TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

SACRIFICE. 53
sacrifice, the Greeks offered cocks to Asldepios, and in Touraine a
white cock used to be sacrificed to St. Christopher for the cure of a
bad finger (Henri Estienne cap. 38, 6). Of game, doubtless only
those fit to eat were fit to sacrifice, stags, roes, wild boars, but never
bears, wolves or foxes, who themselves possess a ghostly being, and
receive a kind of worship. Yet one might suppose that for expiation
uneatable beasts, equally with men, might be offered, just as slaves
and also hounds and falcons followed the burnt body of their
master. Here we must first of all place Adam of Bremen s descrip
tion (4, 27) of the great sacrifice at Upsala by the side of Dietmar s
account of that at Hlethra (see p. 48) : Solet quoque post novem
annos communis omnium Sveoniae provinciarum solennitas
celebrari, ad quam nulli praestatur immunitas ; reges et populi,
omnes et singuli sua dona ad Ubsolam transmittunt, et, quod omni
poena crudelius est, illi qui jam induerunt christianitatem ab illis
ceremoniis se redimunt. Sacrificium itaque tale est : ex omni
animante quod masculinum est, novem capita offeruntur ; quorum
sanguine deos tales placari mos est. Corpora autem suspenduntur
in lucum qui proximus est templo. Is enim lucus tarn sacer est
gentilibus, ut singulae arbores ejus ex morte vel tabo immolatorum
divinae credantur. Ibi etiam canes, qui pendent cum Jwminibus,
quorum corpora mixtim suspensa narravit mihi quidam christianorum
se septuaginta duo vidisse. Ceterum naeniae, quae in
ejusmodi ritibus libatoriis fieri solent, multiplices sunt et inhonestae,
ideoque melius reticendae. The number nine is prominent in this
Swedish sacrificial feast, exactly as in the Danish ;
but here also all
is conceived in the spirit of legend. First, the heads of victims
seem the essential thing again, as among the Franks and Langobards ;
then the dogs come in support of those Hlethra hounds and hawks/
but at the same time remind us of the old judicial custom of hanging
up wolves or dogs by the side of criminals (EA. 685-6). That only
the male sex of every living creature is here to be sacrificed, is in
striking accord with an episode in the Eeinardus, which was
composed less than a century after Adam, and in its groundwork
might well be contemporary with him. At the wedding of a king,
the males of all quadrupeds and birds were to have been slaughtered,
but the cock and gander had made their escape. It looks to me
like a legend of the olden time, which still circulated in the ll-12th
centuries, and which even a nursery-tale (No. 27, the Town-