Chapter XVIII · THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA: ITS RELATION TO HUMAN SACRIFICES.

Popular as the story of the rescue of the devoted maiden is, and appealing as it does to the imagination, it is not a little remarkable that it appears to be indigenous only in the Old World. Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are by no means so confined in their range, where there is no specific human being to deliver; and not infrequently they form part of the cosmogony of peoples alien in race and occupying distant portions of the globe. Few of them exhibit any details in common with those of the Perseus cycle. I have already mentioned some, and to others I shall have occasion to refer hereafter. The rest it would little avail us to analyse. Enough to note that the thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is preternatural and hostile to mankind. The suggestion has often been made that these stories are traditions of the saurians which abounded in geologic times. Of this, not a particle of evidence has been adduced; and it is in itself so wildly improbable as hardly to deserve notice. None of the giant reptiles of the secondary period were contemporary with man. The process of evolution was still far short of that consummation. And when man appeared in the Quaternary, or perhaps at an advanced stage of the Tertiary, period, the remains of iguanodons and pterodactyles had long been peacefully fossilised beyond his reach. It is true that he made war on the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros; but these could have furnished no hints for the construction of the winged dragon or the lindwurm. We may indeed reasonably ask what hints were needed beyond the existence of snakes and birds or bats? The conscious weakness of humanity, the mystery of serpentine motions, the magnifying, the combining and the distorting powers of human imagination, amply account for the result. The hero who is believed to have succeeded in vanquishing a monster thus created, is regarded as somewhat more than man; he is frequently worshipped as a god. This, however, we know, was comparatively late in civilisation. There was a time when gods, in the sense of beings distinct from and above man, though human in their passions, and more or less human in their proper form, did not exist in the belief of mankind. The worship of confessedly human ancestors, totemism, and other and ruder superstitions preceded them. Science has not yet determined the exact relations of ancestor-worship and totemism. But it is at least certain that the dead were constantly held to assume animal shape. Multitudes of the lower animals—even noxious and repulsive creatures like snakes—were venerated as totems. Veneration grows easily into worship; the totem-feast develops into what we understand by a sacrifice. That many of the classical deities themselves emerged into anthropomorphism from an earlier and less advanced existence is probable from the tales which represented them on various occasions and for various purposes “disguised in brutish forms,” and from the wolves, the horses, the swine, the dogs, the mice and even the flies associated with them, or dedicated to them in the ordinary offerings of the temples or in the more secret and solemn cult of the Mysteries. Egypt, down to the latest moment of its independence, in spite of the political vicissitudes of its long and splendid history, and the consequent evolution of its manifold religious faith, never got beyond its zoomorphic deities. The crocodile and the goose, the ibis and the ram, the jackal, the cat and the bull, decorated with divine names, received in their proper bestial persons the adoration of their worshippers. To living gods like these food was a daily necessity; and for such as were carnivorous flesh, doubtless part of the daily sacrifices, must have been provided. A savage nation on days of festival, or under stress of some great impending calamity, would not hesitate to give human flesh. If, by the concurrence of an advance in civilisation and a political revolution, the worship of any such divinity were suppressed, he would become in tradition a deadly monster; and the milder divinity who succeeded to his place in popular regard would be credited with his conquest and destruction.

The hypothesis I venture to put forward to explain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda is, that it is the record of some such religious reformation. In dealing with the previous incidents I was able to show that they were founded on beliefs, which, if we may not call them primitive, at least go down very deep into savage life. Here it is different. Considerable progress in civilisation must have been made before such a reformation could have been effected, though it would still be compatible with the continuance of a vast amount of wilful and deliberate cruelty constantly inflicted on human beings in the service of the gods. The Church, that zealously propagated the legend of Saint George, regarded the tortures inflicted on the hero as highly improper for an orthodox knight, but quite suitable for a heretic. Even the polished Greeks occasionally offered human sacrifices—if we may trust some of the reports, with torments which would have done no dishonour to the genius of Saint Dominic or the most amiable of his “sons.” But the practice of presenting such offerings to wild beasts in their capacity as gods had been abandoned; and the story of the Slaughter of the Dragon would seem to be the mode wherein tradition preserved the effect upon the collective mind, not indeed of a specific event, so much as of the total result. Tradition loves to be pictorial, dramatic. While its presentations are usually wide of the actual series of occurrences, they often embody in imaginative shape some genuine memory; and it is the task of the historian or the scientific student to bid them render up the secrets they enclose.

“Death swims on the water,

Summer will soon be here,

We have carried Death away for you,

We have brought the Summer.

And do thou, O holy Marketa

Give us a good year

Still less need we discuss the revolting subject of human sacrifice in general. The stories I have cited (and they could easily be multiplied) are intended to confirm the hypothesis that we have in the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda a reminiscence of the abolition of human sacrifices to deities in the shape of the lower animals. I have shown that in certain stages of civilisation sacrifices of the kind are practised, and that they are frequently offered to water-spirits conceived in animal form. In offerings to water, and in traditions of water-spirits, we have the product of savage animism. And it may, of course, be that the monster sent to devour Andromeda, and that which appears so often in the legend of Saint George, are to be regarded simply as the personification of water, or of specific rivers and pools, in their sinister aspect. Strictly speaking, however, personification belongs to a higher plane of thought than that which finds the spirit embodied as an actual living creature. Moreover, the dragon is by no means invariably connected with water; and in estimating the probability of this explanation we must not overlook the tales which represent it as having its abode on a hill or mound, or in a cave.