Construction sacrifice is a very common ritual among primitive tribes that survived until the late Middle Ages. His adherents were sure that if a person was bricked up in the foundation of a house under construction, then their home would be under reliable protection.
Scary ritual
In many countries of the world, legends about people walled up alive in the walls or foundations of houses are still alive. Myths and reality are so closely intertwined in them that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. However, archaeologists, who often come across human remains during the excavation of ancient structures, testify that the terrible legends are by no means a figment of the imagination of our distant ancestors.
Some peoples of Europe, America and Asia have long lived the belief that a person killed and buried at the base of the building will become the patron spirit of a house, castle or even an entire city and will protect its inhabitants for the next generations, and will also ensure the durability of the building itself.
Most often, children or women were chosen as victims, during the Middle Ages they were gradually replaced by animals, but sometimes there was enough human blood. Among the archaeological finds at the site of the dwellings of the ancient Slavs, skulls of bulls and horses were often found. Ethnographers believe that the tradition of installing "skates" on the roofs of houses is a kind of relic of the ritual of building sacrifices.
However, the practice of human sacrifice persisted for quite a long time. The most recent example of such a ritual was recorded in 1885 in Indochina. To “strengthen” the city of Mandalay, 52 people were immured alive under the gates and corner towers of the Kremlin.
Today, an echo of the construction sacrifice is the ritual, according to which, before entering a new house, a cat should be launched into it.
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Deceived Totem
The Russian ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin believed that construction sacrifice is a very ancient custom, which developed long before the practice of stone construction and the concept of rent. In his opinion, this custom was originally associated with primitive wooden buildings and was a kind of continuation of the totemic relationship of people to trees.
Some trees were considered to be totems of a clan or tribe and were inviolable. According to the legend, for breaking a taboo, the builder of a building or the first inhabitant of the house could become victims of a vengeful tree. To prevent the tragedy, sacrifices were made to the totem trees in advance - a child, a prisoner, a slave or an animal. The deceived totem was thus satisfied with the offering and stopped the pursuit.
Repeating the universe
The famous Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade sees in the ritual of making a construction sacrifice a symbolic repetition of the act of creation of the universe at the earthly level. Indeed, in many traditional Indo-European cultures, the human dwelling was likened to the universe.
Following this ritual, a construction sacrifice was laid in the center of the foundation of the house, which was equated to the roots of the world tree, and then, like the Universe, which in the mythological representation “unfolded” from a single beginning, the house “grew” from the victim's body.
“According to a whole group of myths, not only the Cosmos, but also edible plants, human races and even various social classes are born as a result of the sacrifice of the First Being, from his flesh,” Eliade writes. "It is on this type of cosmogonic myths that construction sacrifices are based."
Pack the bull
The custom of the construction sacrifice was equally assimilated by both primitive tribes and highly cultured peoples. It also took root in Christian Europe, which gave the clergy a reason to interpret it in their own way.
Thus, the Catholic theologian-ethnographer Johann Sepp wrote: "The eternal father made his own son the cornerstone of all creation in order to save the world from decay and through the death of an innocent to stop the furious onslaught of hellish forces." In the sacrifice when laying the foundation for the house, the Church saw an analogy with the Son of God, who laid the foundation of the building of the entire Christian world with the pain of the cross.
But, of course, the Christian Church opposed human sacrifice. For example, a collection of church rules and imperial decrees, compiled in Byzantium, read: “When building houses, it is customary to lay the human body as a foundation. Whoever puts a person in the foundation, the punishment is 12 years of church repentance and 300 bows. Put a boar or a bull or a goat in the foundation. Quite a mild punishment for homicide.
Let her perish for the whole city alone
Not only families or tribes, but also the inhabitants of the whole city often had a common patron spirit. To ensure the benevolence of such a spirit to all the townspeople, the Serbs, for example, practiced the custom of laying sacrifices in the city walls. They believed that not a single city would survive if, during the construction of fortifications, a living person, or at least his shadow, was not immured. That is why the western and southern Slavs always bypassed the house under construction, as they believed that if their shadow accidentally falls on the wall of the new building, then death will certainly overtake them.
One of the princes of the Radziwill family, apparently, believed in these legends, and therefore decided to immure a young couple in the constantly crumbling tower of the fortress wall of the city of Stock Exchange. As history has shown, the tower and the walls stood for a long time, protecting the city from enemy encroachments.
In ancient Japan, there was a ritual of hitobashira, according to which the victim (usually a mother with a baby) was walled up alive in one of the pillars of the future structure. It was believed that such a ceremony should protect the building in the event of an earthquake, military threats and other disasters. It is documented that in 1576 a blind peasant woman was walled up in the foundation of Maruoka Castle.
The guides of Nizhny Novgorod can also tell the chilling story of human sacrifice, when the young wife of a local merchant Grigory Lopata was buried alive in the foundation of one of the walls of the Novgorod Kremlin. “Let her perish for the whole city alone, we will not forget her in our prayers. Better to die alone, but behind a strong wall, we will be safe from enemies! - said the master burying the girl.
On someone's head
No less ancient is the belief that a sacrifice when laying a house saves its residents from imminent death. For example, in modern Greece, some believe that whoever walks first past a newly built building will die in the coming year. To save a person from a sad fate, masons kill a lamb or a black rooster.
In Russia, they also believed that a new building was being built "on someone's head": in it someone must soon die and thus "renew" the house. Therefore, before the first person enters the built house, the head of a chicken was cut off on the threshold, but its meat was not eaten. In the northern provinces, they did without victims, on the first night a rooster or a cat was launched into the house, and only then did the new settlers enter.
Choose a patron
Construction sacrifices were made not only to appease or invite a guardian spirit to the house, but also so that the victim itself would become the patron saint of the house. German philologist and ethnographer Paul Sartori wrote that "in the old days, when building houses, people were buried in the ground or walled up in walls, namely children - either as a victim of reconciliation, or in order to get an active defender of a new building."
But here it was important to observe one condition: the person being sacrificed had to go to the slaughter voluntarily. It is easy to guess that there were not many of them. In medieval Europe, builders often bought a child from a disadvantaged mother, hoping that he could act as such a voluntary sacrifice.
Ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin believed that the idea of the emergence of an "active guardian spirit" of a dwelling from a walled-up person is clearly associated with a primitive ideology, by virtue of which all those killed and generally perished by a premature and violent death continue their afterlife at the site of their unfortunate death or grave.
For well-being
If in Western Europe they preferred to use living beings as a construction sacrifice, then in the Russian tradition they most often did without bloodshed. Many such examples are given by the famous researcher of Slavic culture Alexander Afanasyev. In particular, he writes that "the peasant, before starting to lay the main links of the log house, buries several small coins and barley grains in the ground at the front corner so that neither bread nor money is transferred in the new house."
For prosperity and wealth of the house, a piece of wool or a handful of grain was usually placed at the corners of the first crown of logs, and a piece of bread, a pinch of salt and a particle of honey were placed at the base of the house. For the same purposes, when strengthening the mat, on which the ceiling was to be laid, a sheepskin coat turned out with fur was tied, a loaf of bread, a pie or a pot of porridge.
From the upper crown, the new settlers could scatter grain and hops, and in the front corner of the house - install a green branch: from the point of view of the Slavs, all these measures were supposed to ensure the health and well-being of all family members in their new home.