78 Eajendralala Mitra — On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. [No 1 



not carry away in his march from Jaffa,*— and in ancient times, with no secure 

 prisons and defective commissariat arrangements, when the victors themselves 

 had to depend upon chance for their own rations, it must have been hut too 

 frequently felt _; and two massacres under such compulsion would suffice to 

 give them a religious character, and render them sacred. 



The capital punishment of criminals at stated times would also assume 

 a similar character in a short period. Vindictiveness has, likewise, had a share 

 as much in suggesting human sacrifices as in bringing anthropophagism into 

 vogue. 



Moreover, it being admitted that a fierce, sanguinary divinity, who help- 

 ed his worshippers in achieving success in warfare, would delight in receiving 

 sanguinary offerings, vows and promises to make them on the result of a 

 projected, or impending, battle proving favourable, or on the attainment of 

 some coveted object, would naturally follow ; and the simple-minded people 

 who made such vows and promises would not fail to keep them with puncti- 

 lious care. 



Moreover, the practice, so common in pre-historic and proto-historic 

 times (and not altogether a thing of the past in the present day), of showing 

 respect or affection to chiefs and seniors at their funerals by slaughtering 

 and sometimes, but rarely, burying alive some of their wives, concubines, and 

 slaves, as also their horses and dogs, to accompany them, and to minister to 

 their comfort in another world, was, by its frequent repetition on so solemn 

 an occasion as a funeral, just what would give a religious character to 

 such slaughter, and convert it into a holy sacrifice. 



Yet again, the art of the magician, which in primitive times included 

 that of the sorcerer and the soothsayer, had to resort to the most outland- 

 ish, uncouth, and extraordinary means to retain its hold on the minds of 

 ignorant, credulous, and superstitious people, and what could be more mys- 

 terious and awe-inspiring than communion with the dead and the 

 slaughter of human beings under the most harrowing circumstances ? and 

 that such slaughter under the peculiar state of ancient society would be as- 

 sociated with religion was but natural! 



Lastly, a vitiated desire for human flesh as an article of choice food 

 was, it would seem, pretty prevalent in rude primitive barbarous times, but 

 as this desire could not be satisfied except at uncertain times when strangers 

 or prisoners were available, the indulgence in it necessarily partook of the 

 character of a feast, and that again soon passed into a religious observance. 



* Dr. Desgentiles, in Ms Histoire Medicals de VArmee dr 'Orient, denies this charge, 

 but Napoleon himself says, "Ivas obliged to leave behind all who could not follow us. 

 There were fifty men sick of the plague who could not move with the army, and who 

 must be left to the ferocious Djezzar. I caused opium to be administered to them to 

 release them from their suffering." (Jomini, I, p. 231.) The charge was at the time 

 generally believed. 



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