The dog or horse is the substitute for a child. A few centuries earlier the dyke builders would have reared it over an infant buried alive. The trace of the substitution remains in some folk-tales. An architect promises the devil the soul of the first person who crosses the threshold of the house, or church, or goes over the bridge he has built with the devil’s aid. The evil one expects a human victim, and is put off with a wolf, or a dog, or a cock. At Aix-la-Chapelle, as we have seen, a wolf took the place of a human victim: at Frankfort a cock.
In Yorkshire, the Kirk-Grim is usually a huge black dog with eyes like saucers, and is called a padfoot. It generally frequents the church lanes; and he who sees it knows that he must die within the year. And now—to somewhat relieve this ghastly subject—I may tell an odd incident connected with it, to which the writer contributed something.
On a stormy night in November, he was out holding over his head a big umbrella, that had a handle of white bone. A sudden gust—and the umbrella was whisked out of his hand, and carried away into infinite darkness and mist of rain.
That same night a friend of his was walking down a very lonely church lane, between hedges and fields, without a house near. In the loneliest, most haunted portion of this lane, his feet, his pulsation and his breath were suddenly arrested by the sight of a great black creature, occupying the middle of the way, shaking itself impatiently, moving forward, then bounding on one side, then running to the other. No saucer eyes, it is true, were visible, but it had a white nose that, to the horrified traveller, seemed lit with a supernatural phosphoric radiance. Being a man of intelligence, he would not admit to himself that he was confronted by the padfoot; he argued with himself that what he saw was a huge Newfoundland dog. So he addressed it in broad Yorkshire: “Sith’ere, lass, don’t be troublesome. There’s a bonny dog, let me pass. I’ve no stick. I wi’nt hurt thee. Come, lass, come, let me by.”
At that moment a blast rushed along the lane. The black dog, monster, padfoot, made a leap upon the terrified man, who screamed with fear. He felt claws in him, and he grasped—an umbrella. Mine!
That this idea of human victims being required to ensure the stability of a structure is by no means extinct, and that it constitutes a difficulty that has to be met and overcome in the East, will be seen from the following interesting extract from a recent number of the London and China Telegraph. The writer says:—“Ever and anon the idea gets abroad that a certain number of human bodies are wanted, in connection with laying the foundation of some building that is in progress; and a senseless panic ensues, and everyone fears to venture out after nightfall. The fact that not only is no proof forthcoming of anyone having been kidnapped, but that, on the contrary, the circle of friends and acquaintances is complete, quite fails to allay it. But is there ever any reasoning with superstition? The idea has somehow got started; it is a familiar one, and it finds ready credence. Nor is the belief confined either to race, creed, or locality. We find it cropping up in India and Korea, in China and Malaysia, and we have a strong impression of having read somewhere of its appearance in Persia. Like the notions of celibacy and retreat in religion, it is common property—the outcome, apparently, of a certain course of thought rather than of any peculiar surroundings. The description of the island of Solovetsk in Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s ‘Free Russia’ might serve, mutatis mutandis, for a description of Pootoo; and so a report of one of these building scares in China would serve equally well for the Straits. When the last mail left, an idea had got abroad among the Coolie population that a number of heads were required in laying the foundations of some Government works at Singapore; and so there was a general fear of venturing out after nightfall, lest the adventurer should be pounced on and decapitated. One might have thought the ways of the Singapore Government were better understood! That such ideas should get abroad about the requirements of Government even in China or Annam is curious enough; but the British Government of the Straits above all others! Yet there it is; the natives had got it into their heads that the Government stood in need of 960 human heads to ensure the safe completion of certain public works, and that 480 of the number were still wanting. Old residents in Shanghai will remember the outbreak of a very similar panic at Shanghai, in connection with the building of the cathedral. The idea got abroad that the Municipal Council wanted a certain number of human bodies to bury beneath the foundation of that edifice, and a general dread of venturing out after nightfall—especially of going past the cathedral compound—prevailed for weeks, with all kinds of variations and details. A similar notion was said to be at the bottom of the riots which broke out last autumn at Söul. Foreigners—the missionaries for choice—were accused of wanting children for some mysterious purpose, and the mob seized and decapitated in the public streets nine Korean officials who were said to have been parties to kidnapping victims to supply the want. This, however, seems more akin to the curious desire for infantile victims which was charged against missionaries in the famous Honan proclamation which preceded the Tientsin massacre, and which was one of the items in the indictment against the Roman Catholics on the occasion of that outbreak. Sometimes children’s brains are wanted for medicine, sometimes their eyes are wanted to compound material for photography. But these, although cognate, are not precisely similar superstitions to the one which now has bestirred the population of Singapore. A case came to us, however, last autumn, from Calcutta, which is so exactly on all fours with this latest manifestation, that it would almost seem as if the idea had travelled like an epidemic and broken out afresh in a congenial atmosphere. Four villagers of the Dinagepore district were convicted, last September, of causing the death of two Cabulis and injuring a third, for the precise reason that they had been kidnapping children to be sacrificed in connection with the building of a railway bridge over the Mahanuddi. A rumour had got abroad that such proceedings were in contemplation, and when these Cabulis came to trade with the villagers they were denounced as kidnappers and mobbed. Two were killed outright, their bodies being flung into the river; while the third, after being severely handled, escaped by hiding himself. We are not aware whether the origin of this curious fancy has ever been investigated and explained, for it may be taken for granted that, like other superstitions, it has its origin in some forgotten custom or faded belief of which a burlesque tradition only remains. This is not the place to go into a disquisition on the origin of human sacrifice; but it is not difficult to believe that, to people who believe in its efficacy, the idea of offering up human beings to propitiate the deity, when laying the foundations of a public edifice, would be natural enough. Whether the notion which crops up now and again, all over Asia, really represents the tradition of a practice—whether certain monarchs ever did bury human bodies, as we bury newspapers and coins, beneath the foundations of their palaces and temples, is a question we must leave others to answer. It is conceivable that they may have done so, as an extravagant form of sacrifice; and it is also conceivable that the abounding capacity of man for distorting superstitious imagery, may have come to transmute the idea of sacrificing human beings as a measure of propitiation, into that of employing human bodies as actual elements in the foundation itself. It is possible that the inhabitants of Dinagepore conserve the more ideal and spiritual view, which the practical Chinese mind has materialised, as in the recent instance at Singapore. Anyhow, the idea is sufficiently wide-spread and curious to deserve a word of examination as well as of passing record.”
Fig. 1.—FIGURE FOUND UNDER THE FOUNDATIONS AT STINVEZAND.
When the north wall of the parish church of Chulmleigh in North Devon was taken down a few years ago—a wall of Perpendicular date—in it was found laid a very early carved figure of Christ crucified to a vine, or interlacing tree, such as is seen in so-called Runic monuments. The north wall having been falling in the fifteenth century, had been re-erected, and this figure was laid in it, and the wall erected over it, just as, in the same county, about the same time, the wall of Holsworthy Church was built over a human being. At Chulmleigh there was an advance in civilisation. The image was laid over the wall in place of the living victim.
When, in 1842, the remains of a Romano-Batavian temple were explored at Stinvezand, near Rysbergen, a singular mummy-like object was found under the foundation. This was doubtless