XXXVI

OF HUMAN VICTIMS

MEN WOULD have been too happy if they had only been deluded; but time, whereby customs are alternately corrupted and rectified, having shed the blood of animals upon the altar, the butchering priests, habitually sanguinary, changed from animals to man; and superstition, the natural daughter of religion, so far forsook her mother’s purity, as to compel men to sacrifice their own children, under the pretense that we should give to God what was the dearest to us.

The first sacrifice of this nature, if the fragments of Sanchoniaton are to be credited, was that of Jehud amongst the Phenicians, who was immolated by his father Hillu, about two thousand years before our era. The great states were at this time already established; Syria, Chaldea, and Egypt, were very flourishing, and Herodotus says, that a young woman was so early drowned in the Nile, to obtain a more abundant flux of this river, which was neither too rapid nor too feeble.

These abominable sacrifices made their way almost over the whole earth. Pausanias asserts, that Lycaon immolated the first of his human victims in Greece. This custom must have been received in the time of the Trojan war, as Homer makes Achilles immolate twelve Trojans to Patrocles’s shade. Would Homer have dared assert so terrible a thing? Would he not have feared disgusting all his readers, if sacrifices had not been in use?

I do not speak of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or that of Idamante, son to Idomeneus: whether true or false they prove the reigning opinion. The sacrifices which the Taurian Scythians made of strangers cannot be doubted.

If we descend to more modern times, the Tyrians and Carthaginians, when in imminent danger, sacrificed a man to Saturn. The same was done in Italy; and the Romans themselves, who condemned these horrid proceedings, immolated two Gauls and two Greeks, to expiate a vestal’s crime. This is what Plutarch teaches us, in his Questions upon the Romans.

This horrid custom prevailed amongst the Gauls and Germans. The Druids burnt human victims in large ozier figures. Amongst the Germans, sorcerers cut the throats of those who were devoted to death, and judged of futurity by the greater or less rapidity of the blood which issued from the wound.

I believe these sacrifices did not often happen. If they had been made annual festivals, if every family had been in perpetual apprehension of their handsomest girl or oldest boy being chosen, to have their hearts sacredly torn out upon a consecrated stone, this would soon have been put an end to, by immolating the priests themselves. It is very probable, that these holy parricides were not committed but upon very urgent occasions, in times of imminent danger, when men are conquered by fear, and when the false idea of public interest silenced all private considerations.

Amongst the Bramins, every widow did not burn herself upon her husband’s corpse. The most devout and rash have from time immemorial made, and still make, this astonishing sacrifice. The Scythians sometimes immolated to the manes of their Kans the most favorite officers of these princes. Herodotus says they were impaled round the royal corpse; but it does not appear by history this custom prevailed for any length of time.

If we read the history of the Jews written by an author of another nation, we shall with difficulty believe, that there ever really was a fugitive people of Egypt, who came by the express order of God to immolate seven or eight small nations whom they did not know; to slay without mercy all the women, all the old men, and even the children at the breast, reserving none but the little girls; that this holy people were punished by their God, when they were so criminal as to save a single man, who was anathematized. We could not believe that so abominable a race could exist upon earth. But as this very people relate all these facts themselves in their holy books, they must be believed.

I shall not here discuss the question, whether these books were inspired. Our holy church, which looks with horror upon the Jews, teaches us that these Jewish books were dictated by God, the creator and father of all men; I cannot form the least doubt about it, nor allow myself in any shape to reason upon it.

It is true that our feeble understanding cannot conceive in God any other wisdom, any other justice, any other goodness, than those of which we have the idea: but, in fine, he has done all he pleased; it is not for us to judge him; I constantly confine myself to mere history.

The Jews have a law, whereby they are expressly ordered to spare nothing nor any man devoted to the Lord: “He cannot be bought off, he must die,” according to the law of Leviticus, chap. xxvii. It is by virtue of this law that we find Jephtha sacrifices his own daughter, and the priest Samuel cuts into morsels king Agag. The Pentateuch tells us, that in the little country of Midian, which contains about nine square leagues, the Israelites, having found six hundred seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and thirty-two thousand virgins, Moses commanded that all the men, all the women, and all the children, should be massacred; and that all the maids should be preserved, and thirty-two only of them were immolated. The remarkable part of this acknowledgment is, that this same Moses was a kinsman of Jethro, the high-priest of the Midianites, who had done him the most signal services, and heaped kindnesses upon him.

The same book tells us, that Joshua, the son of Nun, having passed the river Jordan, with his herd dry-footed, having caused the walls of Jericho, which was anathematized, to fall at the sound of trumpets, that he made all the inhabitants perish in the flames; that he preserved only Rahab, the harlot, and her family, who had concealed the spies of the holy people; that the same Joshua devoted to death twelve thousand inhabitants of the city of Hai; that he sacrificed to the Lord thirty-one kings of the country, who were all anathematized and hanged. We have nothing in our latter times to compare with these religious assassinations, without it be the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and those of Ireland.

It is melancholy that many people doubt the Jews having found six hundred seventy-five thousand sheep, and thirty-two thousand virgins, in the village of a desert in the midst of rocks, and that no one doubts of the affair of St. Bartholomew. But we cannot too often repeat, how much the lights of our reason are impotent, when we endeavor to elucidate the strange events of antiquity, and clear unto our understandings the reasons why God, master of life and death, chose the Jewish people to exterminate the people of Canaan.