Magic and Religion

2. In the Aztec harvest festival a victim was crushed between two great stones (perhaps to represent the grinding of the maize?).

3. The Mexicans sacrificed young children, older children, and old men for each stage of the maize's growth. We are not told how they were sacrificed.[196 - G. B. i. 143.]

4. The Egyptians burned red-haired men, and scattered their ashes with winnowing fans. This burning is a usual feature of sacrifice, and is not hanging or crucifying.

5. The Skidi, or Wolf Pawnees, burned a victim to Ti-ra-wá, 'the power above that moves the universe, and controls all things,' but the victim was a deer or a buffalo. There were also occasional human sacrifices before sowing; the victim had his head cleft with a tomahawk, and was then riddled with arrows, and afterwards burned.[197 - Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories, pp. 362-369.] In some cases he was tied to a cross, before being slain with an axe.[198 - G. B., ii. 238.]

6. A Sioux girl was burned over a slow fire, and then shot with arrows. Her flesh, for magical purposes, was squeezed over the newly sown fields.

7. West African victims were killed with spades and hoes, and burned in newly tilled fields.

8. At Lagos a girl was impaled among sacrificed sheep, goats, yams, heads of maize, and plantains hung on stakes. Though impalement is a form of capital punishment, probably the girl's blood was expected to fertilise the earth. We have no proof that crucifixion was used in Babylon, or the same motive might be alleged for the mock-king at the Sacæa. 'It may be doubted whether crucifixion was an Oriental mode of punishment,' says Mr. Frazer. He does not say that it was an Oriental form of sacrifice.[199 - G. B. ii. 24, note 1.]

9. The Marimos kill and burn a human victim, and scatter the ashes on the ground to fertilise it.

10. The Bagolos hew a slave to pieces.

11. Some tribes in India chop victims up.

12. The Kudulu allow to a victim all the revels, women and all, of the Sacæan mock-king, and then cut a hole in him, and smear his blood over an idol. This is sacrifice, not capital punishment.

13. The Khonds slew their revered and god-like victim in a variety of ways, strangling him in a tree, burning, and chopping up, that his flesh might be sown on the fields. The head, bowels, and bones were burned.

Such are the examples of a real human victim slain for the good of the crops. In six out of fourteen cases the victim's ashes, blood, or flesh is used magically to fertilise the fields, and probably this is done in several other instances. In seven cases burning occurs. In two sacrifice to a god or idol occurs. In one only is the mode of death a recognised form of capital punishment.

Therefore Mr. Frazer does not seem to me to be justified in taking for and describing as 'sacrifice' the capital punishment inflicted at the Sacæa on a mock-king who notoriously was a criminal condemned to death, and who was hanged, not sacrificed.

To be sure Mr. Frazer tries to turn this point, and how? Perhaps ancient kings of Lydia were once burned alive on pyres, 'as living embodiments of their god.' For the Lydian, like the Macedonian and many other royal houses, claimed descent from Heracles, who, being on fire already under the shirt of Nessus, homeopathically burned himself. Crœsus, defeated, was about to die by fire, but not out of his own head. Cyrus was going to burn him alive, like Jeanne d'Arc, Cranmer, Wishart, and others. This cruel infliction by a foreign enemy hardly proves a Lydian custom, nor are Lydians exactly Babylonians. Again, if an old Prussian king 'wished to leave a good name behind him,' he burned himself before a holy oak. 'Crummies is not a Prussian,' nor were the kings of Babylon. Once more Movers thought that the 'divine pair who figured by deputy' at the Sacæa were Semiramis and Sandan or Sardanapalus. (Which divine pair, the king's proxy and one of the king's concubines, or the Tammuz man and the sacred harlot?) Sandan was thought to be Heracles by the Greeks, and his effigy was perhaps burned on a pyre at his festival in Tarsus. Now the Persians, according to Agathias, worshipped Sandes (Sandan), and perhaps the Babylonians did so also, though really that agreeable Byzantine minor poet, Agathias, cannot be called a good witness. Next, K. O. Müller thinks that Sandan (Sandes) may have been burned in a mystery play in Nineveh, Müller giving free licence to his fancy, as he admits. Movers, too, thought that 'at the Sacæa the Zoganes represented a god, and paired with a woman who personated a goddess.'[200 - G. B. iii. 167.] And Movers thinks that the Sacæan victim was originally burned.[201 - G. B. iii. 171.]

For these 'exquisite reasons,' that the Lydian monarchs claimed descent from Heracles, who was burned, that Cyrus wanted to burn Crœsus alive, that old Prussian kings who wished to leave a good name burned themselves, that Movers thought that Sandan or Sardanapalus might have figured at the Sacæa as Zoganes, that Agathias mentioned Sandes as a Babylonian deity, and that Movers thinks that the man who acted the god was burned, Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the mock-king of the Sacæa was burned, once upon a time.[202 - G. B. iii. 170, 171.] But we only know that he was scourged and hanged. So perhaps, Mr. Frazer suggests, he was both scourged, hanged, and burned afterwards, or perhaps hanging or crucifixion 'may have been a later mitigation of his sufferings' – a pretty mitigation! And why was flogging added?[203 - G. B. iii. 171.] One had liefer be burned, like a god and a king, than be first whipped and then crucified, as a malefactor of the lowest and most servile kind, losing, too, the necessary suggestion of sacrifice and divinity implied in being burned. Besides, apart from this theory of a cruel and debasing 'mitigation,' there is no evidence at all except what proves that the mock-king at the Sacæa was first stripped of his royal robes, then whipped, then hanged. If he dies as god or king, why is he stripped of his royal robes? The man was hanged, was capitally punished (which as a condemned criminal he richly deserved), and 'there is an end on't,' as Dr. Johnson rudely remarked. Now 'we must not forget' that Mr. Frazer has announced this I sacrifice 'of a divine king as his theory, but we need not, I may even say must not, accept the theory. Because, first, Mr. Frazer gives many examples of persons believed each to contain a god, either temporarily or permanently.[204 - G. B. i. 131-157.] But in not one single case is the person said to be killed for the benefit of the god whom he contains.

Secondly, there was historically no sacrifice in the case of the Sacæan mock-king.

The mock-king, then, if he has any divinity, has it not as a sacrifice, for he is not sacrificed; nor as representing a king who incarnates a god, for no kings or others thought to incarnate gods, whether temporarily or permanently, are proved to be slain for the benefit of that god. Nor are any kings who are actually slain, slain by hanging. The death of a man, as a god, belongs, if to anything, to quite another festival, that of Tammuz or Adonis, and to quite another set of ideas. We have no proof indeed that a man was ever hanged or sacrificed as an embodiment of Adonis or Tammuz. But Mr. Frazer's theory of the reason for the Crucifixion on Calvary demands the sacrifice of a human victim, who is, ex officio, a god, is sacrificed in that character, and is feigned to rise again. He must also be royal, to account for the scarlet robe and crown of thorns of the great victim.

II. STAGES IN MR. FRAZER'S THEORY

Let us now trace the stages of Mr. Frazer's theory that the Sacæan victim is both god and king.

1. First in order of statement comes the description of the Sacæa, combined from Athenæus, who mentions no victim, and Dio Chrysostom, who does. We learn (from Mr. Frazer, not from Dio)[205 - G. B. ii. 24-26.] that the victim 'dies in the king's stead.' But 'we must not forget that the king is slain in his character of a god, his death and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people and the world.'

That is Mr. Frazer's theory: we have seen no proof of it, we have remarked that sacrificed victims are not hanged; that kings are not scourged; that there is no evidence beyond conjecture for an earlier Babylonian process of burning; while conjecture also explains whipping and hanging as a 'mitigation,' or alleges that possibly the victim was hanged first and burned afterwards.

Here the king is certainly not,[206 - G. B. ii. 24-26.] on the face of it, a god of vegetation: if anything, he is more like the Chitome in Congo, who was a 'pontiff.' His credulous people believed that the world would end if the Chitome died a natural death, 'so when he seemed likely to die' he was clubbed or strangled. He was sacrificed to no god whom he incarnated.[207 - G. B. ii. 8.] He was not clubbed once a year (like the Babylonian king of Mr. Frazer's theory); he was given a rude euthanasia 'when he seemed likely to die.' Does science ask us to believe that each Babylonian king had the cosmic rapport of a Congo savage pontiff, and was sacrificed after a year's reign, because a savage pontiff in Congo is put to death, not annually, but 'when he seems likely to die'?

Here, whatever science may expect us to believe, we are told by Mr. Frazer that the king in Babylon was annually sacrificed, as a god, indeed, but not explicitly as a god of vegetation, who has a resurrection.

2. A Babylonian god of vegetation, and a known god, appears in ii. 123, 124. This god is Tammuz. We hear that 'water was thrown over him at a great mourning ceremony, at which men and women stood round the funeral pyre of Tammuz lamenting… The dead Tammuz was probably represented in effigy, water was poured over him, and he came to life again.' Mr. Frazer does not here plead for a human victim. The festival 'doubtless took place in the month Tammuz (June-July),' or in different places, at different times, from midsummer to autumn, or from June to September, as the late Mr. Robertson Smith calculated. Tammuz, so Mr. Sayce is cited, 'is originally the spring vegetation, which dies in his month, Tammuz or Du'ûzu' (June-July).

Here, then, we have a death and resurrection of Tammuz. It occurs in June-July, or June-September, and Tammuz is undoubtedly the god of spring vegetation. But Mr. Frazer does not here tell us that the king of Babylon is also Tammuz. Tammuz is not whipped and hanged at the Tammuz feast in July. His dead body is 'probably' a dummy.

In vol. ii. 253 Mr. Frazer returns to the victim, the mock-king, of the Sacæa. But he says nothing here about the real king of Babylon. He wishes to show how and why the victim is divine. Now, in ii. 26, we were told that the victim is divine because he 'represents a dying god.' 'For we must not forget that the king dies in his character of a god.'…

Was Mr. Frazer satisfied with this explanation given in ii. 26? Apparently not; for[208 - G. B. ii. 253, 254.] he gives a new explanation and a different one. 'It seems worth suggesting that the mock-king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' Here the Tammuz dummy or effigy of ii. 123, 124, is, perhaps, discarded. Still, if a real live Tammuz was burned on a funeral pyre[209 - G. B. ii. 123.] his ashes might well be represented by a dummy. It has not yet occurred to Mr. Frazer, as it does later, to have the re-arisen god personated by a living human counterpart (Mordecai in a later page) of the dead Tammuz (Haman). The festival of the Sacæa is now a Tammuz festival, a religious feast, and, indeed, is identical with that of ii. 123, 124, for it occurs in the month Lous. Now Lous, says Mr. Robertson Smith, 'answered to the lunar month Tammuz,'[210 - G. B. ii. 254, note 1.] and the month of Tammuz[211 - G. B. ii. 123.] was June-July, or June-September.

There could not surely be two Tammuz feasts in the month Tammuz? We are therefore confronted by the singular facts that Tammuz lay 'on a funeral pyre'[212 - G. B. ii. 123.] and also that, as the Sacæan victim, who, Mr. Frazer thinks it 'worth suggesting' personated Tammuz, he was at the same feast, the Sacæa, whipped and hanged.[213 - G. B. ii. 253, 254.] Mr. Frazer goes on: 'If this conjecture is right, the view that the mock-king at the Sacæa was slain in the character of a god' (Tammuz) 'would be established.'

But it was established already, was it not on other grounds, to Mr. Frazer's satisfaction, in ii. 26? There the criminal victim died as a king, and as a god, for the king was a god, and so was his proxy. Now, on the other hand, if Mr. Frazer's latest conjecture is right, the victim dies as a real known god, Tammuz. We keep asking, Was the king also an incarnation of Tammuz? May I not be excused for surmising that we have here an hypothesis in the making, an hypothesis resting on two different theories? If Mr. Frazer holds that the king of Babylon was also Tammuz, as the mock-king was, here was the opportunity for saying so, and proving the fact from Babylonian texts.

Mr. Frazer here gives us a Tammuz feast in which Tammuz lies on a funeral pyre, and also a Tammuz feast in which the human representative of that deity is whipped and hanged, while 'the dead Tammuz was probably represented in effigy,' water was poured over him, and he came to life again. How? In the person of Mordecai? These are the results of ii. 123, 124, and of ii. 253, 254.

These things are, confessedly, conjectures. But one thing is quite certain: the Sacæa, wherein Tammuz either lay on a funeral pyre, and afterwards had water poured over him, 'probably in effigy,' or was hanged, was a festival of June-July. Variations of calendars, however, might make the Sacæa fall 'from midsummer to autumn or from June to September' (ii. 123, note of Mr. Robertson Smith). These dates are remote from Eastertide.

To this point Mr. Frazer[214 - G. B. ii. 254.] promises 'to return later.' He does so in the most disconcerting manner. For when he returns the Sacæa, which were in the month Tammuz, June-July,[215 - G. B. ii. 123, 124; ii. 253, 254.] startle us by being held in March or March-April.[216 - G. B. iii. 152, 154.] May I not say that I seem to detect traces of an hypothesis in the making, and of discrepant theories? We have already been rather puzzled by the Tammuz on a funeral pyre, who has cold water poured over him, 'probably in effigy,' and also is honoured by being whipped and hanged in the person of a human representative, a mock-king, at the same festival. But perhaps there were two Tammuz feasts in the month of Tammuz? And possibly the victim was whipped and hanged at one of them, while his mortal remains were burned on the pyre at the other? 'It is quite possible,' says Mr. Frazer, when explaining why a victim of a sacrifice was hanged, not burned as is usual, 'that both forms of execution, or rather of sacrifice, may have been combined by hanging or crucifying the victim first and burning him afterwards;'[217 - G. B. iii. 171.] but he neglects the buxom opportunity of corroborating this conjecture, by referring to the Tammuz victim who had both a funeral pyre and a gibbet, in ii. 123, 124, 253, 254.

III. A POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION

There is, perhaps, a mode of reconciling the dates of the Tammuz festivals, at one of which Tammuz was honoured with a pyre, at the other (in the person of his representative, the Sacæan mock-king) with a gibbet. Dr. Jastrow places a Tammuz feast in the fourth month, which, if the Babylonian year begins, as Mr. Frazer says it does, with the month Nisan, means that the fourth month and a Tammuz feast occurred in our June-July. But Dr. Jastrow also writes that in the sixth Babylonian month, our August-September, 'there was celebrated a festival to Tammuz.'[218 - Jastrow, p. 484.]

Thus Tammuz might have his gibbet in June-July, and his pyre in August-September. But alas! this will not do, for the pyre is of June-July.[219 - G. B. ii. 123, 124.] Nor can he have his gibbet in August-September, as I had fondly hoped, for he is to be identified with the mock-king of the Sacæa, and the month of his hanging is Tammuz, Lous, or June-July, if Mr. Robertson Smith is right.[220 - G. B. ii. 253, 54.] Thus I really fail to believe that Tammuz could have both a burning and a hanging in June-July. I hoped that Dr. Jastrow's two Tammuz feasts had solved the problem, but I hoped in vain.

IV. THE SACÆA SUDDENLY CHANGES ITS DATE

Meanwhile, even though we have allowed for two Tammuz feasts, are we also to admit a third Tammuz feast at the March festival of the Sacæa? For in vol. iii. 151-153, March has become the date of the Sacæa, rather to our surprise, for the date had been June-July.[221 - G. B. ii. 123, 124.] Now three Tammuz feasts in six months seem one too many, if not two. Consequently the arguments which in ii. 123, 124, 253, 254, show the Sacæan victim, because he died in the month Tammuz, to represent the god Tammuz fail, perhaps, if the victim really died in March, at the Babylonian Zakmuk, or Zagmuku, a feast in honour, not of Tammuz, but of Bau (a goddess), and later of Marduk.[222 - Jastrow, 59, 127, 631, 677, 678-9.] Neither Bau nor Marduk is Tammuz; nor does the victim seem likely to represent Tammuz, after his death is shifted from the Tammuz feasts of May-June or June-July, July-August, to March, when the feast was really in honour, not of Tammuz, but of Bau, or later, of Marduk.

All our difficulties, indeed, pale before the fact that the date of the Sacæa, when the possible Tammuz victim was hanged, is fixed twice; once, with much show of reason and 'with unconcealed delight,' in June-July, in the second volume; while, next, it is argued from, in the third volume, as if the date were March-April.

I conjecture, therefore, that the July date was not inconsistent with what is now Mr. Frazer's theory when he revised his second volume. Otherwise he would not have said that Mr. Robertson Smith's decision as to the July date 'supplies so welcome a confirmation of the conjecture in the text,'[223 - G. B. ii. 254, note 1.] and then, in iii. 152, 153, have proceeded to argue on the presumption that Mr. Robertson Smith's calculations may be, for the purposes of the theory, disregarded. And they are disregarded, as we shall see. If they were dubious, they should never have been welcomed.

V. VARIOUS THEORIES OF THE VICTIM

Meanwhile, for our own argument, as to the precise nature of the Babylonian King's divinity, vegetable or not, I do not think that we have yet found the King of Babylon explicitly identified with a god of vegetation.

The victim, remember, was at first divine, either as proxy of the king, incarnating, I think, a god unknown; or as full of cosmic rapport, as a man-god of the second species.[224 - G. B. ii. 24-26; i. 80-82.] Next his divinity was established, if Mr. Frazer rightly conjectured that he 'represented Tammuz himself.'[225 - G. B. ii. 253, 254.] Next he was a criminal vicariously sacrificed for 'the saving of the king's life for another year.'[226 - G. B. iii. 152.]

Next 'it would appear that the Zoganes' (the same old victim) 'during his five days of office personated not merely a king but a god, whether that god was the Elamite Humman, the Babylonian Marduk, or some other deity not yet identified.'[227 - G. B. iii. 160.] Next the victim personated 'a god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis, (and) enjoyed the favours of a woman, probably a sacred harlot…' in addition to the caresses of the royal seraglio.[228 - G. B. iii. 178.] Next the indefatigable victim represented the king, 'the human god, the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called,' though all we know of the god Zoganes is that Zoganes was the title of the slave lord of the household at the Persian Sacæa.[229 - G. B. iii. 185.]

It would thus appear almost as if all gods are one god to Mr. Frazer by a kind of scientific 'Henotheism.' Humman or Saturn, Zoganes or Tammuz, Marduk or Adonis, any one of them, or all of them, will do for the king to incarnate or personate. Any one of them, or all of them, will figure as representatives of vegetable life in company with Zeus and the horses of Virbius! 'We may conjecture that the horses by which Virbius was said to have been slain were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation.'[230 - G. B. ii. 314.] Now let me too say 'we may conjecture.' Mr. Frazer tells us that 'horses were excluded from the grove and sanctuary' of Virbius.[231 - G. B. i. 6.] Is it putting too great pressure on evidence to conjecture that the horses, while being driven out, were whipped? Now the horses embodied, perhaps, as we are told, a deity of vegetation. They were whipped, and therefore it was usual to whip the representatives of a deity of vegetation. This solves our problem, why was the victim, the divine victim, whipped?

Seriously, have we not in all this book to do with that method of arbitrary conjecture which has ruined so many laborious philosophies of religion?

As to one essential conjecture, that the Babylonian, or rather the Persian, kings represented a deity of vegetation, I can offer only one shadowy testimony. Nebuchadnezzar for a while exhibited a caprice in favour of a purely vegetable diet. This may have been a survival of a royal taboo. As a god of vegetation, a king would not eat vegetables any more than a savage usually eats his totem. But some savages do eat their totems on certain sacred occasions, and that may be the reason why Nebuchadnezzar, for a given period, turned vegetarian.

VII

ZAKMUK, SACÆA, AND PURIM

It is necessary to get the death of the Sacæan victim into touch with Easter. The Sacæa, when he died, had been in June-July, in vol. ii., in Mr. Frazer's first edition, before he evolved his theory. When the theory is evolved, in the second edition and third volume, the Sacæa prefer to occur in March-April, which gets the sufferings of the mock-king into touch with the Jewish Purim, and so within measurable distance of our Passion Week, though the June-July date of the first edition survives in the second volume of the new edition. The change of date of the Sacæa is arranged for by the plan, rejected by Meyer and Jastrow, of identifying the Persian Sacæa and the Jewish Purim with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk or Zakmuk, a New Year festival of March-April.[232 - 'Zimmern's view of a possible relationship between Purim and Zagmuku is untenable,' says Dr. Jastrow (op. cit. p. 686, note 2). This is also the opinion of Meyer.] To be sure, if that be the date, we seem bereft of our useful Tammuz, from whom, in ii. 254, it was conjectured that the victim mock-king derived his divinity, an old superstitious belief which 'shed the halo of divinity' on the victim of Calvary. For the Tammuz feast was certainly in June-September. However, perhaps there were three Tammuz feasts, resurrection and all, and Mr. Frazer's last choice of a date, in March-April, has the immense advantage for his theory of getting us near Eastertide.