Note 79.1 — Chapter XVIII · THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA: ITS RELATION TO HUMAN SACRIFICES.

Human sacrifices to water were certainly not unknown among the ancient Greeks. I need not cite more than two examples. Athenæus quotes Anticlides, an Athenian writer, as recording that certain colonists of Lesbos were directed by an oracle to throw a virgin into the sea as an offering to Poseidon. This was accordingly done; but Enalos, one of the chiefs of the expedition, being in love with the maiden, leaped after her to save her, and disappeared with her in the depths. The colonists founded Methymna; and in later years when the town had grown populous he was said to have shown himself to them again, swimming to land on a great wave with a wondrous cup of gold in his hand, and to have related that the lady was dwelling beneath the sea with the Nereids, while he himself had become Master of the Horse to Poseidon.79.1 Such a legend as this could only have arisen where sacrifices of the kind had been practised. In historical times the Greeks performed the rites of Adonis, originally, it would seem, a Semitic cult. Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite, according to his story, was slain by a boar. “His death was annually lamented with bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble corpses, were carried out as to burial, and then thrown into the sea or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on the following day.”79.2 If not in Greece, at all events in Syria, whence perhaps it was borrowed, the ceremony here described was doubtless performed with a human being. Mr. Frazer, from whom I take the foregoing description, has made a large collection of cases in which an effigy is prepared and, after the performance of certain rites, is slain and buried, or thrown into the water. We may put aside the instances of burial, only noting them as evidence that the intention is to put some living victim, represented by the effigy, to death. At Altdorf and Weingarten, villages of Swabia, a straw man is made on Ash Wednesday and called the “Carnival Fool.” He is carried round and then thrown with mournful music into the water.80.1 At Balwe, in Westphalia, on the contrary, the straw-man is thrown into the river Hönne with shouts of joy on Shrove Tuesday. In both instances the ceremony is called “burying the Carnival.”80.2 In the Thuringian villages of Oberhain and Maukenbach the children used to “carry out Death” in the shape of a puppet of birchen twigs, on Mid-Lent Sunday, and throw it into a pool.80.3 “At Tabor, in Bohemia, the figure of Death is carried out of the town and flung from a high rock into the water, while” the following song is sung: