I KILLED THE TIGER. 51 



of captives in honour of their gods was by 

 no means uncommon. The great temple at 

 Upsal, in Sweden, appears to have been especially 

 dedicated to Odin, Thor and Frea. Its periodical 

 festivals were accompanied by different degrees of 

 conviviality and license, in which human sacrifices 

 were rarely wanting, varied in their numbers and 

 value by the supposed exigency. In some cases 

 even royal blood was selected that the imagined 

 anger of the gods might be appeased. In Scan- 

 dinavia, the authority of the priest was much 

 greater than it would appear to have been among 

 the Anglo-Saxons. It was his word often which 

 determined where the needed victims should be 

 found. It was his hand that inflicted the wound, 

 and his voice which said, " I send thce to Odin," 

 declaring the object of the sacrifice to be that the 

 gods might be propitiated, that there might be a 

 fruitful season or a successful war. The tendency 

 of the Arian race is to form national and political 

 communities, marry one wife, and worship one 

 supreme and spiritual Deity. The Turanian 

 tendency is to have little natural or political 

 cohesion, to marry one or more wives, without 

 much sentiment, to worship gods and heroes 

 without much idea of a spiritual existence, beyond 

 that implied in the notion of ghosts and devils. 



