Other curious examples are reported from Africa. In Galam, {250}a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of a city, to make it impregnable; and I gather here that the sacrifice was periodically renewed, as we shall see it to have been in many other cases. In Great Bassam and Yarriba, similar sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village. Clearly the idea in these cases was to supply the site with a tutelary deity, a god whose existence was bound up with the place thus consecrated to him. He and the town henceforth were one; he was its soul, and it was his body. Human victims are said to have been buried “for spirit-watchers” under the gates of Mandelay. So too, according to legend, here a tolerably safe guide, a queen was drowned in a Burmese reservoir, to make the dyke safe; while the choice for such a purpose of a royal victim shows clearly the desirability of divine blood being present in the body of the future deity. When Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjaub, the foundation gave way so often that he consulted a soothsayer. The soothsayer advised that the blood of an only son should be shed on the spot; and the only son of a widow was accordingly killed there. I may add that the blood of “_an only-begotten son_” has always been held to possess peculiar efficacy. In Europe itself, not a few traces survive of such foundation-gods, or spirits of towns, town-walls, and houses. The Piets are said to have bathed their foundation-stones in human blood, especially in building their forts and castles. St. Columba himself, though nominally a Christian, did not scruple thus to secure the safety of his monastery. Columbkille said to his people, “‘It would be well for us that our roots should pass into the earth here.’ And he said to them, ‘It is permitted to you that some one of you go under the earth to consecrate it.’” St. Oran volunteered to accept the task, and was ever after honoured as the patron saint of the monastery. Here again it may be noted that the offering was voluntary. As late as 1463, when the broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired, {251}the peasants, being advised to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk (in which state he would of course be “full of the god”) and utilised him for the purpose. In 1885, on the restoration of Hols-worthy church in Devon, a skeleton with a mass of mortar plastered over the mouth was found embedded in an angle of the building. To make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother, and walled into the building. Again, when the church at Blex in Oldenburg was being built, the authorities of the village crossed the Weser, “bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built it alive into the foundations.” We shall see hereafter that “to be brought with a price” is a variant, as it were, on the voluntary