Again, {152}sacred wells and fountains were and are worshipped with just the same acts of sacrifice as ghosts and images. At Aphaca, the pilgrims cast into the holy pool, jewels of gold and silver, with webs of linen and other precious stuffs. A holy grove was an adjunct of the holy spring: in Greece, according to Botticher, they were seldom separated. At the annual fair of the Sacred Terebinth, or tree and well of Abraham at Mamre, the heathen visitors offered sacrifices beside the tree, and cast into the well libations of wine, with cakes, coins, myrrh, and incense: all of which we may compare with the Ostyak offerings to ancestral grave-stakes. At the holy waters of Karwa, bread, fruit, and other foods were laid beside the fountain. At Mecca, and at the Stygian Waters in the Syrian desert, similar gifts were cast into the holy source. In one of these instances at least we know that the holy well was associated with an actual burial; for at Aphaca, the holiest shrine of Syria, the tomb of the local Baal or god was shown beside the sacred fountain. “A buried god,” says Dr. Robertson Smith quaintly, in commenting on this fact, “is a god that dwells under ground.” It would be far truer and more philosophical to say that a god who dwells underground is a buried man. I need not recall the offerings to Cornish and Irish well-spirits, which have now degenerated for the most part into pins and needles. On the whole, though it is impossible to understand the entire genesis of sacred founts and rivers without previous consideration of deliberate god-making, a subject which I reserve for a later portion of our exposition, I do not think we shall go far wrong in supposing that the sacred well most often occurs in company with the sacred tree, the sacred stone or altar, and the sacred tomb; and that it owes its sanctity in the last resort, originally at least, to a burial by its side; though I do not doubt that this sanctity was in many cases kept up by the annual immolation of a fresh victim-god, of a type whose genesis will hereafter {153}detain us. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of the Semitic worship in general, “The usual natural symbols are a fountain or a tree, while the ordinary artificial symbol is a pillar or pile of stones: but very often all three are found together, and this was the rule in the more developed sanctuaries.” I cannot agree with him on the point of “symbolism”: but the collocation of objects is at least significant.