The Golden Bough
A Study in Magic and Religion
By
James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool
Third Edition.
Vol. IV.
Part III
The Dying God
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1911
CONTENTS
Preface.
Chapter I. The Mortality Of The Gods.
Chapter II. The Killing Of The Divine King.
§ 1. Preference for a Violent Death.
§ 2. Kings killed when their Strength fails.
§ 3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term.
§ 4. Octennial Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 5. Funeral Games.
§ 6. The Slaughter of the Dragon.
§ 7. Triennial Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 8. Annual Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 9. Diurnal Tenure of the Kingship.
Chapter III. The Slaying Of The King In Legend.
Chapter IV. The Supply Of Kings.
Chapter V. Temporary Kings.
Chapter VI. Sacrifice Of The King’s Son.
Chapter VII. Succession To The Soul.
Chapter VIII. The Killing Of The Tree-Spirit.
§ 1. The Whitsuntide Mummers.
§ 2. Mock Human Sacrifices.
§ 3. Burying the Carnival.
§ 4. Carrying out Death.
§ 5. Sawing the Old Woman.
§ 6. Bringing in Summer.
§ 7. Battle of Summer and Winter.
§ 8. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko.
§ 9. Death and Revival of Vegetation.
§ 10. Analogous Rites in India.
§ 11. The Magic Spring.
Note A. Chinese Indifference To Death.
Note B. Swinging As A Magical Rite.
Addenda.
Index.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
PREFACE.
With this third part of _The Golden Bough_ we take up the question, Why
had the King of the Wood at Nemi regularly to perish by the hand of his
successor? In the first part of the work I gave some reasons for thinking
that the priest of Diana, who bore the title of King of the Wood beside
the still lake among the Alban Hills, personated the great god Jupiter or
his duplicate Dianus, the deity of the oak, the thunder, and the sky. On
this theory, accordingly, we are at once confronted with the wider and
deeper question, Why put a man-god or human representative of deity to a
violent death? Why extinguish the divine light in its earthly vessel
instead of husbanding it to its natural close? My general answer to that
question is contained in the present volume. If I am right, the motive for
slaying a man-god is a fear lest with the enfeeblement of his body in
sickness or old age his sacred spirit should suffer a corresponding decay,
which might imperil the general course of nature and with it the existence
of his worshippers, who believe the cosmic energies to be mysteriously
knit up with those of their human divinity. Hence, if there is any measure
of truth in this theory, the practice of putting divine men and
particularly divine kings to death, which seems to have been common at a
particular stage in the evolution of society and religion, was a crude but
pathetic attempt to disengage an immortal spirit from its mortal envelope,
to arrest the forces of decomposition in nature by retrenching with
ruthless hand the first ominous symptoms of decay. We may smile if we
please at the vanity of these and the like efforts to stay the inevitable
decline, to bring the relentless revolution of the great wheel to a stand,
to keep youth’s fleeting roses for ever fresh and fair; but perhaps in
spite of every disillusionment, when we contemplate the seemingly endless
vistas of knowledge which have been opened up even within our own
generation, many of us may cherish in our heart of hearts a fancy, if not
a hope, that some loophole of escape may after all be discovered from the
iron walls of the prison-house which threaten to close on and crush us;
that, groping about in the darkness, mankind may yet chance to lay hands
on “that golden key that opes the palace of eternity,” and so to pass from
this world of shadows and sorrow to a world of untroubled light and joy.
If this is a dream, it is surely a happy and innocent one, and to those
who would wake us from it we may murmur with Michael Angelo,
“_Però non mi destar, deh! parla basso._”
J. G. FRAZER.
CAMBRIDGE,
_11th June 1911_.
CHAPTER I. THE MORTALITY OF THE GODS.
(M1) At an early stage of his intellectual development man deems himself
naturally immortal, and imagines that were it not for the baleful arts of
sorcerers, who cut the vital thread prematurely short, he would live for
ever. The illusion, so flattering to human wishes and hopes, is still
current among many savage tribes at the present day,(1) and it may be
supposed to have prevailed universally in that Age of Magic which appears
to have everywhere preceded the Age of Religion. But in time the sad truth
of human mortality was borne in upon our primitive philosopher with a
force of demonstration which no prejudice could resist and no sophistry
dissemble. Among the manifold influences which combined to wring from him
a reluctant assent to the necessity of death must be numbered the growing
influence of religion, which by exposing the vanity of magic and of all
the extravagant pretensions built on it gradually lowered man’s proud and
defiant attitude towards nature, and taught him to believe that there are
mysteries in the universe which his feeble intellect can never fathom, and
forces which his puny hands can never control. Thus more and more he
learned to bow to the inevitable and to console himself for the brevity
and the sorrows of life on earth by the hope of a blissful eternity
hereafter. But if he reluctantly acknowledged the existence of beings at
once superhuman and supernatural, he was as yet far from suspecting the
width and the depth of the gulf which divided him from them. The gods with
whom his imagination now peopled the darkness of the unknown were indeed
admitted by him to be his superiors in knowledge and in power, in the
joyous splendour of their life and in the length of its duration. But,
though he knew it not, these glorious and awful beings were merely, like
the spectre of the Brocken, the reflections of his own diminutive
personality exaggerated into gigantic proportions by distance and by the
mists and clouds upon which they were cast. Man in fact created gods in
his own likeness and being himself mortal he naturally supposed his
creatures to be in the same sad predicament. Thus the Greenlanders
believed that a wind could kill their most powerful god, and that he would
certainly die if he touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God,
they kept asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not,
they were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god
indeed.(2) In answer to the enquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North American
Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit. Being asked
which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad one, “Oh, neither of
_them_” replied he, “the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long
ago. He could not possibly have lived as long as this.”(3) A tribe in the
Philippine Islands told the Spanish conquerors that the grave of the
Creator was upon the top of Mount Cabunian.(4) Heitsi-eibib, a god or
divine hero of the Hottentots, died several times and came to life again.
His graves are generally to be met with in narrow defiles between
mountains. When the Hottentots pass one of them, they throw a stone on it
for good luck, sometimes muttering “Give us plenty of cattle.”(5) The
grave of Zeus, the great god of Greece, was shewn to visitors in Crete as
late as about the beginning of our era.(6) The body of Dionysus was buried
at Delphi beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the
inscription, “Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele.”(7) According to
one account, Apollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras is said
to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how the god had
been killed by the python and buried under the tripod.(8) The ancient god
Cronus was buried in Sicily,(9) and the graves of Hermes, Aphrodite, and
Ares were shewn in Hermopolis, Cyprus, and Thrace.(10)
(M2) The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common
lot. They too grew old and died. For like men they were composed of body
and soul, and like men were subject to all the passions and infirmities of
the flesh. Their bodies, it is true, were fashioned of more ethereal
mould, and lasted longer than ours, but they could not hold out for ever
against the siege of time. Age converted their bones into silver, their
flesh into gold, and their azure locks into lapis-lazuli. When their time
came, they passed away from the cheerful world of the living to reign as
dead gods over dead men in the melancholy world beyond the grave. Even
their souls, like those of mankind, could only endure after death so long
as their bodies held together; and hence it was as needful to preserve the
corpses of the gods as the corpses of common folk, lest with the divine
body the divine spirit should also come to an untimely end. At first their
remains were laid to rest under the desert sands of the mountains, that
the dryness of the soil and the purity of the air might protect them from
putrefaction and decay. Hence one of the oldest titles of the Egyptian
gods is “they who are under the sands.” But when at a later time the
discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to the souls of
the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite time from
corruption, the deities were permitted to share the benefit of an
invention which held out to gods as well as to men a reasonable hope of
immortality. Every province then had the tomb and mummy of its dead god.
The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis boasted of the mummy
of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of
Toumou.(11) But while their bodies lay swathed and bandaged here on earth
in the tomb, their souls, if we may trust the Egyptian priests, shone as
bright stars in the firmament. The soul of Isis sparkled in Sirius, the
soul of Horus in Orion, and the soul of Typhon in the Great Bear.(12) But
the death of the god did not involve the extinction of his sacred stock;
for he commonly had by his wife a son and heir, who on the demise of his
divine parent succeeded to the full rank, power, and honours of the
godhead.(13) The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared to their
worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in
their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for
like men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and fought
and died.(14)
(M3) One of the most famous stories of the death of a god is told by
Plutarch. It runs thus. In the reign of the emperor Tiberius a certain
schoolmaster named Epitherses was sailing from Greece to Italy. The ship
in which he had taken his passage was a merchantman and there were many
other passengers on board. At evening, when they were off the Echinadian
Islands, the wind died away, and the vessel drifted close in to the island
of Paxos. Most of the passengers were awake and many were still drinking
wine after dinner, when suddenly a voice hailed the ship from the island,
calling upon Thamus. The crew and passengers were taken by surprise, for
though there was an Egyptian pilot named Thamus on board, few knew him
even by name. Twice the cry was repeated, but Thamus kept silence.
However, at the third call he answered, and the voice from the shore, now
louder than ever, said, “When you are come to Palodes, announce that the
Great Pan is dead.” Astonishment fell upon all, and they consulted whether
it would be better to do the bidding of the voice or not. At last Thamus
resolved that, if the wind held, he would pass the place in silence, but
if it dropped when they were off Palodes he would give the message. Well,
when they were come to Palodes, there was a great calm; so Thamus standing
in the stern and looking towards the land cried out, as he had been
bidden, “The Great Pan is dead.” The words had hardly passed his lips when
a loud sound of lamentation broke on their ears, as if a multitude were
mourning. This strange story, vouched for by many on board, soon got wind
at Rome, and Thamus was sent for and questioned by the emperor Tiberius
himself, who caused enquiries to be made about the dead god.(15) In modern
times, also, the annunciation of the death of the Great Pan has been much
discussed and various explanations of it have been suggested. On the whole
the simplest and most natural would seem to be that the deity whose sad
end was thus mysteriously proclaimed and lamented was the Syrian god
Tammuz or Adonis, whose death is known to have been annually bewailed by
his followers both in Greece and in his native Syria. At Athens the
solemnity fell at midsummer, and there is no improbability in the view
that in a Greek island a band of worshippers of Tammuz should have been
celebrating the death of their god with the customary passionate
demonstrations of sorrow at the very time when a ship lay becalmed off the
shore, and that in the stillness of the summer night the voices of
lamentation should have been wafted with startling distinctness across the
water and should have made on the minds of the listening passengers a deep
and lasting impression.(16) However that may be, stories of the same kind
found currency in western Asia down to the Middle Ages. An Arab writer
relates that in the year 1063 or 1064 A.D., in the reign of the caliph
Caiem, a rumour went abroad through Bagdad, which soon spread all over the
province of Irac, that some Turks out hunting in the desert had seen a
black tent, where many men and women were beating their faces and uttering
loud cries, as it is the custom to do in the East when some one is dead.
And among the cries they distinguished these words, “The great King of the
Jinn is dead, woe to this country!” In consequence of this a mysterious
threat was circulated from Armenia to Chuzistan that every town which did
not lament the dead King of the Jinn should utterly perish. Again, in the
year 1203 or 1204 A.D. a fatal disease, which attacked the throat, raged
in parts of Mosul and Irac, and it was divulged that a woman of the Jinn
called Umm ’Uncūd or “Mother of the Grape-cluster” had lost her son, and
that all who did not lament for him would fall victims to the epidemic. So
men and women sought to save themselves from death by assembling and
beating their faces, while they cried out in a lamentable voice, “O mother
of the Grape-cluster, excuse us; the Grape-cluster is dead; we knew it
not.”(17)