Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/471

 Notes from Armenia. 441

loaves of bread had been placed upon the body. Inquiry as to the meaning of this elicited no other explanation than that the bread was for the church mice and to keep them from eating the corpse. I did not feel satisfied with the explanation. Some months later, on mentioning the incident to some intelligent Armenians in Constantinople, they frankly admitted that in former days the custom was to eat the bread, dividing it up amongst the friends of the deceased. Whether this is a case of sin-eating I leave Mr. Frazer and Mr. Hartland to decide.

Foundation Sacrifice.

Much attention has been given in late years to the custom of establishing the security of a building or the prosperity of a city by means of a sacrific offered on the foundation or immured in it. These vitalizations and re- vitalizations (for in the case of cities the sacrifice was often renewed annually) are attested for many ancient cities, such as Antioch of Syria, Laodicea of Syria, &c., where a primitive and annually repeated sacrifice of a virgin gave way, in course of time, to the sacrifice of an animal, such as a stag, offered on the birthday of the city. Of such sacrifices it is known that survivals still exist. Perhaps the most amusing survival is the case of the immuring of a live bee on the occasion of the consecration of a new bee-hive, a custom still in vogue in Bulgaria. (See Krauss, Volks- glaube der Sildslaven, p. 160.)

By a happy accident I stumbled upon a case of founda- tion sacrifice just where one would have least expected it, viz. in the laying of a foundation of a new Protestant church at Mezreh near Harpoot. During the past summer this progressive step — for it must be clear to any unpreju- diced observer in Armenia that Progress and Protestantism are bound up together — was taken by the people, and the American missionaries at Harpoot unwittingly took part in the sacrifice of the foundation. When the usual prayers