Hobie,

I just read about this. It was an article from a site that I felt was credible. I can't remember the name of the site. It is a well known Christian site and the woman who started it is famous... I just can't remember her name right now.

Part of the article went into Baal and the "grinning" sacrifices.

These are children that were thrown into the fires. As a human burns, the flesh is pulled back over the lips and the child looked like it was grinning.

Somewhere in the article it talked about the bones and ashes of the sacrifices being mixed in with the foundations of the new temples. Someone sent it to me, hopefully they will read this and send it again.

I just saw that I had "The Golden Bough" setting here on my desk. I looked in the index under sacrifices and found, "Sacrifices as foundations of buildings" P. 222

In modern Greece, when the foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to kill a cock, a ram or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone, under which the animal is afterwards buried.

The object of the sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the building. But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body, or a part of it, or his shadown, and buries the measure under the foundation-stone; or he lays the foundation-stone upon the man's shadow.

It is believed that the man will die within the year. The Roumanians of Transylvania think that he whose shadow is thus immured will dies within forty days; so persons passing by a building which is in course of erection may hear a whining cry, "Beware lest they take they shadow!"

Not long ago there were still shadow-traders whose business it was to provide architects with the shadows necessary for secruring their walls. In these cases the measure of the shadow is looked on as equivalent to the shadow itself, and to bury it is to bury the life or soul of the man, who, deprived of it, must die.

Thus, the custom is a substitute for the older practice of immuring a living person in the walls, or crushing him under the foundation-stone of a new building, in order to give strength and durability to the structure, or more definitely in order that the angry ghost may haunt the plane and guard it against the intrusion of enemies.

Rayelan