Strange survivals : some chapters in the history of man / by S. Baring-Gould.

Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Strange survivals : some chapters in the history of man / by S. Baring-Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    20/304 (page 8)
    fice to the earth, and partly also with the idea of securing to himself for ever a portion of soil by some sacramental act, the old Pagan laid the foundations of his house and fortress in blood. Every great work was initiated with sacrifice. If a man started on a journey, he first made an offering. A warlike expedition was not undertaken till an obla- tion had been made, and the recollection of this lingered on in an altered form of superstition, viz., that that side would win the day which was the first to shed blood, a belief alluded to in the Lady of the Lake. A ship could not be launched without a sacrifice, and the baptism of a vessel nowadays with a bottle of wine is a relic of the breaking of the neck of a human victim and the suffusion of the prow with blood, just as the burial of a bottle with coins at the present day under a foundation stone is the faded reminiscence of the immuring of a human victim. Building, in earl}'- ages, was not so lightly taken in hand as at present, and the principles of architect- ural construction were ill understood. If the walls showed tokens of settlement, the reason supposed was that the earth had not been sufficiently pro- pitiated, and that she refused to bear the super- imposed burden. Plutarch says that when Romulus was about to found the Eternal City, by the advice of Etruscan Augurs, he opened a deep pit, and cast into it the first fruits of everything that is reckoned good by use, or necessary by nature, and before it was closed by a great stone, Faustulus and Quinctilius were killed and laid under it. This place was the