A similar sacred stone exists to this day at Bovey Tracey in Devon, of which Ormerod tells us that the mayor of Bovey used to ride round it on the first day of his tenure of office, and strike it with a stick,--which further explains Jack Cade’s proceeding. According to the Totnes Times of May 13, 1882, the young men of the town were compelled on the same day to kiss the magic stone and pledge allegiance in upholding the ancient rights and privileges of Bovey. (I owe these details to Mr. Lawrence Gomme’s Village Community.) I do not think we can dissociate from these two cases the other sacred stones of Britain, such as the King’s Stone at Kingston in Surrey, where several of the West Saxon kings were crowned; nor the Scone Stone in the coronation-chair at Westminster Abbey; nor the Stone of Clackmannan, and the sacred stones already mentioned in a previous chapter on which the heads of clans or of Irish septs succeeded to the chieftainship of their respective families. These may in part have been ancestral and sepulchral monuments: but it is probable that they also partook in part of this artificial and factitious sanctity. Certainly in some cases that sanctity was renewed by an animal sacrifice. With these fairly obvious instances I would also connect certain other statements which seem to me to have been hitherto misinterpreted. Thus Mesha, king of Moab, when he is close beleaguered, burns his son as a holocaust on the wall of the city. Is not this an offering to protect the wall by the deliberate manufacture of an additional deity? For straightway the besiegers seem to feel they are overpowered, and the siege is raised. Observe {260}here once more that it is the king’s own dearly-be-loved son who is chosen as victim. Again, at Amathus, human sacrifices were offered to Jupiter Hospes “before the gates”; and this Jupiter Hospes, as Ovid calls him, is the Amathusian Herakles or Malika, whose name, preserved for us by Hesychius, identifies him at once as a local deity similar to the Tyrian Melcarth. Was not this again, therefore, the Fortune of the city? At Tyre itself, the sepulchre of Herakles Melcarth was shown, where he was said to have been cremated. For among cremating peoples it was natural to burn, not slaughter, the yearly god-victim. At Tarsus, once more, there was an annual feast, at which a very fair pyre was erected, and the local Herakles or Baal was burned on it in effigy. We cannot doubt, I think, that this was a mitigation of an earlier human holocaust. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of this instance: “This annual commemoration of the death of the god in fire must have its origin in an older rite, in which the victim was not a mere effigy, but a theanthropic sacrifice, i.e., an actual man or sacred animal, whose life, according to the antique conception now familiar to us, was an embodiment of the divine-human life.” This is very near my own view on the subject.