liquid arch formed by the “sheeted column’s silvery perpendicular” in waterfall
or cataract: there he remained during the watches of the night, with phantoms
fluttering round about him, from whence he was supposed to derive the burden
of the oracular response he delivered to his comrades on the following day.
It is probable that this ceremony is the relic of some ancient form of ritual. At all
events, the skins of animals played an important part in the old worship. When
the Thebans slew a cow on the festival of Jupiter Ammon, his image was clothed
with the skin: all present in the temple then struck the carcase, which was buried
in a consecrated place.
Pausanias records that a temple in honour of the soothsayer Amphiaraus, the
reputed son of Apollo, stood in the territory of Oropus in Attica. Votaries who
resorted thither for the purpose of divination, underwent certain lustrations, or
purifying rites, sacrificed a ram, and, in expectation of seeing visions, slept upon
its skin.
Virgil, in one of the most elaborate scenes of the Æneid, represents to us a
similar oblation as being offered at a consecrated fountain, where the priest, to
prepare himself for the delivery of responses, slept on the skin:—
“Et cæsarum ovium sub nocte silenti
Pellibus incubuit stratis, somnosque petivit;
Multa modis simulacra videt volitantia miris
Et varias audit voces.”[72]It seems to have been an important part of the heathen ritual to make use of the
skin of the sacrificed animal for the purposes of clothing. Lucian, describing the
ceremonies practised in the temple of Hierapolis, says that, on his arrival, the
head and eyebrows of the novice were shaved; a sheep was then sacrificed; he
knelt on the skin, and covering his own head with the head and feet of the
animal, prayed that his offering might be accepted while promising a worthier
one.
The Spanish invaders of the New World discovered that the religion of its most
civilised race, the Aztecs, was founded upon human sacrifices. The number of
victims offered up to the Aztec gods is stated in figures which seem almost
incredible. Peculiar to the Aztec kingdom was the horrid ceremony entitled “the
flaying of men.” The Aztecs having demanded the daughter of some
neighbouring potentate as their queen, she was flayed on the very night of her
arrival by command of their deity, and a young man clothed in her skin. In this