The best known instances of such deliberate godmaking are those which refer to the foundation of cities, city walls, and houses. In such cases, a human victim is often sacrificed in order that his blood may be used as cement, {249}and his soul be built in to the very stones of the fabric. Thereafter he becomes the tutelary deity or “fortune” of the house or city. In many cases, the victim offers himself voluntarily for the purpose; frequently he is of kingly or divine ancestry. As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. In Polynesia, where we usually stand nearest to the very core of religion, Ellis heard that the central pillar of the temple at Mæva was planted upon the body of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed to death under the first post of a house. In October 1881, the king of Ashanti put fifty girls to death that their blood might be mixed with the “swish” or mud used in the repair of the royal buildings. Even in Japan, a couple of centuries since, when a great wall was to be built, “some wretched slave would offer himself as a foundation.” Observe in this instance the important fact that the immolation was purely voluntary. Mr. Tylor, it is true, treats most of these cases as though the victim were intended to appease the earth-demons, which is the natural interpretation for the elder school of thinkers to put upon such ceremonies; but those who have read Mr. Frazer and Mr. Baring Gould will know that the offering is really a piece of deliberate god-making. Many of the original witnesses, indeed, correctly report this intention on the part of the perpetrators; thus Mason was told by an eyewitness that at the building of the new city of Tavoy in Tennasserim “a criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon” or rather deity. So in Siam, when a new city gate was being erected, says Mr. Speth, officers seized the first four or eight people who passed, and buried them under it “as guardian angels.” And in Roumania a _stahic_ is defined as “the ghost of a person who has been immured in the walls of a building in order to make it more solid.” The Irish Banshee is doubtless of similar origin.