Magic and Religion

III. MORE PERIODS OF LICENCE

I am going with more than diffidence to offer a guess at the reasons, asking it to be remembered that I do so merely because the case is isolated, and cannot at present be illustrated by parallel ceremonies. But first, returning to the periods of licence, I must show that they are not peculiar to agricultural races, nor, therefore, necessarily instituted to aid the farmer. This in itself is a great comfort, for one wearies of being told that the crops are so eternally the cause of custom and rite. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many ways a backward race and not agricultural, 'considerable licence is allowed on certain occasions, when a large number of men and women are gathered together to perform certain corroborees' (or sacred dances). So say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.

The laws of marriage are then turned upside down. A man is ordered to have relations with the woman who is his 'Mura – that is, one to whom he may not, under ordinary circumstances, even speak, or go near, much less have anything like marital relations with.' Every man is expected to send his wife to these dances, for the express purpose of violating, in this period of licence, the most sacred laws of the tribe.345 These backward persons, the Arunta, have no native strong drink, and cannot get intoxicated, but what they can they do in the way of licence, like more civilised races, and necessarily not for agricultural reasons, as they have no agriculture. They break their most sacred law, just as the Jews, at Purim, deliberately broke the law of Moses.346 Conceivably, then, even stripping, scourging, and hanging a mock-king at the Sacæa may also have been done for some reason not agricultural.

What view did the Persians themselves take of their festival? I do not think that Mr. Frazer insists enough on this point. The Persians regard the Sacæa as commemorative of a great massacre of the Sacæ near the Euxine. In both forms of the Persian legend, in Strabo, their ancestors fell on the Sacæ when that tribe was hopelessly intoxicated: 'drunk and frantic, drowsy and asleep, or dancing and maddened with wine.' The Sacæ were massacred, and the Sacæa, a feast of licence, was dedicated to the Persian goddess Anaitis; obviously in memory of the intoxicated revels of the Sacæ,347 or so tradition averred.

The Persians thus, by dint of a popular etymology (Sacæa from Sacæ), accounted to themselves for the origin of a period of chartered licence, in which, says Strabo, 'both men and women, dressed in the Scythian habit, drink and sport wantonly by night and day.' As in many other cases, collected by Athenæus, the lawless revel had its kings of unreason: slaves acting as masters and kings. Just one of these kings, the Zoganes in the royal household, was afterwards stripped, scourged, and hanged. What could the reason be? We have seen that in Tonquin all crimes committed in the period of licence are overlooked, except treason and murder.348 We have been told that in the Roman Saturnalia a slave might do, unreproved, what at any other time would be punished 'with stripes, imprisonment, or death.'349 We have read that, at the Pondo period of licence, nobody was later made responsible for his actions, though at Tonquin murder and treason were excepted.350 The same irresponsibility pervades the Zulu period of licence.351

To reinforce this fact, that the most sacred laws are purposefully broken at some periods of licence, I cite the Nanga orgies in old Fiji. 'The Nanga is frequently spoken of as the Mbaki, or harvest;' people being 'full of devilry and food' at harvest, which, perhaps, they need not be in March-April. All distinctions of property were suspended at the Nanga. Men and women, in fantastic dresses, publicly 'practised unmentionable abominations.' Even the relationship of brother and sister 'seemed to be no bar to the general licence.' But after the Nanga, as before the Nanga, brothers and sisters might not even speak to each other. This precisely answers to the Australian incest with the Mura. Brothers and sisters at the Nanga were 'intentionally coupled.' The ceremonies included initiatory mysteries, like the Bora of the Australian blacks. As at the Arunta corroborees, the great point was to break the most sacred laws: those of incest.352 This peculiar 'burst' then is in Australia pre-agricultural, though, as in Fiji, it survives among an agricultural people.

IV. THE SACÆA AS A PERIOD OF LICENCE

Well, the Sacæa was such a period of licence. Each household was then ruled by a slave, the Zoganes, as Athenæus quotes Berosus. The royal household was not an exception. Now to rule the royal household, in the royal robes, and above all to take liberties with the royal harem (compare Fijian and Australian licence), is treason; one of the two crimes excepted from the Saturnalian amnesty in Tonquin. To overlook treason would be, for a Persian monarch, to set a dangerous precedent. Therefore the royal Zoganes, or slave-king of the five days' revel, unlike the Zoganes of private houses, would deserve death, technically speaking. At this point let me adopt Mr. Frazer's theory of a substitute. A criminal already condemned to death is employed instead of a harmless slave, as Zoganes of the royal household, and is then hanged.

In dozens of cases of summer gambols, in European folklore, 'the Whitsuntide representatives of the tree spirit' are put to a mock death.353 These are in one or two instances called 'kings.' The regular May Kings and May Queens seem to escape: the Grass King merely 'hands his crown to the mayor.'354 These mock slayings of folklore actors may (I think), like handing the crown to the mayor, merely mean that the actor's reign is over. This is not Mr. Frazer's opinion: the summer monarchs when killed in sport are killed, he thinks, as their precursors were really slain, for the god of vegetation. O vegetation, what crimes are wrought in thy name!

In any case the royal Zoganes, or criminal substitute for the slave-king of the royal household in Babylon, deserved a hanging, to discourage the precedent of treason set by him in the period of licence. Only in the king's house was the reign of the Zoganes high treason.

Now, before hanging him, it was actually necessary to demonstrate by symbolic action that he was no real king, but a common slave or criminal. He was reduced to his true level by being stripped of his royal robes, and by being whipped, a specially servile punishment. He was then hanged.

But to treat a real slave thus merely because, as in every other household, he played the Zoganes or slave as master, would be a shame. The man's only fault was the accident, thrust on him by custom, of playing lord in the royal household of a jealous monarch. So a criminal already condemned took the part, and, as the slave would have been, he was finally reduced to his level by being stripped of his royal robes and scourged, before suffering death; technically for treason, really for the crime on which he was originally condemned.

This mere guess at the origin of a unique custom has certain advantages. It explains (and I fail to see that Mr. Frazer explains) why the Sacæan mock-king (unlike the Saturn victim) was stripped of his royal robes and whipped. These sufferings proclaimed the man no king, but a slave. Again, his hanging was just what, as condemned on a capital charge, a low-born malefactor might expect. With the best will in the world, no Babylonian could follow Mr. Frazer and take a hanged felon for a god or a divine sacrifice. Why only one man was thus treated, though there was a Zoganes or slave-lord in every house, is explained by the fact that there was only one royal house, only one household in which the slave-lord's conduct was treason.

With paternal fondness I contemplate my own little guess. But, alas! we are not told that the other slave-lords at the Sacæa actually invaded the ladies of the house. So why should the slave-lord of the royal household be allowed to do so? How is my conjecture to weather this point of danger? Well, we are never told (as far as I am aware) that a subject in the East enfeoffed himself of private demesne by invading the harem of the man to whose estate he was a pretender. But in the case of royal demesne to invade the harem was the first step of a young pretender, like Absalom, 'for the purpose of making known and strengthening his claim to the throne,' says Movers.355

Remembering the tenacity of traditional usage, sanctioning deadly sexual crimes in some periods of licence, remembering that, in them, the 'primitive' Arunta deliberately break, as did the Jews at Purim, and the Fijians, the most sacred and stringent of their taboos, shall we not allow Sacæan custom to encroach, for the purpose of making the royalty of the king's Zoganes indisputable, on the king's harem? For in that way was Oriental royalty proclaimed and asserted. Sir Alfred Lyall says: 'We believe that a few unfortunate concubines would have been of no account at all for the due performance of a popular Babylonian masquerade, which might just as well mimic earthly kingship as symbolise divine mysteries.'

And now we see a simple and conceivable reason why the mock-king of the Sacæa invaded the king's harem, ruled all royally, was crowned, robed in the king's robes, and then, to restore his servile status and wipe away his royalty, was stripped of the royal robes, whipped as a slave was whipped, and hanged as a condemned criminal deserved to be.

My guess, unlike Mr. Frazer's hypothesis, colligates all the facts. It explains the stripping, which Mr. Frazer does not, I think, explain. It explains the scourging and hanging, which Mr. Frazer is obliged to account for as a mitigation of burning. It does not require us to believe (what is incredible) that of old the Persian kings were sacrificed annually. It accounts for the occurrence of the execution at a season of secular licence just as in Ashanti. It involves us in no double, and, to my thinking, contradictory theory, that the sufferer is both king's proxy and also a representative of Tammuz, or Marduk, or Humman, or Gilgamesh, or Eabani.

But my guess is only a guess, and is offered chiefly to prove that guessing is easy. We cannot be certain about any explanation of a custom so remote, so unparalleled, and reported on evidence so late and so dubious as that of Dio Chrysostom.

Some student may point out that, though I boast of my theory as colligating all the facts, I have left out the sacred harlot. But she was only the child of an hypothesis of Mr. Frazer's. A scientific hypothesis is not required to colligate more than the known facts in each case. And I am by no means certain that the facts given by our only authority, Dio, were facts of history.

X

CALVARY

It is, fortunately, not needful to dwell long on the disproval of Mr. Frazer's theory that his facts 'seem to shed fresh light on some of the causes which contributed to the remarkably rapid diffusion of Christianity in Asia Minor… The new faith had elements in it which appealed powerfully to the Asiatic mind… We have seen that the conception of the dying and risen god was no new one in these regions… A man whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god gave his life for the life of the world… A chain of causes which, because we cannot follow them, might in the loose language of daily life be called an accidents determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust on Jesus of Nazareth…' His death as the Haman of the annual mystery play of the dying god' impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father. In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died the death of a vulgar malefactor. It shed round the Cross on Calvary a halo of divinity,' &c.356

But all this halo could only be shed if the victim was recognised by the world as dying in the character of a god, and as rising again in the person of Barabbas, the Mordecai of the year. We know on the best historical evidence that there was no such recognition. 'To the Greeks foolishness, and to the Jews a stumbling block,' was the Cross, as St. Paul assures us. Moreover, we know that ribaldry, not reverence, marked the multitude at the Crucifixion. By Mr. Frazer's theory Barabbas represented the re-arisen god, 'The Son of the Father.' Was Barabbas revered? No; 'some pretended to salute his mock majesty, and others belaboured the donkey on which he rode.'357 Therefore, by Mr. Frazer's own explicit statement, the divine facts about Barabbas were not recognised. Yet he was the counterpart of the sacred Victim.

Mr. Frazer's theory demands, I think, the general recognition of the godhead of the yearly victim, who gave Christ's mission 'the influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died the death of a vulgar malefactor.'358

Yet Mr. Frazer himself assures us that the idea of the divinity of the victim may have been forgotten; that his 'sacrifice' might seem 'the execution of a criminal.' I cite the passage: 'The divine character of the animal or man is forgotten, and he comes to be regarded merely as an ordinary victim. This is especially the case when it is a divine man who is killed. For when a nation becomes civilised, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus, as in the Sacæan festival at Babylon, the killing of a god may come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.'359 Yet within eighty pages Mr. Frazer attributes the 'halo of divinity' to the happy accident which enabled the victim to die as a recognised representative of a dying god.360

Mr. Frazer puts forth his hypothesis 'with great diffidence.'361 He thinks that he may 'have perhaps been led by the interest and importance of the subject somewhat deeper than the evidence warrants.'362

That is certain. We have shown that the evidence, in our opinion, warrants none of the hypotheses; no, not one.

It is not proved that magic is older than religion.

It is disproved that general belief (as distinguished from local legend) in any age regards gods as mortal.

There is no evidence, or none is given, to show that a man has ever been sacrificed for the benefit of a god whom he incarnates.

There is no evidence that a real king was ever yearly sacrificed to benefit a god at Babylon, or in every city-state of early Italy, or anywhere. The idea is incredible.

The evidence for any sacrifice of mock-kings is, historically, of the weakest conceivable kind.

The deaths of the Sacæan mock-kings were infamous executions of criminals; they were not sacrifices, if they ever occurred at all.

The date of the festival at which, if at all, they perished cannot be made to fit in with Purim or Easter.

There is no evidence that the Jews borrowed the custom of killing a yearly human victim, or practised the habit.

If they did, it was a month after Purim.363

If they did, by Mr. Frazer's own statement the killing might be thought that of a vulgar malefactor,364 and could not cast on all or on any one of the victims a halo of divinity.

Finally, our own history, in the case of the Earl of Atholl (who pretended to the crown at the murder of James I. of Scotland) and in the case of Sir William Wallace (who was accused of saying that he would be crowned in Westminster Hall), proves that pretenders to royalty have been mocked by being indued with symbols of royalty. Wallace was crowned at his trial with laurel; Atholl was tortured to death with a red-hot iron crown. The Victim of Calvary was accused of aiming at a kingdom, and, like Wallace and Atholl, was crowned – with thorns. The preliminary scourging is illustrated by the tyranny of Verres in Sicily.

May we not conclude that Mr. Frazer's 'light bridges' of hypothesis have 'broken down'?365

'The importance and interest of the subject' have induced me to examine the hypotheses. But it was needless.

One point has been clear from the beginning. Even if the Sacæan victims were originally supposed to be gods, they could not bequeath a halo of divinity to Christ, unless, as late as the reign of Tiberius, their own godhead was still commonly recognised. Now it certainly was not recognised. When Mr. Frazer published the first edition of his 'Golden Bough,' he doubted that the Sacæan victim could, as civilisation advanced, be identified with a god. But, before publishing his second edition, Mr. Frazer evolved his theory of the origin or partial origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ, as inherited from the criminal slaves at the Sacæa. In his second edition, therefore, the godhead of the Sacæan victims is usually regarded as commonly recognised; though Mr. Frazer had doubted the possibility of this in his first, and preserves the doubt in his second edition. It is needless to say more.

Mr. Frazer, in vol. iii. 120, had already shaken his own theory as given in vol. iii. 195-198.366 I might have contented myself with comparing these two passages, but in the interest of the nascent science of religion it seemed desirable to point out what I am constrained to think the errors of method that now prevail. In the following essay criticism is applied to an hypothesis with which modern orthodoxy has no concern.

XI

THE GHASTLY PRIEST

The spirit of system, of finding master keys for all the locks of old religion and mythology, has confessedly been apt to misguide students. 'Macrobius was the father,' says Mr. Frazer, 'of that large family of mythologists who resolve all or most gods into the sun. According to him Mercury was the sun, Mars was the sun, Janus was the sun, Saturn was the sun, so was Jupiter, also Nemesis, likewise Pan, and so on through a great part of the Pantheon. It was natural, therefore, that he should identify Osiris with the sun…'367

Mythology has been of late emancipated from the universal dominion of the sun, but only to fall under that of gods of vegetation, whether of vegetable life at large, or of the corn spirit and the oak spirit in particular. What Mr. Frazer says about Macrobius, Macrobius would retort on Mr. Frazer, thus:

'According to him Mars was a god of vegetation, Saturn was a god of vegetation (of sowing), so was Zeus, also Hera, and so on through a great part of the Pantheon. It was natural, therefore, that he should identify Osiris with a god of vegetation – and Mr. Frazer does so.'

Far be it from me to say that Mr. Frazer is wrong, when his gods are gods of vegetation, or even that Macrobius is wrong, when his gods are gods of the sun. It appears to me that when a god had obtained a firm hold of public favour, the public might accept him as a god of this, that, and the other aspect or phenomenon of nature.

Still, the new school of mythology does work the vegetable element in mythology hard; nearly as hard as the solar element used to be worked. Aphrodite, as the female mate of Adonis, gets mixed up with plant life.368 So does Attis with Cybele, so does Balder,369 so does Death,370 so does Dionysus371 with undoubted propriety; so does Eabani, so does Gilgamesh, so does Haman, so does Hera,372 so does Iasion with Demeter,373 so does Isis,374 so does Jack-in-the-Green, so does Kupalo,375 so do Linus and Lityerses,376 so does Mamurius Veturius,377 so does Merodach or Marduk (if he represents Eabani or Gilgamesh), so does Mars,378 so does Osiris,379 so, I think, does Semiramis,380 so does Tammuz, so does Virbius,381 so does Zeus, probably;382 so does a great multitude of cattle, cats, horses, bulls, goats, cocks, with plenty of other beasts.

The solar mythologists did not spare heroes like Achilles; they, too, were the sun. But the vegetable school, the Covent Garden school of mythologists, mixes up real human beings with vegetation. Jesus Christ derives his divinity, or some of it, as we have seen, from a long array of criminals who were hanged partly as kings, partly as gods of vegetation. I do not feel absolutely assured that Judas Iscariot, at his annual burnings in effigy, escapes the universal doom any more than the ugly deformed person who was whipped and killed in old Attica. But an unexpected man to be a representative of a god of vegetation is the priest of the grove of Diana near Aricia. He is known to all from the familiar verse of Macaulay —

Why, Mr. Frazer asks, in effect, had the priest of the grove of Diana, near Aricia, to slay his predecessor, subject, in turn, to death at the hands of a new competitor for the office? First, let us ask what we know about this ghastly priest. Let us begin with the evidence of Virgil, in the Sixth Book of the 'Æneid' (line 136 and so onwards). Virgil says nothing about the ghastly priest, or, in this place, about Diana, or the grove near Aricia. Virgil, indeed, tells us much about a bough of a tree, a golden branch, but, as to the singular priest, nothing. But some four hundred years after Virgil's date (say 370 A.D.) a commentator on Virgil, Servius, tries to illustrate the passage cited from the 'Æneid.' He obviously knows nothing about Virgil's mystic golden bough, but he tells us that, in his own time, 'public opinion' (publico, opinio) placed the habitat of Virgil's bough in the grove haunted by the ghastly priest, near Aricia. It is, in fact, not known whether Virgil invented his bough, with its extraordinary attributes, or took it from his rich store of antiquarian learning. It may have been a folklore belief, like Le Rameau d'Or of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tale. Virgil's bough, as we shall see, has one folklore attribute in common with a mystic sword in the Arthurian cycle of romances, and in the Volsunga Saga. I think that Mr. Frazer has failed to comment on this point. If I might hazard a guess as to Virgil's branch, it is that, of old, suppliants approached gods or kings with boughs in their hands. He who would approach Proserpine carried, in Virgil, a bough of pure gold, which only the favoured and predestined suppliant could obtain, as shall be shown.

In the four centuries between Virgil and Servius the meaning and source of Virgil's branch of gold were forgotten. But people, and Servius himself, knew of another bough, near Aricia, and located (conjecturally?) Virgil's branch of gold in that district. Servius, then, in his commentary on the 'Æneid,' after the manner of annotators in all ages, talks much about the boughs of a certain tree in a certain grove, concerning which Virgil makes no remark. Virgil, as we shall see, was writing about a golden branch of very peculiar character. Knowing, like the public opinion of his age, something about quite other branches, and nothing about Virgil's branch, Servius tells us that, in the grove of Diana at Aricia, there grew a tree from which it was unlawful (non licebat) to break a bough. If any fugitive slave, however, could break a branch from this tree, he might fight the priest, taking his office if successful. In the opinion of Servius the temple was founded by Orestes, to the barbaric Diana of the Chersonese, whence he had fled after a homicide. That Diana received human sacrifices of all strangers who landed on her coasts. The rite of human sacrifice was, in Italy, commuted, Servius thinks, for the duel between the priest and the fugitive slave, Orestes having himself been a fugitive. The process is, first a Greek wanderer on a barbarous coast is in danger of being offered, as all outlanders were offered, to the local goddess. This rite was a form of xenelasia, an anti-immigrant statute. Compare China, the Transvaal, the agitation against pauper immigrants. Having escaped being sacrificed, and having killed the king in an unfriendly land, Orestes flies to Italy and appeases the cruel Diana by erecting her fane at Aricia. But, instead of sacrificing immigrants, he, or his successors, establish a duel between the priest and any other fugitive slave. Why? For the priest of the cruel Diana was not accustomed to be sacrificed, nor had he been a fugitive slave. Servius then, not observing this, goes off into an allegorising interpretation of Virgil's branch, as worthless as all such interpretations always are.