says a hymn to Ishtar.[24]
Of course every one sees that 'thy liver' is only a phrase for 'thy wrath;' the liver (as in our phrases 'pluck' and 'lily-livered') being taken for the seat of the 'pluck' of men. It is manifest that the Babylonian gods are not dead but living, otherwise they could not attend the yearly divine assembly, nor could they be addressed in prayer. Moreover, if they could only be kept alive by yearly sacrificing their human vehicles, great holocausts of human vehicles would have been needed every year: one man for one god, and their name was legion.
Once more, if men believed that gods could die, unless kept alive by sacrifices of their human vehicles, we must say of the Greeks that they
did not striveOfficiously to keep alive
their deities. Had the Greeks known that this was in their power to do, then Apollo, Dionysus, Cronos, Zeus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares had not died. Yet die they did, if the graves of each of these mortals prove the prevailing belief in their decease.[25]Mankind, according to Mr. Frazer, believed in 'mighty beings,' 'who breathed into man's nostrils and made him live.' He implored them 'to bring his immortal spirit ... to some happier world ... where he might rest with them,' and so on.[26]Yet, 'lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposed the gods to be mortal like himself.' Mr. Frazer has, we see, also told us that they did not believe their gods to be mortal. Probably, then, the belief in their immortality was a late stage in a gradual process.[27]Yet it had not prevailed when the grave of Zeus was shown 'about the beginning of our era.'[28]Man, then, believed that he could keep one out of the crowd of gods alive (though he implored them to keephimalive) by sacrificing his rightful king once a year, thereby overthrowing dynasty after dynasty, and upsetting the whole organisation of the state. All this we must steadfastly believe, before we can accept Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the Nicene Creed. It is a large preliminary demand.
The gods keep on being 'immortals,' and this we must insist on, in view of Mr. Frazer's theory that man-gods who are slain are slain to keep alive the god whois incarnate in them, of which he does not give one example. His instances of beliefs that the high gods are dead notoriously contradict the prevalent belief that they are deathless. And the prevalent belief regulates religion.
However, man-gods certainly die, and some South Sea Islanders—by a scientific experiment—demonstrated that Captain Cook was no god, because he died when stabbed, which a genuine god would not have done. This, of course, proves that these benighted heathen knew the difference between an immortal god and a deathly man as well as did Anchises in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite.
Peoples who think that all the luck depends on their king-man-god (the second sort, the superior sorcerer, with no god in him) hold, we are to believe, that his luck and cosmic influence wane with his waning forces. Therefore they kill him, and get a more vigorous recipient of hissoul(not of a god) and of his luck.[29]Of king-killing for this reason Mr. Eraser gives, I think, one adequate example. Of the transmission of the soul of the slain divinity to his successor he 'has no direct proof,' though souls of incarnating gods are transmitted after natural deaths.[30]
Now this is a very important part of the long-drawn argument which is to suggest that Christ died as a mock-king, who also represented a god. First, we have seen that there are two kinds of man-god. In one kind a real god, 'of an order different from and superior to man,' is supposed to become incarnate. The other kind of man-god is only a superior 'sensitive' and sorcerer.[31]
Now Jesus, by Mr. Frazer's theory, died as representative of a god, therefore as one of the first two kinds of man-gods. But Mr. Frazer does not here, as I said, produce one solitary example of a man-god proved to be of the first class—a king in whom an acknowledged god is incarnate—being slain to prevent his inspiring god from waning with the man's waning energies.[32]Many examples of that practice are needed by the argument. I repeat that not one example is produced in this place. Mr. Frazer's entire argument depends on his announced failure to 'insist on' the distinction between two sorts of man-gods which he himself has drawn.[33]So I keep on insisting.
Again, it can hardly be said that any examples are produced of a king of the second sort (a man-god who is really no god at all, but a 'sensitive,' sorcerer, or magic-man) being slain to preserve the vigour of his magic. The examples to be cited all but universally give no proof of the idea of preserving man'smagicalvigour from the decay of old age.
The cases given, as a rule, are mere instances of superannuation. It is possible (would that it were easy) to pension off aged professors in the Scottish Universities. But to pension off a king merely means a series of civil wars. The early middle ages 'tonsured' weak kings. How tempting to represent this dedication of them to God as a mitigation of sacrifice! Kings, in fact, among some barbaric races, are slain merely by way of superannuation. Nay, the practice is not confined to kings. It is usual among elderly subjects.[34]
Let us take Mr. Frazer's examples.[35]
1. A Congo people believe that the world would perish if their chitome, or pontiff, died a natural death. So he was clubbed or strangled by his successor. But what god is incarnate in the chitome? None is mentioned.[36]The king himself 'is regarded as a god in earth, and all powerful in heaven.'
2. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods, but were ordered to die by the priests, on the authority of an alleged oracle of the gods, 'whenever the priests chose.' That they first showed any signs of decay 'we may conjecture.'[37]We have no evidence except that the priests put an end to the king 'whenever they chose.' And, far from alleging the king's decay or bad crops as the regular recognised reason, they alleged a special oracle of the gods.
3. When the King of Unyoro, in Central Africa, is old, or very ill, hiswiveskill him (an obvious reason readily occurs: it is the wives, not a god, who need a more spirited person), alleging an old prophecy that the throne will pass from the dynasty if the king dies a natural death. But it is not here shown that this king is a man-god of either species; and the prophecy does not concern injury to a god, or to magicalrapport.[38]
4. The King of Kibanga, on the upper Congo, is killed by sorcerers when he 'seems near his end.' So are old dogs and cats and horses in this country, and peasants are even thought to provide euthanasia for kinsfolk 'near their end.' If the King of Kibanga is a man-god, Mr. Frazer does not say so.
5. If wounded in war the King of Gingero is killed by his comrades or kinsfolk, even if he be reluctant. The reason alleged is 'that he may not die by the hands of hisenemies.' Did Saul, Brutus, and many other warriors who refuse to survive wounds and defeat die as man-gods? Is the King of Gingero a man-god?
6. Chaka, King of the Zulus, used hair-dye, having a great aversion to grey hairs. The Zulus, a warlike people, would not elect, or accept, a greyhaired king, and, though I know no instance of slaying a Zulu king because he was old, Mr. Isaacs (1836) says that grey hair is 'always followed by the death of the monarch.' Even if an historical example were given, a warlike race merely superannuates a disabled war-leader in the only safe way.
7. At last we reach a king-man-god in Sofala, who, according to Dos Santos, was the only god of the Caffres, and was implored to give good weather.[39]A modern Zulu told Dr. Callaway that 'when people say the heaven is the chief's they do not believe what they say.'[40]The Sofalese, or rather their neighbours, were perhaps more credulous; and it appears to have been a custom or law among them that a blemished king should kill himself, though a reforming prince denounced this as insanity, and altered the law. We are told that the king-god of the Sofalese was under this law, and a neighbouring king (who is nowhere said to have been a man-god) was. But what god, if any, was incarnate in this man-god, if hewasa man-god, like his neighbour?[41]
8. The Spartans were warned by an oracle against a lame king, as the Mackenzies were warned by the Brahan seer against a set of physically blemished lairds. The seer's prophecy was fulfilled.[42]We do not hear that the Spartans Killed any lame king.
9. The King of the Eyeos is warned to kill himself, warned by a gift of parrot's eggs, 'when the people have conceived an opinion of his ill-government.' His wives strangle him, and his son succeeds, or did so before 1774, when the King refused to die at the request of his ministers. To make a case, it must be shown that the king was a man-god of one or other variety. He is, in fact, merely king while popular, 'holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he merits the approval of his people.'
10. The old Prussians were governed by a king called God's Mouth. 'If he wanted to leave a good name behind,' when weak and ill he burned himself to death, in front of a holy oak.
11. In Quilacare, in Southern India, the king cut himself to pieces, before an idol, after a twelve years' reign. We are not told that he was an incarnation of the god, if any, incorporated in, or represented by, the idol.
12. The King of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, used to cut his throat in public after a twelve years' reign. About 1680-1700 this was commuted. If any man could cut his way through 30,000 or 40,000 guardsmen, to kill the king, he succeeded. Three men tried, but numbers over-powered them. Other examples are given in which everyregicide might become king, if he could, like Macbeth. It was held, at Passier, that God would not allow the king to be killed if he did not richly deserve it. These kings are not said to incarnate gods.
13. Ibn Batuta once saw a man throw a rope into the air, and climb up it. Another man followed and cut the first to pieces, which fell on the ground, were reunited, and no harm done. This veracious traveller also saw a man, at Java, kill himself for love of the Sultan, thereby securing liberal pensions for his family, as his father and grandfather had done before him. 'We may conjecture that formerly the Sultans of Java, like the Kings of Quilacare and Calicut, were bound to cut their own throats at the end of a fixed term of years,'[43]but that they deputed the duty to one certain family. Wemayconjecture, but, considering the lack of evidence, and the stories that Ibn Batuta freely tells, I doubt! Ibn, at the Court of Delhi, saw cups and dishes I at a wish appear, and at a wish retire.' Did the Sultan of Java incarnate a god?
14. This case is so extremely involved and hypothetical (it concerns Sparta, where I never heard that the king was a man-god) that the reader must be referred to the original.[44]
Meanwhile the list of instances is numerically respectable. But are the instances to the point? Do they prove a practice of killing a royal man-god, for the purpose of helping a god incarnate in him, or even of preventing his magical power (ormana, in New Zealand) from waning? They rather prove regicide as a form of superannuation, or as the result of the machinations of priests, or of public discontent. Above all, they do not demonstrate that the king is ever killed as an incarnation of a deity who needs a sturdier person to be incarnate in.
So recalcitrant is the evidence, that of all Mr. Frazer's kings who are here said to be gods, or to incarnate gods, not one is here said to be put to death by his worshippers.[45]And of all his kings who are here said to be put to death, not one is here said to incarnate a god.[46]Such are the initial difficulties of the theory: to which we may add that elderly men are notoriously killed by many savages just because they are elderly, whether they are kings or commoners.
Mr. Frazer's point is that Christ died in 'a halo of divinity,' visible 'wherever men had heard the old, old story of the dying and rising god.'[47]But, apart from other objections already urged, Mr. Frazer's present instances do not contain one example of a 'dying and rising god,' stated to be represented by a living man who is therefore killed; even if there are one or two cases of a slain king who is a medicine-man, sorcerer, or cosmic sensitive. Thus the argument fails from the first. Christ is to be reckoned divine as representing a king who was killed as an incarnation of a god. But of regicide for this reason no proof is afforded, as far as I can see.
Next we arrive at an absolutely necessary hypothesis, which I find it difficult to accept. 'In some places it appears that the people could not trust the king to remain in full mental and bodily vigour for more than a year; hence at the end of a year's reign he was put to death, and a new king appointed to reign in his turn a year, and suffer death at the end of it.... When the time drew near for the king to be put to death (in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year'sreign), he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and suffered in his stead.'[48]
Later we read of 'the time when the real king used to redeem his own life by deputing his son to reign for a short time and die in his stead.'[49]
The hypothesis is, then, that at Babylon the king used to be sacrificed once a year. Later he appointed a son, or some other member of the royal family, or some one else, to die for him, while, last of all, a criminal was chosen.
Is not this a startling hypothesis? Yet on it the whole argument about the Divinity of Christ depends. Mr. Frazer overestimates human ambition. We wonder that Moray, Lennox, and Morton pined to be Regents of Scotland. Yet at least they had a faint chance of escaping death within the year. But the kings of Babylon had no chance: they were sacrificed annually. Mr. Frazer asks us to suppose that any men of royal race, anywhere, men free and noble, not captives, not condemned criminals, would accept a crown, followed, in 365 days, by a death of fire! A child knows that no men have ever acted in this way. Even if they were so incredibly unlike all other human beings as to choose a year's royalty, followed by burning to death, how was the succession regulated? Even the primitive Arunta, naked savages in Central Australia, have a kind of magistrate, merely a convener, called the Alatunja, 'the head man of a local totemic group.' He is an hereditary official, inheriting in the male line.[50]Does any one believe that a poor black man would accept the Alatunjaship if he knew he was to be roasted, and so die, at the end of a year? Now the Babylonians (orrather the Persians) were infinitely more civilised than the Arunta. Their kings were hereditary kings. How, then, would Mr. Frazer's system work? The king is sacrificed; his eldest son succeeds; is sacrificed next year; they soon work through the royal family. Thus, in Scotland, Darnley is sacrificed (1567). Next year you sacrifice the baby, James VI. Next year you begin on the Hamiltons. Chatelherault lasts a year: then Arran, then Lord John, then Lord Claude. Beginning in 1567 you work out that result in 1572. Then you start on the Lennox Stewarts. You have Lennox offered up in 1573, his son Charles in 1574, and by the end of the century you have exhausted the female and illegitimate branches of the royal family. You can only sacrifice males, and these must be adults, for each sacrificed man, by Mr. Frazer's theory, has to consort before his death with a lady, probably 'a sacred harlot.'[51]
Mr. Frazer perhaps will say 'these Babylonian kings were polygamous, and had large families of sons.' But think of the situation! When the king comes to providing a son as a substitute, to reign for a few days and be sacrificed in his stead, he may be a young king, just married. Even if he could count on a male baby, or a score of them, annually, they would be of no use: they could not consort with the sacred harlot, which is indispensable.[52]So, after the young king is sacrificed, we are in a quandary. We must overlook primogeniture, and begin sacrificing the king's brothers; they will not last long; we fall back on the cousins. Soon we need a new dynasty. Now no government could be carried on in the circumstances imagined by Mr. Frazer. The country would not stand it. No individual king would ever accept the crown. Human beings never had such apreposterous institution. But, if they had not, Mr. Frazer's whole theory of the Crucifixion is baseless, for it all hangs on the yearly sacrifice of the divine king in Babylon. Where there is no historical evidence of annual regicide, we must appeal to our general knowledge of human nature. The reply is that the thing is impossible. Moreover, that sacrifice is wholly without evidence.
The only reason for believing that the kings of the great Babylonian Empire, or even the kings of Babylon when it may have been a small autonomous town, were sacrificed once a year, is the faint testimony existing to show that once a year at a Persian feast a mock-king was hanged. To account for thathangingMr. Frazer has to invent the hypothesis that real kings, in olden times, were annuallysacrificed. The only corroboration of actual fact is in the savage instances of king killing,notannual, which we have explained as, in most cases, a rude form of superannuation; in no case as certainly the deliverance of a recognised god incarnate in the king There are also instances in folklore of yearly mock executions of a king of the May, or the like, and a dubious case in Lower Mœsia. These do not prove annual sacrifices of actual kings in the past, if they prove any sacrifice at all. In these circumstances, I venture to hold, science requires us, if we must explain the alleged yearly hanging of a mock-king at Babylon, to look for a theory, an hypothesis, which does not contradict all that we know of human nature. For all of human nature that we know is contradicted by the fancy that the kings of Babylon were once sacrificed annually. I shall later produce a theory which, at least, does not run counter to the very nature of man, and so far is legitimate and scientific.
Mr. Frazer says that his theory 'will hardly appear extravagant or improbable' when we remember that, in Ngoio, the chief who puts on the cap of royalty one day is, by the rule, killed the next day.[53]So nobody puts on the cap. And nobody would have put on the Babylonian crown under the condition of being roasted to death at the end of the year.
If the theory were correct, the king incarnating a god would be slain yearly. But he would not like that, and would procure a substitute, who would yearly be slain (a) as a proxy of the king, or (b) as the god of vegetation, incarnate in the king, or as both. Yet, I repeat, not a single instance has been given of a king who is slain for magico-religious reasons, and who is also the incarnation of any god whatever. The slain kings in the instances produced were, as a rule, superannuated because they were old, or got rid of because they were unpopular, or because a clerical cabal desired their destruction, or for some other reason: at most, and rarely, because they were outworn 'sensitives.' We know scores of cases of god-possessed men, but none are killed because they are god-possessed.
The argument has thus made no approach to Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the belief in the divine character of Christ and of his doctrine.
At this point Mr. Frazer's theory turns from god-mankings slain to preserve theirmana, or cosmicrapport, to persons who suffer for these kings. Not one single historical proof that there ever was such a custom is adduced. All is a matter of inference and conjecture. There is, we saw, a region Ngoio, in Congo, where the throne is perpetually vacant, because whoever occupied it was killed the day after coronation day—no substituteis suggested, and no one sits in the Siege Perilous.[54]There are cases of 'temporary kings,' as King February, for three days in Cambodia—the temporary king being of a cadet branch of the royal family. He is not killed. In Siam a temporary king for three days conducted aquête,or jocular pillaging, like our Robin Hood in Scotland. This is an example of thePeriod of Licencewhen law is in abeyance, and the importance of this period we shall later prove. The mock-king also ploughed nine furrows, and stood later with his right foot on his left knee. He did the same thing on a later occasion, and omens were drawn from his steadiness; he was supposed, if firm, to conquer evil spirits, and had anotherquête. In Upper Egypt a king of unreason for three days holds mock tribunals, then is condemned, and his 'shell' is burned; probably, as I shall show, to mean that 'the gambol has been shown' and is over.[55]There are two or three similar cases, and Mr. Frazer suggests that the mock-king is invested with the 'divine or magical functions' of the real king. But the local Pacha, on the Nile, has no such functions, and his august representative wears 'a tall fool's cap.' None are put to death: the Upper Egyptian case alone and dimly, if at all, suggests the proxy supposed (as in Ibn Batuta's tale interpreted by Mr. Frazer) to die for the king.
Next we approach instances of sons of kings who are sacrificed, but these are cases of sin offerings (as when the King of Moab sacrificed his son on the wall), and, even if the lads were substitutes for their royal fathers, there is no presumption raised that the fathers were habitually killed year by year, to keep their cosmicrapportunimpaired, or to release the god incarnate within them, a custom of which I find no example at all.
One instance of what he conjectures to be a proxy sacrifice for a king Mr. Frazer finds in a festival at Babylon called the Sacæa.[56]To this we return in due order. We must first examine cases of similar customs, or inferred customs, in Greece and Borne.
Meanwhile we hope to have shown that Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the belief in the Divinity of Christ already rests on three scarcely legitimate hypotheses. First, there is the hypothesis that kings were slain to release a known deity, incarnate in them, and to provide a better human vehicle. Of this rite no instances were given. Next, there is the hypothesis that the King of Babylon was annually sacrificed, and succeeded by a new king, who was sacrificed at the end of the year. Historical evidence does not exist, and the supposed custom is beyond belief. Thirdly, we are to believe in proxies or substitutes who die annually for the king. Of this practice no actual example is adduced.
Here, perhaps, the reader may be invited to ask himself whether he believes that there ever was, anywhere, a custom of yearly killing the king, the head of the state. If he cannot believe this, in the entire lack of proof, he may admire the faith which can move this mountain in the interests of Mr. Frazer's conclusions. For my part I may say that I was so hypnotised, after first reading through the long roll of Mr. Frazer's 'sad stories of the deaths of kings,' that I could only murmur 'But there is no historical evidence for the yearly Babylonian, or rather Persian, regicides.' Then I woke out of the hypnotic trance; I shook off the drowsy spell of suggestion, and exclaimed 'The king is killedannually!' Next, I asked myself whether mortal men would take the crown, and how the arrangement wouldwork, and, alas! it was my belief in Mr. Frazer's theory that was shattered.
But the 'general reader,' perusing an argument of 1,400 pages, may fall under the hypnotic spell of numerous 'cases,' though none are to the point, and may accept an hypothesis, however violently opposed to his knowledge of human nature. To that test we are, in a case like this, compelled to appeal, however little we may value 'common sense' in other fields of speculation. Ours is the field of normal human nature, motive, and action, in which every man may be a judge. I cannot but think that the author of the theory would have been stopped by considerations so obvious and obstacles so insuperable. But first he had the remote analogy of the Aztec war-prisoner who personated a god, and to a god was sacrificed. That example is of no real service: the man was a captive and could not help himself; he was not King of Anahuac. Moreover, he was sacrificed: he was not put to a death of special shame. Again, there was the Saturnian victim, if we believe the legend about to be narrated. But he too was sacrificed: he was not stripped, scourged, and hanged. Our author, however, was fascinated by the Cross at the end of the long vista of the argument. In place, therefore, of seeking, or at least in place of finding, a simple explanation of the Persian custom, or leaving it unexplained, he accepted the impossibility of the annual regicide at Babylon, and was launched into a new wilderness of conjectures and inferences to explain the absence, in the Persian case, of sacrifice and religion, the presence of a merrymaking and a hanging.
We are next to look for an historical case of the yearly sacrifice, not of a king, but of a mock-king. The argument thus carries us to the Roman feast of the Saturnalia. This festival (in late times held in December, 16-23) so closely resembled our Christmas in jollity, that Pliny (like some of us) used to withdraw to the most retired room in his Laurentine villa to escape the noise. Mr. Frazer does not remark the circumstance, but in Rome before the Empire, or earlier, the Saturnalia seem to have been a feast of one day only. 'Among our ancestors,' says Macrobius, 'the Saturnalia were completed in a single day,' though he does not seem very certain of his fact. Livy says: 'The Saturnalia were instituted as a festal day.'[57]After the time of Caligula, the Saturnalia endured for five days, 'precisely like the feast of the Sacæa at Babylon,' of which we are fated to hear a great deal.[58]
It would thus appear that the Saturnalia were originally a feast of one day, later lengthened to five days, and again to seven days. By the time of writers like Lucian and Martial the feast continued for a week, and Lucian represents Cronos (Saturn) as a jolly old king of unreason.[59]The rich helped the poor, people made presents to each other, 'a Christmas carol philosophy,' as Dickens calls it, prevailed. The masters served the slaves at table; all was licence and riot. Wax candles were given as presents (cerea), like those on our Christmas trees. Thesecerea, according to Macrobius, were thoughtby some antiquaries to be substitutes for human sacrifices. Originally, it was said, the Pelasgi, before migrating to Italy, received an oracle from Dodona:
Τῷ πατρί πέμπετε Φῶτα
'Send a man to the Father,' that is, to the god Cronos or, in Italy, Saturn. But, by a pun on the GreekΦῶτα, they were induced to substitute lights, the wax candles.[60]
Now it is a really astonishing thing that, if actual human sacrifices were offered after our era, at the Saturnalia, no Roman antiquary (and there were plenty of antiquaries) should mention the fact, while discussing the theory thatcereawere commutations of sacrifice. If, now and then, under the Empire a survival or recrudescence of human sacrifice was heard of in a rural district, the antiquaries would catch at it greedily, as a proof that wax tapers really were commutations of human sacrifice, which some doubted. That rural recrudescences do occur we know from the recent case of burning an Irish peasant woman to death, to deliver her from a fairy.[61]
Mr. Frazer, however, believes that survivals of human sacrifices at the Saturnalia did really occur. He is 'tempted to surmise' that the king of the revels (who answered to our 'Twelfth Night' 'King' or 'Queen of the Bean') 'may have originally personated Saturn himself.'[62]In the following page we read that the victim 'cut his own throat on the altar of the god whom he personated.' The only known or alleged instance of human sacrifice at the Saturnalia follows.
In A.D. 303, when the persecution under Diocletian began, one Dasius, a Christian soldier, in Lower Mœsia, is said to have been the victim whom the soldiers yearlychose for the mock-king of amonth, not a week, the Saturn of the occasion. Why a month, if the ancient feast lasted but a day, and, later, but a week? After being a merry monarch for thirty days, he should have cut his own throat at the altar of Saturn (Κρόνος, in the Greek MSS.).[63]Dasius declined the crown and was knocked on the head, on November 20, by a soldier, apparently a christened man, named John. The Saturnalia at Rome lasted (at least under the Empire) from December 16 to December 23. Dasius must have been executed for his refusal, announced before hismonth'sreign (only a week is elsewhere known) should have begun—on November 23; if the regnal month ended on December 23. Thus the festive Saturnalian kings at Rome may be guessed to descend from a custom, at Rome unknown, but surviving among the soldiers, of killing a mock-king Saturnus. Dasius was no slave or criminal, but himself a soldier. The revels of a month, in place of a day or a week, must also, one presumes, be a survival, though a day was the early limit. The date of the MSS. about Dasius Mr. Frazer does not give, but he thinks that the longest MS. is 'probably based on official documents.' To the MSS. I shall return.
The grotesque figure of Carnival, destroyed at the end of a modern Roman feast which does not fall in December, is also a survival of a slain mock-king 'who personated Saturn,' so Mr. Frazer suggests, though in ancient Rome even this carnival practice is to us unknown.[64]
It will already have been observed that even if the Romans were, in some remote age, wont yearly to sacrifice a mock-king who represented a god, they did not do so at Easter, as in the case of Christ, did not do so in spring, and did not scourge the victim. Their rite, if it reallycorresponded to that of the soldiers who slew Dasius, began in November, and ended in December, lasting thirty days, or,teste Macrobio, originally lasting one day. If the slaying of Dasius really occurred, and was a survival of a custom once prevalent (as in ancient Anahuac), then the early Saturnalia lasted for a month, from November 23 to December 23; but Roman antiquaries knew nothing of this. The month date is remote indeed from Easter, so Mr. Frazer must try to show that originally the Saturnalia were a spring festival, like carnival.
To make the carnival and Saturnalia coincide, Mr. Frazer points out that 'if the Saturnalia, like many other seasons of licence, was always observed at the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one, it must, like the carnival, have been originally held in February or March, at the time when March was the first month of the Roman year.'[65]Thus, in conservative rural districts, the Saturnalia would continue to be held in February, not, as at Rome, in December, though Roman writers do not tell us so, and though non-Roman pagan peoples held festival at the winter solstice. The soldiers who killed poor Dasius were ultra-conservative, but they killed him in November, when their month of Saturnalia began, not in February, when, as they held by old usage, their Saturnalia should have been kept. The hypothesis may be stated thus:
1. In rural districts 'the older and sterner practice' of murder may long have survived.[66]
2. In rural districts the Saturnalia continued to be held in February-March, not in December.[67]
3. Therefore the soldiers, who kept up 'the older and sterner practice' of remote districts where the Saturnalia fell in February-March, killed Dasius—in November!
4. Meanwhile, so wedded were the rural districts to Saturnalia in February-March, that the feast continued in these months under the Church and became our carnival.
5. The eclectic soldiers in Lower Mœsia kept up theoldkilling and full month of revelry (though we never hear of a full month in older or later Rome), but they accepted thenewdate, November (not kept in Rome) and December; though in their remote rural homes the Saturnalia were in February-March. Doubtless their officers insisted on the new official date, while permitting the old month of revel and the human sacrifice. Yet, apparently, of old there was but one day of revel.
But is the story of St. Dasius a true story? The editor and discoverer of the Greek text in which the legend occurs at full length, Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent, at first held that as far as the sacrifice of the military mock-king goes the story is false. I have already observed that Mr. Frazer says nothing about the date of the Greek MS. containing the longest legend of Dasius. M. Cumont does. The MS. is of the eleventh century of our era, and the original narrative, he thinks, was done into Greek out of the Latin, which may have been based on official documents, before the end of the seventh century[68]A.D., by some one who knew Latin ill, wrote execrable Greek, did not understand his subject, and was far from scrupulous. These sentiments of M. Cumont 'set in a new and lurid light'—as Mr. Frazer says of something else—-the only evidence for the yearly military sacrifice of a mock-king of the Saturnalia. Our author was unscrupulous, for he makes Dasius profess the Nicene Creedbefore it was made. As to the thirty days' revel, M. Cumont supposesthatto be a blunder of our author, who did not know that the Saturnalia only occupied a week.[69]M. Cumont held that the king of the feast had not to slay himself, but only to sacrifice to Saturn; in fact, Bassus, his commanding officer, does ask him, in the legend, to 'sacrifice to our gods, whom even the barbarians worship.' Dasius, the MS. says, refused, and was knocked on the head by a soldier named John. 'John' was likely to be a Christian, and M. Cumont suggests that the ignorant translator of the Latin took 'sepultus est' ('he was buried' by a soldier named John) for 'pulsus,' or 'depulsus est,' 'he was knocked on the head' (ἐκρούσθη.) In fact the Greek translator of the seventh century retouched his Latin originalà plaisir. Human sacrifices, says M. Cumont, had been abolished since Hadrian's time. The soldiers, if they sacrificed a mock-king, broke an imperial edict.[70]
Our evidence then would seem, if M. Cumont is right, to be that of an unfaithful and not very scrupulous translator and embellisher of a Latin text. He informs us by the way that similar noisy performances went on in his own Christian period, not in December, but on New Year's Day. The Saturnalia were thus pushed on a week from December 23; we do not learn that they were transferred to, or retained at, February-March. The moral lesson of the legend is that we must not be noisy on New Year's Day.
Thus M. Cumont did not at first accept the evidencefor the annual sacrifice of a mock-king representing the god Saturn. But M. Parmentier suggested that an old cruel rite might have been introduced by Oriental soldiers into Mœsia (303 A.D.) thanks to the licensed ferocity of the persecutions under Diocletian. The victim, Dasius, was a Christian, and the author of his legend told the tale to illustrate the sin of revelry on New Year's Day. But what led to the revival of the cruelty? M. Parmentier quoted the story of our Babylonian festival, the Sacæa, in which a mock-king was scourged and slain. This or a similar rite the Roman legions finally confused with their own Saturnalia, both as to date and as to characteristics. The Oriental soldiers of the Roman Empire imported into the army this Oriental feast and sacrifice: just as they brought monuments of Mithra-worship into Mœsia. In an hour of military licence and of persecution, the cohorts in Mœsia may actually have tried to sacrifice a Christian private as a representative of King Saturn.
So far the sacrifice is an Asiatic importation, not a Roman survival. But M. Cumont, after reading M. Parmentier, returned from his disbelief in the veracity of the Dasius legend. He thought that the extension of the Saturnalia from one day to five days, after Caligula, might be due to an imitation introduced by Eastern slaves in Rome (an influential class) of the five days' feast of the Babylonian Sacæa. But thirty days, as in Mœsia, are not five days. He also inclined to accept the recently proposed identification of the Sacæa with a really old Babylonian feast calledZagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim, an identification which we shall later criticise. As to the imperial edict forbidding human sacrifice, M. Cumont now suggested that it had become a dead letter and impotent. In the general decadence of 303 monstrous cruelties flourished, and the Saturnalia were marked bygladiatorial combats. Thus, in remote Mœsia, the half Oriental soldiery might really sacrifice a Christian 'for the safety of his comrades under arms.'
So far the sacrifice of Dasius looks rather like a cruelty introduced into decadent Rome, and at the good-humoured Saturnalia, by Oriental legionaries, than like a Roman survival or recrudescence of a regular original feature of the Saturnalia. In any case the stripping and scourging of the Sacæan mock-king, his hanging, and his simulated resurrection (at which we shall find Mr. Frazer making a guess) are absent, while the date of the alleged transaction (November-December) does not tally with Purim, or Eastertide, or the date of the Sacæa. The duration of the Dasius feast, thirty days, is neither Roman nor Oriental. Thus, far from illuminating the Oriental practice, the rite reported in Mœsia does but make the problem more perplexing. The evidence has all the faults possible, and the conjecture that the Greek writer invented the sacrifice, to throw discredit on the New Year revels of his contemporaries, may be worth considering.
Perhaps I may hint that I think the historical evidence of the author of the Dasius legend so extremely dubious that I might have expected Mr. Frazer to offer a criticism of its character. The general reader can gather from the 'Golden Bough' no idea of the tenuity of the testimony, which, of course, is at once visible to readers of French and Greek. We address ourselves to scholars, and for scholars Mr. Frazer has provided the necessary citations, but my heart inclines to regard the needs of the general reader. (Cf. 'Man,' May 1901, No. 53.)
From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less, to Saturn in Rome, though howmuch of the resemblance is due to Roman varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February, nor March, but in July.[71]Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another hypothesis) wereoriginallyin February or March, though of this we have no proof. Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at the winter solstice.
As proof that the Attic feast of Cronos (supposed to answer to the Saturnalia) was originally in spring, not in July, Mr. Frazer writes: 'A cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronos by the Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March, and there are traces of a licence accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine jars,' in the month of flowers preceding.[72]It was a proper season for licence.
The possible meaning of the cake does not go for much, and Cronos is not Dionysus. There was a spring festival of Cronos at Olympia, and Aug. Mommsen thinks that the Athenian Cronos feast was originally vernal,though Athenian tradition thought it was a harvest feast.[73]
The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos, who certainly received many such offerings.
We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally with the June-July date of the Persian Sacæa, as given by Mr. Frazer (and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74]But in his third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sacæa æabout Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]
How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of licence like the Sacæa usually occur just after harvest, the real time of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76]But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sacæa in June-July. On the other hand,the conjecture that the Sacæa were vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.
We are still trying to find an historical case of a man who is sacrificed in the character of a god and a king. The argument next introduces us to the Sacæa at Babylon, when the mock-king was hanged, the Persian feast, which, as we saw, M. Parmentier, following Herr Meissner, is inclined to identify with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim.
This identification, this theory that Zakmuk, Sacæa, and the Jewish Purim are all the same feast, is essential to Mr. Frazer's theory. But, before his theory was published, Meyer, in the new volume of his 'History of Antiquity,' had declared that the identification is impossible, philologically and as a matter of fact (Geschichte des Alterthums). It would be interesting to know the meaning of the word Sacæa, orSacea, orSakia, which Hyde translates 'convivial drinking, drinking healths' (compotatio, propinatio).[77]We remember the Persian butler, called aSáki, in Omar Khayyam:
The eternalSákifrom the bowl has pouredMyriads of other bubbles, and will pour.
If the wine-pourer, theSáki, of Omar is etymologically connected with the Sakæa, or Sacæa, then the feast means a wine-party. The Greeks, however, connected the Sacæa with the Sacæ, an Oriental tribe of the great race stretching from the Black Sea to Dacia. Indeed, in Strabo's time, the feasters at the Sacæa dressed as Scythians(Sacæ) and drank, as Horace tells us that the Scythians were used to drink. This occurred at Zela, a town of Pontus, where a love goddess, in Persian Anaitis, of the type of the Babylonian Ishtar, was adored. Mr. Frazer even conjectures that her high priest, or a substitute, 'who played the King of the Sacæa,' was yearly sacrificed here, perhaps as Tammuz.[78]No record of the fact has reached us.
The interesting point about this derivation of Sacæa from the tribe of the Sacæ is that the festival was believed, says Strabo, to commemorate a great victory of the Persians over the Sacæ. In precisely the same way the Persian feast of the Magophonia was supposed to commemorate a victory over and massacre of the Magi.[79]Purim, again, was held to commemorate a triumph of the Jews over the Persians and a massacre of the Persians. In three cases, then, Sacæa, Magophonia, and Purim, a feast which was a secular drinking bout, preserve the memory of a bloody victory. I do not observe that Mr. Frazer notices this coincidence.
But manifestly this kind of feast is not a feast of the death of a mock-king, still less, if possible, a religious festival of the death and resurrection of a vernal god.[80]Yet there really was (if we accept rather poor evidence)nota sacrifice but an execution of a mock-king, a criminal, at the Sacæa, as held in Babylon. I quote our authorities. First comes Athenæus, who is writing about feasts of unreason, at which, in various regions, the slaves are waited upon by their masters.[81]He says nothing of the execution of a mock-king. He remarks: 'Berosus, in the first book of his "History of Babylon," says that on the sixteenth day of the month Lous there is a great festival celebrated at Babylon, which is calledSakeas, and it lasts five days;and during these days it is the custom for the masters to be under the orders of their slaves, and one of the slaves puts on a robe like the king's, being calledZoganes, and is master of the house. And Ctesias also mentions this festival in the second book of his "History of Persia."' (Ctesias nourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is about 200 B.C.)
Thus Athenæus is silent about the execution of a mock-king, though doubtless he had the book of Berosus before him. And Dio Chrysostom, who does speak of the execution, and he alone does so, says nothing about Berosus, or any other authority. I cite the observations of Dio Chrysostom. He puts them into the mouth of the cynic, Diogenes, who is lecturing Alexander the Great, to tame his pride; and who tells illustrative anecdotes, some of them absurd, much as Mr. Barlow was used to instruct Masters Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. Dio, then, makes Diogenes say that at the Sacæa 'they take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat him upon the king's throne, and give him the king's raiment, and let him lord it and drink, and run riot and use the king's concubines during these days, and no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip, and scourge, and crucify (or hang,ἐκρέμασαν) him.'[82]He dies, not as a victim, by sacrifice, but as a criminal, by a cruel and degrading form of capital punishment.[83]According to Dio any condemned criminal would serve the turn. But Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the profession of victim was hereditary.[84]
Such is the story which Dio makes Diogenes tell Alexander, in a humorous apologue against royal pride. 'You will soon be growing a crest like a cock,' says Diogenes in Dio's essay. I cannot think that evidence found only in a literarytour de force, and put into the mouth of a professed humourist, proves historically that the mock-king was actually hanged once a year, at a feast described by Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius, who never mention so strange an affair as the hanging. The reader will not find that Mr. Frazer suggests all these doubts. Indeed, the student who avoids footnotes will believe that the tale of the hanging is 'according to the historian Berosus, who, as a Babylonian priest, spoke with ample knowledge.'[85]
Now, granting that there really was a yearly execution at Babylon of a criminal, a mock-king, why was he put to death? We know what Mr. Frazer's theory needs. It needs historical examples of men who, by being sacrificed as victims, obtain a divine character, as representing the god to whom they are sacrificed. The theory also demands that these victims shall be arrayed and crowned as kings. It is desirable, too, that they should perish about our Eastertide, and that they should be supposed to rise again. The solitary example of a Saturnalian victim in Mœsia did not fulfil these conditions. He was arrayed as a king, indeed, and was sacrificed, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius; but he was not stripped and scourged, and he died, not at Easter, but in November: if he had not refused the part thrust on him he would have died in December. There was no word about his resurrection. It was found necessary to suggestthat originally the Saturnalian victim died in February-March, but this was not proved.
The other historical case, the mock-king of the Sacæa, also does not fulfil the conditions required. He is robed, and crowned, and scourged, but he is not sacrificed. We have no hint of a resurrection; none of a religious character attaching to the feast; none of a divine character attaching to the victim. The feast is traditionally a revel commemorative of a victory: the victim is a condemned criminal. As to the date of the death, Mr. Frazer has two contradictory theories. By the first (which is correct) the victim died probably in June-July (if not, certainly in September). By the second, the month date of the death is fixed (provisionally) in March-April. Let me add that, to suit Mr. Frazer's theory, the victim must not only have been divine at the origin of the institution, but must have been recognised as divine at the time of the Crucifixion of our Lord: otherwise our Lord's death, in the character of the victim, could lend him no 'halo of divinity.'