304 
THE WESTERN COAST. 
him grovelling in the dust. The Dahomans main- 
tain the true doctrine of passive obedience, and the 
divine right of kings, in the utmost purity, and 
their history exhibits no example of a deposition. 
At his accession, the king walks in blood from the 
palace to the grave of his predecessor, and annu- 
ally "waters the graves of his ancestors with the 
blood of human victims. The death of the king is 
only announced by fearful shrieks, which spread 
like lightning from the palace to the extremities 
of Dahomy, and become the signal for anarchy, 
rapine, and murder, which continue till the new 
king ascends the throne. The religion of Daho- 
my is vague and uncertain in its principles, and 
rather consists in the performance of some tradi- 
tionary ceremonies, than in any fixed system of 
belief, or of moral conduct. They believe more 
firmly in their amulets and fetiches, than in the 
Deity ; their national fetiche is the Tiger ; and, 
their habitations are decorated with ugly images, 
tinged with blood, stuck with feathers, besmear- 
ed with palm-oil, and bedaubed with eggs. As 
their ideas of Deity do not coincide with those of 
Europeans, they imagine that their tutelary gods 
are different. " Perhaps," said a Dahoman chief 
to Snelgrave, " that God may be yours, who has 
" communicated so many extraordinary things to 
" white men ; but as that God has not been pleas- 
" ed to make himself known to us, we must be 
