86 Bajendralala Mitra— On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. [No. 1 



sacrificed captive was disposed of, remains to be told. It was delivered to 

 the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed 

 was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse 

 repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious viands 

 prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who, as we shall see here- 

 after, conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. Surely, 

 never were refinement and the extreme of barbarism brought so closely in 

 contact with each other. ' ?# Well may the historian exclaim, " Strange 

 that in every country the most fiendish passions of the human heart have 

 been kindled in the name of religion." 



The neighbours of the Aztecs, the Toltecs and the Tezcaucans, as also 

 the Incas, indulged in the loathsome and revolting rite, and often waged war 

 with each other, simply for the sake of obtaining captives for their gods. It 

 is even said that such wars were sometimes amicably arranged solely for the 

 sake of captives for sacrifice.f 



In South America, the Peruvians were strongly addicted to human sacri- 

 fices, and the Araucanians, though they are said to have been " sensible to the 

 dictates of compassion", and a mild, sensible race averse to cruelty, were never- 

 theless sometimes given to the same practice. They celebrated a rite called 

 Pruloucon, or " the Dance of the Dead", at which a prisoner-of-war was 

 " sacrificed to the manes of the soldiers killed in the war." After subject- 

 ing the unfortunate victim to various kinds of ignominy, such as making him 

 ride a horse deprived of his ears and tail, symbolically burying the good deeds 

 of his national chiefs, and the like, " the Toqui, or one of his bravest com- 

 panions to whom he relinquishes the honour of the execution, dashes out the 

 brains of the prisoner with a club. The heart is immediately taken out 

 by two attendants and presented palpitating to the general, who sucks a 

 little of the blood, and passes it to his officers, who repeat in succession the 

 same ceremony, in the mean time he fumigates with tobacco-smoke from 

 his pipe the four cardinal points of the circle. The soldiers strip the flesh 

 from the bones, and make of them flutes ; then cutting off the head, carry 

 it round upon a pike amidst the acclamations of the multitude, while, stamp- 

 ing in measured pace, they thunder out their dreadful war-song, accompanied 

 by the mournful sound of these horrid instruments." J 



Of cannibalism pure and simple, such as that of some of the Pacific Island- 

 ers ; of the people of Equatorial Africa, some of whom, the Murirumbites 

 for instance, like human flesh raw, and others, like the Wadoe of the 

 Coast, prefer to eat it roasted j§ of the " Mongols, who, according to 



* Conquest of Mexico, p. 71. 



f Ibid, p. 74. Vide passim Heaviside's American Antiquities. 

 % Abbe Don J. Ignatius Molina's History of Chili, II, p. 79. 



§ Burton's Lake Eegions of Central Africa, II, p. 114 ; also Du Chaillu's Explora- 

 tions in Equatorial Africa. 



