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82 Kajendralala Mitra — On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. pSfo. 1 



represents them (®va<nv a>iAo{3opoi<s iKeAcu) as savage as the Thyades, who 

 delighted in bloody banquets. Upon this the Scholiast observes, that the 

 Msenades, and Bacchse, used to devour the raw limbs of animals, which they 

 had cut or torn asunder. In the island of Chios it was a religious 

 custom to tear a man's limb by way of sacrifice to Dionusus. The 

 same obtained in Tenedos. It is Porphyry who gives the account. He 

 was a staunch Pagan, and his evidence on that account is of consequence. 

 He quotes for the rites of Tenedos Euelpis the Carystian. From all 

 which we may learn one sad truth, that there is scarce any thing so 

 impious and unnatural, as not at times to have prevailed."* It is said 

 Orpheus first put a stop to this disgustingly cruel custom ; but, according 

 to some, he only stopped the practice of eating raw flesh, but did not 

 succeed in altogether suppressing the rite. 



Eeferring to the inhabitants of Cyprus, Herodotus says : " The people 

 of this place worship the virgin goddess Artemis ; at whose shrine they 

 sacrifice all persons who have the misfortune to be shipwrecked upon their 

 coast : and all the Grecians that they can lay hold of, when they are at any 

 time thither driven. All these they, without any ceremony, brain with a 

 club. Though others say that they shove them off headlong from a preci- 

 pice, for their temple is founded upon a cliff, "f This Artemis was the 

 counterpart of the Indian Kali, to whom human sacrifices were offered until 

 very recently, as will be shown further on. Even the casting of the victim 

 headlong from the top of a cliff was not unknown in India, for we are in- 

 formed by Dr. Hendley in his interesting account of the Maiwar Bhils (ante 

 XLIV, p. 350) that " at installations at Jodhpur, buffaloes and goats are to 

 this day sacrificed in front of the four-armed Devi, and thrown down the 

 rock face of the fort. So again, at the very ancient temple of Devi on the 

 Chitor Hill." " These are," he adds, "relics of aboriginal worship ;" but of 

 this there is no proof. " A goat is still offered daily at the shrine of Amba- 

 devi, at Amber the ancient capital of Dhundar, or Jaipur, as a substitute 

 for the human victim formerly stated to have been sacrificed at the same 

 place." The story of the Devi who wanted and got seven consecutive royal 

 victims from a chieftain of Chitor, so spiritedly narrated by Colonel Tod, 

 must be fresh in the mind of the reader. 



The Assyrians, like the people on the shores of the Mediterranean, free- 

 ly indulged in human sacrifices, and imagined that such sacrifices were the 

 most acceptable offerings they could make to their gods. 



According to Diodorus " red-haired men were formerly sacrificed by 

 the Egyptian kings at the altar of Osiris. $"■ And Plutarch quotes a 



* Bryant's Ancient Mythology, II, pp. 12 ff. 

 t L. iv, C. 103. 

 X Diodor., I. 88. 



