we may say, by reason of the conflict with Christianity
down to a period when it had long disappeared throughout
the rest of Europe. One type of it common to
(14:59):
all the nations, the Baltic to the Altai mountains, is
described by Herodotus and his account of the funeral of
a Scythian king. One of his wives and many of
his servants were compelled to share his grave together with
his horses and precious vessels. In the first fruits of
all products. After a year, fifty men and horses were
(15:21):
slain and stuffed, and set round the monument as guards.
The Scythians gashed and wounded themselves in presence of the
royal corpse. The ruling idea was that the king was
deified by death, and that the gods were no other
than the dead. They were supplied therefore with all that
was most needful to them in order to continue in
(15:42):
existence not very different from that which they had lost.
The sacrifice of deposition was for use the anniversary one
for honor. This notion of providing the dead monarch with
attendants was capable of an indefinite extension, and led in
and a subsequent age to some of the most appalling
(16:02):
scenes in the Sanguinary Annals of Central Asia. The wounding
of the survivors and the offering of the first fruits
seemed to point to a distinct order of ideas and
indicate a more spiritual conception of divinity and sacrifice. The
earliest notice of similar customs among the Slavonic people in
(16:23):
the Middle Ages is furnished by Saint Boniface in the
year seven forty five. Among the Wends. Quote bodhissimus et
deterimum genus aminum Unquote, the widows refused to survive their husbands,
but slew themselves to be burnt with them quote tam
(16:43):
magno zilo matrimony amorum mutumb servant. If the practice had
sprung from pure attachment, it would have indicated the existence
of centemas highly favorable to the adoption of Christianity, whereas,
being a religious rite, it proved to be a stubborn
support of Paganism. Three hundred years later, the wends, though
(17:07):
spoken of very favorably by the Catholic clergy, still shed
human blood upon their altars. All their sacrifices were expiatory,
and all therefore were bloody. They made no difference in
kind between human and animal sacrifices, nor did they understand
that bullocks or sheep might be offered up vicariously for
human victims. These were selected from Christian captives. One was
(17:32):
sacrificed every year, and on great occasions large numbers suffered
a lingering death. Dithmar, Bishop of Murzburg, who died in
ten eighteen, does not particularize the victims, especially Christian Quo
dominum akt sanguine perkudum in ballibus forum theaorum fuerer mitigar.
(17:57):
But Helmold, who wrote toward the end of the year
eleven sixty eight, is only of Christian victims quote Megtanteciu.
Theese suis ostheis de bobos et ovibus cleerique etium de
omnibus christianis enuatum ominum christicolim thettari consueverant. It seems, therefore,
(18:24):
that the original notion of human sacrifice was extinct, and
that the practice was kept alive down to the twelfth
century only by the antagonism to Christianity. As practiced among
the ancient Prussians, human sacrifice exhibits far higher notions of
theology than the ordinary immolation of prisoners and slaves. Not
(18:45):
only captives, but children and the priests themselves were sacrificed
to the God patrimpos a perpetual fire burnt before his
sacred oak, and the supreme reward of the priests was
to perish in its hollowed flames. If it was allowed
to go out. The priest, who was responsible, was burnt
(19:05):
as soon as it was lighted again. The priest was
mediator between mankind and the gods. When he grew old,
he mounted a pyre and exhorted the people to desert
their evil ways, and if they professed sorrow, he caused
the logs to be set on fire and offered himself
up in satisfaction for their sins. But the right lost
(19:26):
much of its religious significance and became a mere act
of vengeance and ferocity. During the long warfare with the
Teutonic Knights, a Christian who approached the holy places was
put to death in order to appease the outraged gods.
Before an expedition, a captive belonging to the hostile nation
was slaughtered in order to ascertain its result. The practice
(19:50):
resembling that which, according to Livy and Plenty, prevailed for
centuries in Rome. Prisoners taken in battle were put to
death with solemn rites, and the sword of the warriors
were dipped in their blood. Maidens were crowned with flowers,
and slain commanders were burnt with their horses. A knight
(20:10):
of the Order was sacrificed in this way in the
year twelve sixty one, and another so late as thirteen twenty.
This is the latest instance of the rite in the
history of European paganism, and it is almost entirely stripped
of its original religious character. The Estonians exhibited the same
ferocity against the Christian enemy. In twelve twenty one, they
(20:34):
sacrificed a Danish captive and devoured his heart in order
to give themselves courage for the fray. But they were
not content with the victims they could obtain. In war.
A regular trade was carried on by which Christian slaves
were supplied for their altars, and nobles used to sell
their serfs for this purpose. The classic historian of Poland
(20:56):
tells us that the Heathen Poles occasionally sacrificed enemies in war,
and adds that the rights were accompanied by those acts
which in Asia and America, though not in Northern Europe,
seem almost inseparable from the sacrifice of human beings. In Russia,
it cannot be proved that human sacrifices were known before
the Warajian conquest, but in the tenth century there were
(21:20):
many gods to whom parents sacrificed their children. We know
no other case in which the right was practiced promiscuously
without distinguishing the deity to whom it was specially grateful
sacrifices to the dead are described with greatfulness by an
Arabian writer who was sent by the Caliph in the
year nine twenty one to convert the Russians to Islam.
(21:42):
A man of note, having died, his family asked who
would die with him. A girl of his house volunteered,
and the particulars of her death are remarkable, for they
are described by an eye witness. It is evident that
matrimonial affection had is little to do with it, as
the idea of expiation for the victim is not the wife.
(22:04):
And she exclaims, quote, my Lord calls me, so take
me to him, unquote, and speaks not a word about
the gods, but dies solely to be the company of
the dead. On the other hand, we are strongly reminded
of the Phoenician rites when we read that the men
beat their shields in order to drown her cries, and
(22:26):
that a scene of cold debauchery immediately preceded her death.
On the twelfth of July. The Russians still commemorate the
festival of Theodore and Ewaine, the only martyrs of the
Church at Kiev. Their legend is connected with the last
human sacrifice recorded of the pagan Russians five years before
(22:47):
their conversion. In nine eighty three, Vladimir proposed to celebrate
his victories in Galatia by offering up the usual human
victims to the gods. The lot fell on his son,
a Warajian, who had been converted at Constantinople. He refused
to deliver him up and denounce the false gods of
(23:07):
the people, who thereupon slew both father and son. The
Russian Church soon canonized them and has continued to venerate
them ever since. The memory of the blood he has
shed wanted Vladimir after his baptism, and great disorders were
caused by the mildness of his later rule. He feared
to provoke the anger of God if he destroyed a
(23:30):
human life, and the clergy were compelled to admonish him.
That severity was an important duty of kings. The conversion
of the people did not deliver the soil of Russia
from the horrors of human sacrifice. It was universally practiced
by the Tartars, says Mikhand, but apparently only at the
(23:50):
burial of chieftains, and not in honor of the divinity.
Those who dug the grave of Fatila were immediately slain
in order that that place might be concealed from the
knowledge of mankind. One hundred years later, a similar custom
prevailed among the Turks, but with a somewhat deeper significance.
(24:10):
Turxanthus slew together with his father's horses, four captive huns
at his grave, bidding them inform him of the state
of his affairs. At the death of Genghis Khan, forty
maidens followed him to the other world, and in order
that the secret might be kept, his followers slew all
whom they met while carrying his body from the place
(24:32):
where he died on the hong Ko to the sepulcher
of the Khans. In the al Thai, Marco Polo says
that this became the regular practice thenceforward at the funeral
of the Khans, and that the victims were told that
they must go to serve their master in the other world.
When Mengu died in twelve fifty nine, many thousand corps
(24:53):
marked the passage of his funeral procession across the plains
of Tartary. The favorite wife of Attay died upon his grave,
and maidens covered with jewels were buried with Hullugo. The
long and arduous struggle of the gentler religion of Buddho
against this ancient rite has been recorded by one of
(25:14):
the descendants of Genghis. In fifteen seventy eight, it was
forbidden to destroy even horses or camels at funerals. Nevertheless,
when all Tan Kanankhan lost his only son, the mother
of the boy, regardless of the sin, says the Mongol historian,
ordered one hundred children to be slaughtered as companions for
(25:35):
her child. More than forty perished. When the threats of
the people put an end to the massacre, the guilt
of the mother caused strange things to befall. When she
was dead, the devil would not abandon the corpse and
made it move, a horrible imitation of real life, the
Bagda Lama invoked, the most awful of the gods. The
(25:56):
upper garment of the dead was laid in a triangular
grave into which the Bogdi Lama also flung as many
passing demons as he could catch, whereupon a lizard appeared.
Bogdi Lama then discourse so impressively on inevitable death that
the creature, having bowed its head, three times gave up
the ghost. Then the garment and the lizard were consumed
(26:19):
by fire, from which preceded a stench so foul that
many of those who were present fainted. But the faith
of those who preserved their senses was wonderfully confirmed when
they beheld a great white pillar rising out of the smoke,
bearing on its summit a heavenly figure. So great is
the force of this superstition that it survives to the
(26:40):
present day among a race which has professed for centuries
of religion, which condemns it as a monstrous crime. Tuck
relates that young slaves of both sexes are even now
poisoned with quicksilver and placed around the body of a
Mongol prince. There can be no more conclusive proof that
the custom can subsist without the slightest reference to the
(27:02):
religious idea of sacrifice. Buddhism encountered human sacrifices of another
and far more spiritual kind. In India. Hegel has very
correctly explained how the pantheism of the Hindu religion led
to the sanctification of suicide. The Hindus deprecate and despise
(27:22):
the life of man. It has no more value, they say,
than the life of nature, and it can only acquire
dignity by the negation of itself, to which all concrete
existences are essentially opposed. Hence, in their ritual men sacrifice
themselves and parents, their children, and widows are burnt after
(27:43):
their husband's death, not in satisfaction for guilt and kurd
or to expiate a wrong, but only for the purpose
of becoming meritorious. Hence these acts must be spontaneous, for
the victim dies not for others, but for himself. And
be he, ever so great a sinner, he becomes by
the act of self sacrifice, pure from sin. In this
(28:07):
form the right is peculiar to India, but it existed
there in many other forms, whether of native growth or
as aryan imports. In later times it was confined to
the worship of Cali, but although recognized and regulated in
the Betas, it was discouraged and prevailed chiefly among the sects.
(28:30):
Ritter and his great work on the Geography of Asia,
has collected many instances of human sacrifice, either known by
memorials or still practiced early in this century and about
the time of Herber's travels. Since the volumes were published.
The investigations of English officers have proved that a kind
(28:50):
of vicarious sacrifice prevailed very extensively in southern India. Macpherson
and Campbell discovered sex by whom human victarctims were regularly
put to death in incredible numbers. Generally, they were bought
for the purpose and were kept in comfort for years
until the moment of their doom arrived when they were slain,
(29:13):
in order to secure fine weather and rich crops, but
seldom at the dictation of a subtle theology, such as
that which devotes crowds of voluntary and cheerful victims to Cali,
and of Part three
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