CHAPTER III

230Crowther and Taylor,Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, p. 344sq.

Dr. Frazer further mentions a custom which, according to Strabo, prevailed among the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus.231In the temple of the Moon they kept a number of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man thrust a sacred spear into his side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which the victim fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.232Dr. Frazer maintains that “the last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hand on the animal’s head.”233So it may be, although, in my opinion, the purificatory ceremony described by Strabo also allows of another interpretation. The victim was evidently held to be saturated with magic energy; this is commonly the case with men, or animals, or even inanimate things, that are offered in sacrifice, and in the present instance the man was regarded as holy already, long before he was slain. To stand on the corpse, then, might have been regarded as purifying in consequence of the benign virtue inherent in it, just as, according to Muhammedan notions, contact with a saint cures disease, not by transferring it to the saint, but by annihilating it or expelling it from the body of the patient. But whether the ceremony in question involved the idea of sin-transference or not, there is no indication that the sacrifice of the slave was of an expiatory character. The same may be said both of the Egyptian sacrifice of a bull, mentioned by Herodotus, and of the white dog sacrifice performed by the Iroquois. The Egyptians first invoked the god and slew the bull. They then cut off his head and flayed the body. Nextthey took the head, and heaped imprecations on it, praying that, if any evil was impending either over those who sacrificed or over the land of Egypt, it might be made to fall upon that head. And finally, they either sold the head to Greek traders or threw it into the river234—which shows that the real scapegoat, the head, was not regarded as a sacrifice to the god. Among the Iroquois, also, the victims were slain before the sins of the people were transferred to them. According to Hale’s and Morgan’s accounts of this rite, which have reference to different tribes of the Iroquois, no mention of sin-transference is made in the hymn which accompanied the sacrifice.235Only blessings were invoked. This was the beginning of the chant:—“Now we are about to offer this victim adorned for the sacrifice, in hope that the act will be pleasing and acceptable to the All-Ruler, and that he will so adorn his children, the red men, with his blessings, when they appear before him.”236Mr. Morgan even denies that the burning of the dog had the slightest connection with the sins of the people, and states that “in the religious system of the Iroquois, there is no recognition of the doctrine of atonement for sin, or of the absolution or forgiveness of sins.”237

231Frazer,op. cit.iii. 112sq.

232Strabo, xi. 4. 7.

233Frazer,op. cit.iii. 113.

234Herodotus, ii. 39.

235Hale, inAmerican Antiquarian, vii. 10sqq.Morgan,League of the Iroquois, p. 217sq.

236Hale,loc. cit.p. 10.

237Morgan,op. cit.p. 216.

I think we can see the reason why, in some cases, a sacrificial victim is used as scapegoat. The transference of sins or evils is not looked upon as a mere “natural” process, it can hardly be accomplished without the aid of mysterious, magic energy. Among the Berbers of Ait Zelṭn, in Southern Morocco, sick people used to visit a miracle-working wild olive-tree, growing in the immediate vicinity of the supposed grave of Sîdi Butlîla. They there relieve themselves of their complaints by tying a woollen string to one of its branches; in case of headache the patient previously winds the string three times round the top of his head, whilst, in case of fever, he spits on the string, and, when tying it to the tree, says, “I left my fever in thee, O wild olive-tree.” He believes that he may thus transfer his disease to this tree because there isbaraka, “benign virtue,” in it; he would not expect to be curedby tying the string to any ordinary tree. This illustrates a principle of probably world-wide application. In Morocco, and, I presume, in other countries where disease-transference is believed in, rags tied to a tree are a sure indication that the tree is regarded as holy. Similarly I venture to believe that the transference of sins and evils to a scapegoat is generally supposed to require magic aid of some kind or other. Among the Hebrews, it took place on the Day of Atonement only, and the act was performed by the high-priest.238Among the Iroquois, it was by “a kind of magic” that the sins of the people were worked into the white dogs;239and that the animals themselves were held to be charged with supernatural energy, appears from the fact that, according to one account, the ashes of the pyre on which one of them was burnt were “gathered up, carried through the village, and sprinkled at the door of every house.”240Considering, then, that sacrificial victims, owing to their close contact with the deities to whom they are offered, are held more or less sacred, the idea of employing them as scapegoats is certainly near at hand. But this does not make the sacrifice expiatory. In fact, I know of no instance of an expiatory sacrifice being connected with a ceremony of sin-transference. Hence the materialistic conception of sin hardly helps to explain the belief that the sins of a person may be atoned by another person being offered as a sacrifice to the offended god.

238Leviticus, xvi. 21.

239Seaver,op. cit.p. 160.

240Beauchamp,loc. cit.p. 239.

A sacrifice is expiatory if its object is to avert the supposed anger or indignation of a superhuman being from those on whose behalf it is offered. In various cases the offended god is thought to be appeased only by the death of a man. But it is not always necessary that the victim should be the actual offender. The death of a substitute may expiate his guilt. The expiatory sacrifice may be vicarious.

We shall see, in a subsequent chapter, that, as a generalrule, human victims are sacrificed for the purpose of saving the lives of the sacrificers: before the beginning of a battle or during a siege, previously to a dangerous sea-expedition, during epidemics, famines, or on other similar occasions, when murderous designs are attributed to some superhuman being on whose will the lives of men are supposed to depend. But these sacrifices are not always expiatory in nature. A god may desire to cause the death of men not only because he is offended, but because he delights in human flesh, or because he wants human attendants, or—no one knows exactly why. It is impossible to find out in each particular case whether the sacrifice is meant to be an expiation or not; it is not certain that the sacrificers know it themselves. Yet in many instances there can be no doubt that its object is to serve as a vicarious atonement.

In Eastern Central Africa, “if a freeman were to set fire to the grass or reeds beside a lake, and cause a great conflagration close to the chosen abode of the deity, he is liable to be offered up to the god that is thus annoyed,” but if he be the owner of many slaves he can easily redeem himself by offering one of them in his place.241The Ojibways, it is said, were once visited with an epidemic, which they regarded as a divine punishment sent them on account of their wickedness; and when all other efforts failed, “it was decided that the most beautiful girl of the tribe should enter a canoe, push into the channel just above the Sault, and throw away her paddle.”242In Bœotia, a drunken man having killed a priest of Dionysus Aegobolus, and a pestilence having broken out immediately after, the calamity was regarded as a judgment on the people for the sacrilege, and the oracle of Delphi ordered them to expiate it by sacrificing to the god a blooming boy.243In his work on the Jews, Philo of Byblus states that “it was the custom among the ancients in cases of great dangers, that the rulers of a city or a nation, in order to avert universal destruction, should give the dearest of their children to be killed as a ransom offered to avenging demons.”244The idea that sins could be expiated by the death of one whohad not deserved it, was familiar to the Hebrews. It was said that “the death of the righteous makes atonement.”245The passage in Isaiah liii. 12 was interpreted of Moses, who “poured out his soul unto death246and was numbered with the transgressors (the generation that died in the wilderness) and bare the sin of many “that he might atone for the sin of the golden calf.247Ezekiel suffered “that he might wipe out the transgressions of Israel.”248And of the Maccabaean martyrs it is said, “Having become as it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of those godly men and their atoning death, divine providence saved Israel which had before been evil entreated.”249In these cases, of course, there was no sacrifice in the proper sense of the term, but they obviously illustrate the same characteristic of the divine mind. In fact, the death of Christ, by which he atoned and obliterated the sins of all ages, was conceived as a sacrifice, or spoken of in sacrificial figures.250

241Macdonald,Africana, i. 96sq.

242Dorman,Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 208.

243Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.

244Eusebius,Praeparatio Evangelica, i. 10. 40 (Migne,Patrologia, Ser. Gr. xxi. 85).

245Moore, in Cheyne and Black,Encyclopaedia Biblica, iv. 4226.

246Exodus, xxxii. 32.

247Sōṭāh, 14 A, quoted by Moore,loc. cit.col. 4226.

248Sanhedrin, 39 A, quotedibid.col. 4226.

2494 Maccabaeans, xvii. 22, quotedibid.col. 4232.

250See Moore,loc. cit.col. 4229sqq.

It is said that, according to early ideas, “it did not essentially concern divine justice that the punishment of faults committed should fall precisely on the guilty; what did concern it was that it should fall on some one, that it should have its accomplishment.”251Men, we are told, could not fail to discern that a transgression produces suffering as its consequence, and, seeing this, they “associate suffering with the expiation of sin, and, in atoning for their transgressions, they mark their contrition by the suffering which they inflict vicariously on the victim. They argue thus: ‘I have broken a law of God. God exacts pain as a consequence of such a breach. I will therefore slay this lamb, and its sufferings shall make the atonement requisite.’”252But, so far as I can see, this interpretation of the idea of vicarious expiation is not supported by facts. The victim whose suffering or death is calculated to appease the wrathful god is not anybodyat random, whosoever he may be. He is a representative of the community which has incurred the anger of the god, and is accepted as a substitute on the principle of social solidarity. So, also, according to the Western Church, Christ discharged the punishment due to the sins of mankind and propitiated the justice of his Father, in his capacity of a man, as a representative of the human race; whereas in the East, where it was maintained that thedeitysuffered (though he suffered through the human nature which he had made his own), the idea of substitution could hardly take root, since, as Harnack remarks, “the dyingGod-man really represented no one.”253The Greek Church regarded the death of Christ as a ransom for mankind paid to the devil, and this doctrine was also accepted by the most important of the Western Fathers, although it flatly contradicted their own theory of atonement.254There can be no doubt that expiatory sacrifices are frequently offered as ransoms, in other words, that the god or demon is supposed to be appeased, not by the suffering of the victim, but by the gift. Among men it often occurs that the offended party is induced by some material compensation to desist from avenging the injury—in many societies such placability is even prescribed by custom,—and something similar is naturally believed to be the case with gods. From this point of view, of course, it is not necessary that the victim should be a person who is connected with the offender by ties of social solidarity, although he may still be regarded as in a way a substitute. He may be an alien or a slave; or animals or inanimate things may be offered to expiate the sins of men. Among the Dacotahs, “for the expiation of sins or crimes a sacrifice is made of some kind of an animal.”255Of the Melanesian sacrifices, says Dr. Codrington, “some are propitiatory, substituting an animal for the person who has offended.”256The Shánárs of Tinnevelly offer up agoat, a sheep, or a fowl, in order “to appease the angry demon, and induce him to remove the evil he has inflicted, or abstain from the infliction he may meditate.”257It would be almost absurd to suppose that in similar cases the suffering or death of the animal is looked upon in the light of a vicariouspunishment. Of the Hebrew sin-offering, Professor Kuenen aptly remarks:—258“According to the Israelite’s notion, Yahveh in his clemency permits the soul of the animal sacrificed to take the place of that of the sacrificer. No transfer of guilt to the animal sacrificed takes place: the blood of the latter is clean and remains so, as is evident from the very fact that this blood is put upon the altar; it is a token of mercy on Yahveh’s part that he accepts it…. Nor can it be asserted that the animal sacrificed undergoes the punishment in the place of the transgressor: this is said nowhere, and therefore, in any case, gives another, more sharply defined idea than that which the Israelite must have formed for himself; moreover, it is irreconcilable with the rule that the indigent may bring the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour as a sin-offering.”259It should also be noticed that a purifying effect was ascribed to contact with the victim’s blood: the high priest should put or sprinkle some blood upon the altar “and cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.”260

251Réville,Prolegomena of the History of Religions, p. 135.

252Baring-Gould,Origin and Development of Religious Belief, i. 387sq.

253Harnack,op. cit.iii. 312sqq.

254Ibid.iii. 307, 315 n. 2.

255Schoolcraft,Indian Tribes of the United States, ii. 196.

256Codrington,Melanesians, p. 127.

257Percival,Land of the Veda, p. 309sq.Cf.Caldwell,Tinnevelly Shánárs, p. 37.

258Kuenen,Religion of Israel, ii. 266sq.

259Leviticus, v. 11sqq.

260Ibid.xvi. 18sq.

To sum up:—The fact that punishments for offences are frequently inflicted, or are supposed to be inflicted, by men or gods upon individuals who have not committed those offences, is explicable from circumstances which in no way clash with our thesis that moral indignation is, in its essence, directed towards the assumed cause of inflicted pain. In many cases the victim, in accordance with the doctrine of collective responsibility, is punished because he is considered to be involved in the guilt—even when he is really innocent—or because he is regarded as a fairrepresentative of an offending community. In other cases, he is supposed to be polluted by a sin or a curse, owing to the contagious nature of sins and curses. The principle of social solidarity also accounts for the efficacy ascribed to vicarious expiatory sacrifices; but in many instances expiatory sacrifices only have the character of a ransom or bribe.

And whilst thus our thesis as to the true direction of moral indignation is not in the least invalidated by facts, apparently, but only apparently, contradictory, it is, on the other hand, strongly supported by the protest which the moral consciousness, when sufficiently guided by discrimination and sympathy, enters against the infliction of penal suffering upon the guiltless. Such a protest is heard from various quarters, both with reference to human justice and with reference to the resentment of gods.

Confucius taught that the vices of a father should not discredit a virtuous son.261Plato lays down the rule that “the disgrace and punishment of the father is not to be visited on the children”; on the contrary, he says, if the children of a criminal who has been punished capitally avoid the wrongs of their father, they shall have glory, and honourable mention shall be made of them, “as having nobly and manfully escaped out of evil into good.”262According to Roman law, “crimen vel poena paterna nullam maculam filio infligere potest.”263“Nothing,” says Seneca, “is more unjust than that any one should inherit the quarrels of his father.”264The Deuteronomist enjoins, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his ownsin.”265Lawgivers have been anxious to restrict the blood-feud to the actual culprit. The Koran forbids the avenger of blood to kill any other person than the manslayer himself.266In England, according to a law of Edmund, the feud was not to be prosecuted against the kindred of the slayer, unless they made his misdeed their own by harbouring him.267So, also, in Sweden, in the thirteenth century, the blood feud was limited by law to the guilty individual;268and we meet with a similar restriction in Slavonic law-books.269

261Lun Yü, vi. 4.Cf.Thâi-Shang4.

262Plato,Leges, ix. 854sqq.Plato makes an exception for those whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers have successively undergone the penalty of death: “Such persons the city shall send away with all their possessions to the city and country of their ancestors, retaining only and wholly their appointed lot” (ibid.ix. 856). But this enactment had no doubt a purely utilitarian foundation, the offspring of a thoroughly wicked family being considered a danger to the city.

263Digesta, xlviii. 19. 26.Cf.ibid.xlviii. 19. 20.

264Seneca,De ira, ii. 34.Cf.Cicero,De officiis, i. 25.

265Deuteronomy, xxiv. 16.Cf.2 Kingsxiv. 6.

266Koran, xvii. 35.

267Laws of Edmund, ii. 1.

268Nordström,Bidrag till den svenska samhälls-författningens historia, ii. 103, 334, 335, 399. Wilda,op. cit.p. 174.

269Kovalewsky,Coutume contemporaine, p. 248. In Montenegro it was enjoined by Daniel I. (Post,Anfänge des Staats- und Rechtsleben, p. 181).

Passing to the vengeance of gods: according to the Atharva-Veda, Agni, who forgives sin committed through folly and averts Varuna’s wrath, also frees from the consequence of a sin committed by a man’s father or mother.270Theognis asks, “How, O king of immortals, is it just that whoso is aloof from unrighteous deeds, holding no transgression, nor sinful oath, but being righteous, should suffer what is not just?”271According to Bion, the deity, in punishing the children of the wicked for their fathers’ crimes, is more ridiculous than a doctor administering a potion to a son or grandson for a father’s or grandfather’s disease.272The early Greek notion of an inherited curse was modified into the belief that the curse works through generations because the descendants each commit new acts of guilt.273The persons who prohibited the sons of such as had been proscribed by Sylla, from standing candidates for their fathers’ honours, and from being admitted into the senate, were supposed to have been punished by the gods for this injustice:—“In process of time,” says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “a blameless punishment, the avenger of their crimes, pursuedthem, by which they themselves were brought down from the greatest height of glory, to the lowest degree of obscurity; and none, even, of their race are now left, but women.”274Among the Hebrews, Jeremiah and Ezekiel broke with the old notion of divine vengeance. The law of individual responsibility, which had already previously been laid down as a principle of human justice, was to be extended to the sphere of religion.275“Every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.”276“The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.”277

270Atharva-Veda, v. 30. 4.Cf.Macdonell,Vedic Mythology, p. 98.

271Theognis, 743sqq.

272Plutarch,De sera numinis vindicta19.Cf.ibid.12; Cicero,De natura Deorum, iii. 38.

273Farnell,op. cit.i. 77. Maine,Ancient Law, p. 127.

274Dionysius of Halicarnassus,op. cit.viii. 80.

275Cf.Montefiore,op. cit.p. 220; Kuenen,op. cit.ii. 35sq.

276Jeremiah, xxxi. 30.

277Ezekiel, xviii. 20. For Talmudic views, see Deutsch,Literary Remains, p. 52.

ITwas said in the last chapter that moral disapproval is a sub-species of resentment, and that resentment is, in its essence, an aggressive attitude of mind towards an assumed cause of pain. It was shown that, in the course of mental evolution, the true direction of the hostile reaction involved in moral disapproval has become more apparent. We shall now see that, at the same time, its aggressive character has become more disguised.

This is evidenced by the changed opinion about anger and revenge which we meet at the higher stages of moral development. Retaliation is condemned, and forgiveness of injuries is laid down as a duty.

The rule that a person should be forbearing and kind to his enemy has no place in early ethics.

“Let those that speak evil of us perish. Let the enemy be clubbed, swept away, utterly destroyed, piled in heaps. Let their teeth be broken. May they fall headlong into a pit. Let us live, and let our enemies perish.” Such were the requests which generally concluded the prayers of the Fijians.1A savage would find nothing objectionable in them. On the contrary, he regards revenge as a duty,2and forgiveness of enemies as a sign of weakness, or cowardice, or want of honour.3Noris this opinion restricted to the savage world. In the Old Testament the spirit of vindictiveness pervades both the men and their god. The last thing with which David on his death-bed charged Solomon was to destroy an enemy whom he himself had spared.4Sirach counts among the nine causes of a man’s happiness to see the fall of his enemy.5The enemies of Yahveh can expect no mercy from him, but utter destruction is their lot.6To do good to a friend and to do harm to an enemy was a maxim of the ancient Scandinavians.7It was taken for a matter of course by popular opinion in Greece8and Rome. According to Aristotle, “it belongs to the courageous man never to be worsted”; to take revenge on a foe rather than to be reconciled is just, and therefore honourable.9Cicero defines a good man as a person “who serves whom he can, and injures none except when provoked by injury.”10Except in domestic life and in the case of friends, Professor Seeley observes, “people not only did not forgive their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor think better of themselves for having done so. That man considered himself fortunate who on his deathbed could say, in reviewing his past life, that no one had done more good to his friends or more mischief to his enemies. This was the celebrated felicity of Sulla; this the crown of Xenophon’s panegyric on Cyrus the Younger.”11

1Fison, quoted by Codrington,Melanesians, p. 147, n. 1.

2Seeinfra, onBlood-revenge.

3Cf.Domenech,Great Deserts of North America, ii. 97, 338, 438 (Dacotahs); Boas,First General Report on the Indians of British Columbia, p. 38; Baker,Albert N’yanzai. 240sq.(Latukas).

41 Kings, ii. 8sq.

5Ecclesiasticus, xxv. 7.

6Cf.Montefiore, Hibbert Lectures, p. 40.

7Maurer,Bekehrung des Norwegischen Stammes, ii. 154sq.

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