form of oath
taken daily in our law courts; and it may be that the more repulsive the
object to be kissed, the greater the merit of kissing it. Again, the
lady who required to be followed into the depths of a lake may be
matched with the goddess Hertha, whose slaves were drowned in the
self-same waters wherein they had washed her; nor does it seem more
menial to carry a princess than to wash a goddess. The ceremony of
carrying may indeed be the relic of a solemn procession, or of a sacred
drama. The words of blessing following on a sneeze need no explanation;
and the omission to return at the promised time a borrowed kettle would
be more likely to provoke the anger of a god than to retard the
deliverance of a mortal. This is implied by the statement that the devil
fetched the kettle himself; and we need have little doubt that in an
earlier form the story so described it. I am unable to explain the
unknown word which would deliver the lady who haunted the bridge at Old
Strelitz, unless it be a reminiscence of an incantation.

There remain the demand for an unbaptized child to kiss, the torture to
which the heroes of the two Bohemian sagas submit, the requirement in
the Pomeranian tale to place seven brothers on the stone haunted by the
seven mice, and lastly the personal violence to the damsel involved in
striking her with a birch-rod or a bunch of juniper and in beheadal. In
all these we probably have traces of sacrifice. The offering of an
innocent child is familiar, if not comprehensible, enough to any one who
has the most superficial acquaintance with savage rites. We have already
seen that an unbaptized child is regarded as a pagan, and is an object
of desire on the part of supernatural beings. The same reasons which
induce fairies to steal it would probably render it an acceptable
offering to a pagan divinity. No words need be wasted on the torture, or
the tale of the mice. But the personal violence, if indeed the remnant
of a tradition of sacrifice, involves the slaughter of the divinity
herself. This might be thought an insuperable objection; but it is not
really so. For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very
widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative
or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such
cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a
home in another body. The subject is too vast and complex to be
discussed here at l