The evil eye. An account of this ancient and wide spread superstition

11 SHADOW CONTAINS THE SOUL 79
Whoever entered the sanctuary of Zeus on Mount
Lycaeus was beHeved to lose his shadow and to die
within the year. Here in the west country there is
an old belief that many have sold their souls to the
devil, and that those who do so, lose their shadow
from this it would seem to be thought, that the
shadow contains the soul, i.e. the " Ka " of ancient
Egypt.
In olden times it was believed in many widely
separated countries ^^^ that a human victim was a
necessity for the stability of any important build-
ing ; indeed
the idea was by no means confined to
paganism, for we are told that St, Columba ^"^ found
it necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the
foundation of his monastery, in order to propitiate
the spirits of the soil, who demolished at night what
had been built during the day.
Here in England, throughout the Middle Ages,
the common saying, "There's a skeleton in every
house," or, " Every man has a skeleton in his closet,"
was hardly a figure of speech. The stories of finding
the skeletons of faithless monks and nuns walled up
alive, ^^^" seem to have sprung from a much earlier
notion ; and it is now well established that these are
by no means myths, but very facts. At Holsworthy,
in North Devon, the parish church was restored in
123 "Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i. p. 94 et seq. gives a number of very
remarkable instances of foundation sacrifices from all parts of the world ; as
for instance, quite in modern times even in our own possessions in the
Punjaub— the only son of a widow was thus sacrificed. But perhaps the
strangest account of all is that of several willing victims, making the story of
Quintus Curtius seem quite commonplace.
!-•* Baring-Gould, art. " On Foundations," in Murray's Magazine^ March
1887, pp. 365, 367. Tylor tells the same story, op. cit. i. 94.
vi\a These stories are sifted and disproved in The Innititring of Nuns, by
the Rev. H. Thurston, S.J., Catholic Truth Society, 1st ser. p. 125 ; but he
by no means controverts facts relating to long antecedent beliefs.
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