Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/300

274 tance. With some savage peoples, eating the body of a defeated enemy is far from being simple anthropophagy. It is an act securing the transfer of the fallen warrior's own admirable qualities, with all those similarly taken in possession by himself from defeated foemen, to the conqueror who has at last overcome him. The ritual cannibalism of the ancient Mexicans, which took the form of what appears to have been a communion feast on the corpses of prisoners dedicated and offered to the gods, implies a similiarsimilar [sic] belief. The flesh of the unfortunate who was by a kind of mysterious transubstantiation at once the victim and the earthly manifestation of the deity honoured, was no ordinary food; and apparently among European nations the blood of a felon is no ordinary blood, although the reason for its special association with the restoration of health has yet to be satisfactorily explained. It may be that the miserable, misbegotten wretch who pays the forfeit of his outrages on society by death, fills to the popular imagination the place once occupied by some victim whom our remote ancestors regarded with mingled severity, awe and pity, as they slew him and sent him to their gods. Perhaps too—for as people say in Lincolnshire, "A many things go to everything," and the current of belief is commonly a stream formed by the union of many rills of conjecture and sentiment—a sprinkling of the dead man's blood, or failing that a touch of his hand, to work the decay of disease by sympathy, is efficacious because he died by violence, and therefore presumably in health and strength, with the warm red tide of life beating vigourously in every vein. If so, physical contact with one who has perished by drowning is also of signal advantage, because he too has been cut off from existence with his vital powers in full action; but this opinion may have also received further support from another conception, namely, that those who die by water are in some sort the sacrifices claimed by the element which has slain them, and are therefore sacred as the prey of the entity in union