to have
taken a prominent place among the Aryans,[229] though he takes his
examples, not from language, but from the unexamined customs of the
Greeks, Romans, northerns, Indians, and Persians. We know more about
the development of sacrifice now that Professor Robertson Smith has
dealt with the Semitic part of the evidence. Without resting on the
fact that the occurrence of human sacrifice in a country occupied by
Aryan-speaking people does not, of itself alone, imply that the rite
was Aryan, it is far more important to point out that among the higher
races "the feeling that the slaying involves a grave responsibility
and must be justified by divine permission" appears, and "care was
taken to slay the victim without bloodshed, or to make believe that it
had killed itself."[230] This feeling marks distinctly the Greek
sacrifice as at Thargelia and in the Leukadian ceremony, the Roman
sacrifice at the Tarpeian Rock, the sacrifice at the Valhalla rock of
the northerns, while among the Hindus there is much to show that the
idea of human sacrifice in some of the early writings is a literary
borrowing from the Hebrews; and that if it ever prevailed among the
Aryas of India it was very early superseded by the sacrifice of
animals.[231] Colonel Dalton has given good reasons for his views
"that the Hindus derived from the aboriginal races the practice of
human sacrifices."[232] Although, then, Greek ritual and Greek myth
are full of legends which tell of sacrifices once human, but
afterwards commuted into sacrifices where some other victim is slain
or the dummy of a man is destroyed;[233] although the significant
Hindu ceremonial of so throwing the limbs of an animal slaughtered to
be burnt with the dead that every limb lies upon a corresponding part
of the corpse;[234] although Teuton, Celt, and Norse[235] are credited
with the practice by authorities not to be questioned, it appears by
the evidence that the European form of human sacrifice has little in
common with the savage form except in the nature of the victim. It
occurred, as Grimm states, when some great disaster, some heinous
crime, had to be retrieved or purged, a kind of sacrifice, says Mr.
Lang, not necessarily savage except in its cruelty; and the victims
were not tribesmen, but captive enemies, purchased slaves, or great
criminals.

These two examples will serve as warning against the too general
acceptance of the custom and belief of savage and barbaric races, a