Oftener, however, the expelled demons are not represented at all,

but are understood to be present invisibly in the material and

visible vehicle which conveys them away. Here, again, it will be

convenient to distinguish between occasional and periodical

expulsions. We begin with the former.

2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle

THE VEHICLE which conveys away the demons may be of various kinds. A

common one is a little ship or boat. Thus, in the southern district

of the island of Ceram, when a whole village suffers from sickness,

a small ship is made and filled with rice, tobacco, eggs, and so

forth, which have been contributed by all the people. A little sail

is hoisted on the ship. When all is ready, a man calls out in a very

loud voice, "O all ye sicknesses, ye smallpoxes, agues, measles,

etc., who have visited us so long and wasted us so sorely, but who

now cease to plague us, we have made ready this ship for you, and we

have furnished you with provender sufficient for the voyage. Ye

shall have no lack of food nor of betel-leaves nor of areca nuts nor

of tobacco. Depart, and sail away from us directly; never come near

us again; but go to a land which is far from here. Let all the tides

and winds waft you speedily thither, and so convey you thither that

for the time to come we may live sound and well, and that we may

never see the sun rise on you again." Then ten or twelve men carry

the vessel to the shore, and let it drift away with the land-breeze,

feeling convinced that they are free from sickness for ever, or at

least till the next time. If sickness attacks them again, they are

sure it is not the same sickness, but a different one, which in due

time they dismiss in the same manner. When the demon-laden bark is

lost to sight, the bearers return to the village, whereupon a man

cries out, "The sicknesses are now gone, vanished, expelled, and

sailed away." At this all the people come running out of their

houses, passing the word from one to the other with great joy,

beating on gongs and on tinkling instruments.

Similar ceremonies are commonly resorted to in other East Indian

islands. Thus in Timor-laut, to mislead the demons who are causing

sickness, a small proa, containing the image of a man and

provisioned for a long voyage, is allowed to drift away with wind

and tide. As it is being launched, the people cry, "O sickness, go

from here; turn back; what do you here in this poor land?" Three

days after this ceremony a pig is killed, and part of the flesh is

offered to Dudilaa, who lives in the sun. One of the oldest men

says, "Old sir, I beseech you make well the grand-children,

children, women, and men, that we may be able to eat pork and rice

and to drink palmwine. I will keep my promise. Eat your share, and

make all the people in the village well." If the proa is stranded at

any inhabited spot, the sickness will break out there. Hence a

stranded proa excites much alarm amongst the coast population, and

they immediately burn it, because demons fly from fire. In the

island of Buru the proa which carries away the demons of disease is

about twenty feet long, rigged out with sails, oars, anchor, and so

on, and well stocked with provisions. For a day and a night the

people beat gongs and drums, and rush about to frighten the demons.

Next morning ten stalwart young men strike the people with branches,

which have been previously dipped in an earthen pot of water. As

soon as they have done so, they run down to the beach, put the

branches on board the proa, launch another boat in great haste, and

tow the disease-burdened bark far out to sea. There they cast it

off, and one of them calls out, "Grandfather Smallpox, go away--go

willingly away--go visit another land; we have made you food ready

for the voyage, we have now nothing more to give." When they have

landed, all the people bathe together in the sea. In this ceremony

the reason for striking the people with the branches is clearly to

rid them of the disease-demons, which are then supposed to be

transferred to the branches. Hence the haste with which the branches

are deposited in the proa and towed away to sea. So in the inland

districts of Ceram, when smallpox or other sickness is raging, the

priest strikes all the houses with consecrated branches, which are

then thrown into the river, to be carried down to the sea; exactly

as amongst the Wotyaks of Russia the sticks which have been used for

expelling the devils from the village are thrown into the river,

that the current may sweep the baleful burden away. The plan of

putting puppets in the boat to represent sick persons, in order to

lure the demons after them, is not uncommon. For example, most of

the pagan tribes on the coast of Borneo seek to drive away epidemic

disease as follows. They carve one or more rough human images from

the pith of the sago palm and place them on a small raft or boat or

full-rigged Malay ship together with rice and other food. The boat

is decked with blossoms of the areca palm and with ribbons made from

its leaves, and thus adorned the little craft is allowed to float

out to sea with the ebb-tide, bearing, as the people fondly think or

hope, the sickness away with it.

Often the vehicle which carries away the collected demons or ills of

a whole community is an animal or scapegoat. In the Central

Provinces of India, when cholera breaks out in a village, every one

retires after sunset to his house. The priests then parade the

streets, taking from the roof of each house a straw, which is burnt

with an offering of rice, ghee, and turmeric, at some shrine to the

east of the village. Chickens daubed with vermilion are driven away

in the direction of the smoke, and are believed to carry the disease

with them. If they fail, goats are tried, and last of all pigs. When

cholera rages among the Bhars, Mallans, and Kurmis of India, they

take a goat or a buffalo--in either case the animal must be a

female, and as black as possible--then having tied some grain,

cloves, and red lead in a yellow cloth on its back they turn it out

of the village. The animal is conducted beyond the boundary and not

allowed to return. Sometimes the buffalo is marked with a red

pigment and driven to the next village, where he carries the plague

with him.

Amongst the Dinkas, a pastoral people of the White Nile, each family

possesses a sacred cow. When the country is threatened with war,

famine, or any other public calamity, the chiefs of the village

require a particular family to surrender their sacred cow to serve

as a scapegoat. The animal is driven by the women to the brink of

the river and across it to the other bank, there to wander in the

wilderness and fall a prey to ravening beasts. Then the women return

in silence and without looking behind them; were they to cast a

backward glance, they imagine that the ceremony would have no

effect. In 1857, when the Aymara Indians of Bolivia and Peru were

suffering from a plague, they loaded a black llama with the clothes

of the plague-stricken people, sprinkled brandy on the clothes, and

then turned the animal loose on the mountains, hoping that it would

carry the pest away with it.

Occasionally the scapegoat is a man. For example, from time to time

the gods used to warn the King of Uganda that his foes the Banyoro

were working magic against him and his people to make them die of

disease. To avert such a catastrophe the king would send a scapegoat

to the frontier of Bunyoro, the land of the enemy. The scapegoat

consisted of either a man and a boy or a woman and her child, chosen

because of some mark or bodily defect, which the gods had noted and

by which the victims were to be recognised. With the human victims

were sent a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog; and a strong guard

escorted them to the land which the god had indicated. There the

limbs of the victims were broken and they were left to die a

lingering death in the enemy's country, being too crippled to crawl

back to Uganda. The disease or plague was thought to have been thus

transferred to the victims and to have been conveyed back in their

persons to the land from which it came.

Some of the aboriginal tribes of China, as a protection against

pestilence, select a man of great muscular strength to act the part

of scapegoat. Having besmeared his face with paint, he performs many

antics with the view of enticing all pestilential and noxious

influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a

priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women

beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the

town or village. In the Punjaub a cure for the murrain is to hire a

man of the Chamar caste, turn his face away from the village, brand

him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle taking

the murrain with him. He must not look back.

3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle

THE MEDIATE expulsion of evils by means of a scapegoat or other

material vehicle, like the immediate expulsion of them in invisible

form, tends to become periodic, and for a like reason. Thus every

year, generally in March, the people of Leti, Moa, and Lakor,

islands of the Indian Archipelago, send away all their diseases to

sea. They make a proa about six feet long, rig it with sails, oars,

rudder, and other gear, and every family deposits in its some rice,

fruit, a fowl, two eggs, insects that ravage the fields, and so on.

Then they let it drift away to sea, saying, "Take away from here all

kinds of sickness, take them to other islands, to other lands,

distribute them in places that lie eastward, where the sun rises."

The Biajas of Borneo annually send to sea a little bark laden with

the sins and misfortunes of the people. The crew of any ship that

falls in with the ill-omened bark at sea will suffer all the sorrows

with which it is laden. A like custom is annually observed by the

Dusuns of the Tuaran district in British North Borneo. The ceremony

is the most important of the whole year. Its aim is to bring good

luck to the village during the ensuing year by solemnly expelling

all the evil spirits that may have collected in or about the houses

throughout the last twelve months. The task of routing out the

demons and banishing them devolves chiefly on women. Dressed in

their finest array, they go in procession through the village. One

of them carries a small sucking pig in a basket on her back; and all

of them bear wands, with which they belabour the little pig at the

appropriate moment; its squeals help to attract the vagrant spirits.

At every house the women dance and sing, clashing castanets or

cymbals of brass and jingling bunches of little brass bells in both

hands. When the performance has been repeated at every house in the

village, the procession defiles down to the river, and all the evil

spirits, which the performers have chased from the houses, follow

them to the edge of the water. There a raft has been made ready and

moored to the bank. It contains offerings of food, cloth,

cooking-pots, and swords; and the deck is crowded with figures of

men, women, animals, and birds, all made out of the leaves of the

sago palm. The evil spirits now embark on the raft, and when they

are all aboard, it is pushed off and allowed to float down with the

current, carrying the demons with it. Should the raft run aground

near the village, it is shoved off with all speed, lest the

invisible passengers should seize the opportunity of landing and

returning to the village. Finally, the sufferings of the little pig,

whose squeals served to decoy the demons from their lurking-places,

are terminated by death, for it is killed and its carcase thrown

away.

Every year, at the beginning of the dry season, the Nicobar

Islanders carry the model of a ship through their villages. The

devils are chased out of the huts, and driven on board the little

ship, which is then launched and suffered to sail away with the

wind. The ceremony has been described by a catechist, who witnessed

it at Car Nicobar in July 1897. For three days the people were busy

preparing two very large floating cars, shaped like canoes, fitted

with sails, and loaded with certain leaves, which possessed the

valuable property of expelling devils. While the young people were

thus engaged, the exorcists and the elders sat in a house singing

songs by turns; but often they would come forth, pace the beach

armed with rods, and forbid the devil to enter the village. The

fourth day of the solemnity bore a name which means "Expelling the

Devil by Sails." In the evening all the villagers assembled, the

women bringing baskets of ashes and bunches of devil-expelling

leaves. These leaves were then distributed to everybody, old and

young. When all was ready, a band of robust men, attended by a guard

of exorcists, carried one of the cars down to the sea on the right

side of the village graveyard, and set it floating in the water. As

soon as they had returned, another band of men carried the other car

to the beach and floated it similarly in the sea to the left of the

graveyard. The demon-laden barks being now launched, the women threw

ashes from the shore, and the whole crowd shouted, saying, "Fly

away, devil, fly away, never come again!" The wind and the tide

being favourable, the canoes sailed quickly away; and that night all

the people feasted together with great joy, because the devil had

departed in the direction of Chowra. A similar expulsion of devils

takes place once a year in other Nicobar villages; but the

ceremonies are held at different times in different places.

Amongst many of the aboriginal tribes of China, a great festival is

celebrated in the third month of every year. It is held by way of a

general rejoicing over what the people believe to be a total

annihilation of the ills of the past twelve months. The destruction

is supposed to be effected in the following way. A large earthenware

jar filled with gunpowder, stones, and bits of iron is buried in the

earth. A train of gunpowder, communicating with the jar, is then

laid; and a match being applied, the jar and its contents are blown

up. The stones and bits of iron represent the ills and disasters of

the past year, and the dispersion of them by the explosion is

believed to remove the ills and disasters themselves. The festival

is attended with much revelling and drunkenness.

At Old Calabar on the coast of Guinea, the devils and ghosts are, or

used to be, publicly expelled once in two years. Among the spirits

thus driven from their haunts are the souls of all the people who

died since the last lustration of the town. About three weeks or a

month before the expulsion, which according to one account takes

place in the month of November, rude effigies representing men and

animals, such as crocodiles, leopards, elephants, bullocks, and

birds, are made of wicker-work or wood, and being hung with strips

of cloth and bedizened with gew-gaws, are set before the door of

every house. About three o'clock in the morning of the day appointed

for the ceremony the whole population turns out into the streets,

and proceeds with a deafening uproar and in a state of the wildest

excitement to drive all lurking devils and ghosts into the effigies,

in order that they may be banished with them from the abodes of men.

For this purpose bands of people roam through the streets knocking

on doors, firing guns, beating drums, blowing on horns, ringing

bells, clattering pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might

and main, in short making all the noise it is possible for them to

raise. The hubbub goes on till the approach of dawn, when it

gradually subsides and ceases altogether at sunrise. By this time

the houses have been thoroughly swept, and all the frightened

spirits are supposed to have huddled into the effigies or their

fluttering drapery. In these wicker figures are also deposited the

sweepings of the houses and the ashes of yesterday's fires. Then the

demon-laden images are hastily snatched up, carried in tumultuous

procession down to the brink of the river, and thrown into the water

to the tuck of drums. The ebb-tide bears them away seaward, and thus

the town is swept clean of ghosts and devils for another two years.

Similar annual expulsions of embodied evils are not unknown in

Europe. On the evening of Easter Sunday the gypsies of Southern

Europe take a wooden vessel like a band-box, which rests cradle-wise

on two cross pieces of wood. In this they place herbs and simples,

together with the dried carcase of a snake, or lizard, which every

person present must first have touched with his fingers. The vessel

is then wrapt in white and red wool, carried by the oldest man from

tent to tent, and finally thrown into running water, not, however,

before every member of the band has spat into it once, and the

sorceress has uttered some spells over it. They believe that by

performing this ceremony they dispel all the illnesses that would

otherwise have afflicted them in the course of the year; and that if

any one finds the vessel and opens it out of curiosity, he and his

will be visited by all the maladies which the others have escaped.

The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year

are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the

Garos of Assam, "besides the sacrifices for individual cases of

illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year

by a whole community or village, and are intended to safeguard its

members from dangers of the forest, and from sickness and mishap

during the coming twelve months. The principal of these is the

Asongtata ceremony. Close to the outskirts of every big village a

number of stones may be noticed stuck into the ground, apparently

without order or method. These are known by the name of _asong,_ and

on them is offered the sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The

sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later, that of a

_langur_ (_Entellus_ monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered

necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and

is led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the

village. It is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled

villagers, meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to

frighten and drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up

their residence within. The round of the village having been made in

this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the

village, killed by a blow of a _dao,_ which disembowels it, and then

crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified

animal long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form _chevaux de

frise_ round about it. These commemorate the days when such defences

surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and

they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from

the wild animals of the forest. The _langur_ required for the

purpose is hunted down some days before, but should it be found

impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take its place; a hulock

may not be used." Here the crucified ape or rat is the public

scapegoat, which by its vicarious sufferings and death relieves the

people from all sickness and mishap in the coming year.

Again, on one day of the year the Bhotiyas of Juhar, in the Western

Himalayas, take a dog, intoxicate him with spirits and bhang or

hemp, and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village

and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and

stones, and believe that, when they have done so, no disease or

misfortune will visit the village during the year. In some parts of

Breadalbane it was formerly the custom on New Year's Day to take a

dog to the door, give him a bit of bread, and drive him out, saying,

"Get away, you dog! Whatever death of men or loss of cattle would

happen in this house to the end of the present year, may it all

light on your head!" On the Day of Atonement, which was the tenth

day of the seventh month, the Jewish high-priest laid both his hands

on the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of

the Children of Israel, and, having thereby transferred the sins of

the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically

laid, may also be a human being. At Onitsha, on the Niger, two human

beings used to be annually sacrificed to take away the sins of the

land. The victims were purchased by public subscription. All persons

who, during the past year, had fallen into gross sins, such as

incendiarism, theft, adultery, witchcraft, and so forth, were

expected to contribute 28 _ngugas,_ or a little over £2. The money

thus collected was taken into the interior of the country and

expended in the purchase of two sickly persons "to be offered as a

sacrifice for all these abominable crimes--one for the land and one

for the river." A man from a neighbouring town was hired to put them

to death. On the twenty-seventh of February 1858 the Rev. J. C.

Taylor witnessed the sacrifice of one of these victims. The sufferer

was a woman, about nineteen or twenty years of age. They dragged her

alive along the ground, face downwards, from the king's house to the

river, a distance of two miles, the crowds who accompanied her

crying, "Wickedness! wickedness!" The intention was "to take away

the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a

merciless manner, as if the weight of all their wickedness was thus

carried away." Similar customs are said to be still secretly

practised every year by many tribes in the delta of the Niger in

spite of the vigilance of the British Government. Among the Yoruba

negroes of West Africa "the human victim chosen for sacrifice, and

who may be either a freeborn or a slave, a person of noble or

wealthy parentage, or one of humble birth, is, after he has been

chosen and marked out for the purpose, called an _Oluwo._ He is

always well fed and nourished and supplied with whatever he should

desire during the period of his confinement. When the occasion

arrives for him to be sacrificed and offered up, he is commonly led

about and paraded through the streets of the town or city of the

Sovereign who would sacrifice him for the well-being of his

government and of every family and individual under it, in order

that he might carry off the sin, guilt, misfortune and death of all

without exception. Ashes and chalk would be employed to hide his

identity by the one being freely thrown over his head, and his face

painted with the latter, whilst individuals would often rush out of

their houses to lay their hands upon him that they might thus

transfer to him their sin, guilt, trouble, and death." This parade

over, he is taken to an inner sanctuary and beheaded. His last words

or dying groans are the signal for an outburst of joy among the

people assembled outside, who believe that the sacrifice has been

accepted and the divine wrath appeased.

In Siam it used to be the custom on one day of the year to single

out a woman broken down by debauchery, and carry her on a litter

through all the streets to the music of drums and hautboys. The mob

insulted her and pelted her with dirt; and after having carried her

through the whole city, they threw her on a dunghill or a hedge of

thorns outside the ramparts, forbidding her ever to enter the walls

again. They believed that the woman thus drew upon herself all the

malign influences of the air and of evil spirits. The Bataks of

Sumatra offer either a red horse or a buffalo as a public sacrifice

to purify the land and obtain the favour of the gods. Formerly, it

is said, a man was bound to the same stake as the buffalo, and when

they killed the animal, the man was driven away; no one might

receive him, converse with him, or give him food. Doubtless he was

supposed to carry away the sins and misfortunes of the people.

Sometimes the scapegoat is a divine animal. The people of Malabar

share the Hindoo reverence for the cow, to kill and eat which "they

esteem to be a crime as heinous as homicide or wilful murder."

Nevertheless the "Bramans transfer the sins of the people into one

or more Cows, which are then carry'd away, both the Cows and the

Sins wherewith these Beasts are charged, to what place the Braman

shall appoint." When the ancient Egyptians sacrificed a bull, they

invoked upon its head all the evils that might otherwise befall

themselves and the land of Egypt, and thereupon they either sold the

bull's head to the Greeks or cast it into the river. Now, it cannot

be said that in the times known to us the Egyptians worshipped bulls

in general, for they seem to have commonly killed and eaten them.

But a good many circumstances point to the conclusion that

originally all cattle, bulls as well as cows, were held sacred by

the Egyptians. For not only were all cows esteemed holy by them and

never sacrificed, but even bulls might not be sacrificed unless they

had certain natural marks; a priest examined every bull before it

was sacrificed; if it had the proper marks, he put his seal on the

animal in token that it might be sacrificed; and if a man sacrificed

a bull which had not been sealed, he was put to death. Moreover, the

worship of the black bulls Apis and Mnevis, especially the former,

played an important part in Egyptian religion; all bulls that died a

natural death were carefully buried in the suburbs of the cities,

and their bones were afterwards collected from all parts of Egypt

and interred in a single spot; and at the sacrifice of a bull in the

great rites of Isis all the worshippers beat their breasts and

mourned. On the whole, then, we are perhaps entitled to infer that

bulls were originally, as cows were always, esteemed sacred by the

Egyptians, and that the slain bull upon whose head they laid the

misfortunes of the people was once a divine scapegoat. It seems not

improbable that the lamb annually slain by the Madis of Central

Africa is a divine scapegoat, and the same supposition may partly

explain the Zuni sacrifice of the turtle.

Lastly, the scapegoat may be a divine man. Thus, in November the

Gonds of India worship Ghansyam Deo, the protector of the crops, and

at the festival the god himself is said to descend on the head of

one of the worshippers, who is suddenly seized with a kind of fit

and, after staggering about, rushes off into the jungle, where it is

believed that, if left to himself, he would die mad. However, they

bring him back, but he does not recover his senses for one or two

days. The people think that one man is thus singled out as a

scapegoat for the sins of the rest of the village. In the temple of

the Moon the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus 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, and wandered solitary up and down the woods, like the Gond

in the jungle, 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 whose

business it was to slay these human victims and to whom practice had

given dexterity, advanced from the crowd and thrust a sacred spear

into the victim's side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which

the slain man 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. This 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 hands on the

animal's head; and since the man was believed to be possessed by the

divine spirit, we have here an undoubted example of a man-god slain

to take away the sins and misfortunes of the people.

In Tibet the ceremony of the scapegoat presents some remarkable

features. The Tibetan new year begins with the new moon which

appears about the fifteenth of February. For twenty-three days

afterwards the government of Lhasa, the capital, is taken out of the

hands of the ordinary rulers and entrusted to the monk of the Debang

monastery who offers to pay the highest sum for the privilege. The

successful bidder is called the Jalno, and he announces his

accession to power in person, going through the streets of Lhasa

with a silver stick in his hand. Monks from all the neighbouring

monasteries and temples assemble to pay him homage. The Jalno

exercises his authority in the most arbitrary manner for his own

benefit, as all the fines which he exacts are his by purchase. The

profit he makes is about ten times the amount of the purchase money.

His men go about the streets in order to discover any conduct on the

part of the inhabitants that can be found fault with. Every house in

Lhasa is taxed at this time, and the slightest offence is punished

with unsparing rigour by fines. This severity of the Jalno drives

all working classes out of the city till the twenty-three days are

over. But if the laity go out, the clergy come in. All the Buddhist

monasteries of the country for miles round about open their gates

and disgorge their inmates. All the roads that lead down into Lhasa

from the neighbouring mountains are full of monks hurrying to the

capital, some on foot, some on horseback, some riding asses or

lowing oxen, all carrying their prayer-books and culinary utensils.

In such multitudes do they come that the streets and squares of the

city are encumbered with their swarms, and incarnadined with their

red cloaks. The disorder and confusion are indescribable. Bands of

the holy men traverse the streets chanting prayers, or uttering wild

cries. They meet, they jostle, they quarrel, they fight; bloody

noses, black eyes, and broken heads are freely given and received.

All day long, too, from before the peep of dawn till after darkness

has fallen, these red-cloaked monks hold services in the dim

incense-laden air of the great Machindranath temple, the cathedral

of Lhasa; and thither they crowd thrice a day to receive their doles

of tea and soup and money. The cathedral is a vast building,

standing in the centre of the city, and surrounded by bazaars and

shops. The idols in it are richly inlaid with gold and precious

stones.

Twenty-four days after the Jalno has ceased to have authority, he

assumes it again, and for ten days acts in the same arbitrary manner

as before. On the first of the ten days the priests again assemble

at the cathedral, pray to the gods to prevent sickness and other

evils among the people, "and, as a peace-offering, sacrifice one

man. The man is not killed purposely, but the ceremony he undergoes

often proves fatal. Grain is thrown against his head, and his face

is painted half white, half black." Thus grotesquely disguised, and

carrying a coat of skin on his arm, he is called the King of the

Years, and sits daily in the market-place, where he helps himself to

whatever he likes and goes about shaking a black yak's tail over the

people, who thus transfer their bad luck to him. On the tenth day,

all the troops in Lhasa march to the great temple and form in line

before it. The King of the Years is brought forth from the temple

and receives small donations from the assembled multitude. He then

ridicules the Jalno, saying to him, "What we perceive through the

five senses is no illusion. All you teach is untrue," and the like.

The Jalno, who represents the Grand Lama for the time being,

contests these heretical opinions; the dispute waxes warm, and at

last both agree to decide the questions at issue by a cast of the

dice, the Jalno offering to change places with the scapegoat should

the throw be against him. If the King of the Years wins, much evil

is prognosticated; but if the Jalno wins, there is great rejoicing,

for it proves that his adversary has been accepted by the gods as a

victim to bear all the sins of the people of Lhasa. Fortune,

however, always favours the Jalno, who throws sixes with unvarying

success, while his opponent turns up only ones. Nor is this so

extraordinary as at first sight it might appear; for the Jalno's

dice are marked with nothing but sixes and his adversary's with

nothing but ones. When he sees the finger of Providence thus plainly

pointed against him, the King of the Years is terrified and flees

away upon a white horse, with a white dog, a white bird, salt, and

so forth, which have all been provided for him by the government.

His face is still painted half white and half black, and he still

wears his leathern coat. The whole populace pursues him, hooting,

yelling, and firing blank shots in volleys after him. Thus driven

out of the city, he is detained for seven days in the great chamber

of horrors at the Samyas monastery, surrounded by monstrous and

terrific images of devils and skins of huge serpents and wild

beasts. Thence he goes away into the mountains of Chetang, where he

has to remain an outcast for several months or a year in a narrow

den. If he dies before the time is out, the people say it is an

auspicious omen; but if he survives, he may return to Lhasa and play

the part of scapegoat over again the following year.

This quaint ceremonial, still annually observed in the secluded

capital of Buddhism--the Rome of Asia--is interesting because it

exhibits, in a clearly marked religious stratification, a series of

divine redeemers themselves redeemed, of vicarious sacrifices

vicariously atoned for, of gods undergoing a process of

fossilisation, who, while they retain the privileges, have

disburdened themselves of the pains and penalties of divinity. In

the Jalno we may without undue straining discern a successor of

those temporary kings, those mortal gods, who purchase a short lease

of power and glory at the price of their lives. That he is the

temporary substitute of the Grand Lama is certain; that he is, or

was once, liable to act as scapegoat for the people is made nearly

certain by his offer to change places with the real scapegoat--the

King of the Years--if the arbitrament of the dice should go against

him. It is true that the conditions under which the question is now

put to the hazard have reduced the offer to an idle form. But such

forms are no mere mushroom growths, springing up of themselves in a

night. If they are now lifeless formalities, empty husks devoid of

significance, we may be sure that they once had a life and a

meaning; if at the present day they are blind alleys leading

nowhere, we may be certain that in former days they were paths that

led somewhere, if only to death. That death was the goal to which of

old the Tibetan scapegoat passed after his brief period of licence

in the market-place, is a conjecture that has much to commend it.

Analogy suggests it; the blank shots fired after him, the statement

that the ceremony often proves fatal, the belief that his death is a

happy omen, all confirm it. We need not wonder then that the Jalno,

after paying so dear to act as deputy-deity for a few weeks, should

have preferred to die by deputy rather than in his own person when

his time was up. The painful but necessary duty was accordingly laid

on some poor devil, some social outcast, some wretch with whom the

world had gone hard, who readily agreed to throw away his life at

the end of a few days if only he might have his fling in the

meantime. For observe that while the time allowed to the original

deputy--the Jalno--was measured by weeks, the time allowed to the

deputy's deputy was cut down to days, ten days according to one

authority, seven days according to another. So short a rope was

doubtless thought a long enough tether for so black or sickly a

sheep; so few sands in the hour-glass, slipping so fast away,

sufficed for one who had wasted so many precious years. Hence in the

jack-pudding who now masquerades with motley countenance in the

market-place of Lhasa, sweeping up misfortune with a black yak's

tail, we may fairly see the substitute of a substitute, the vicar of

a vicar, the proxy on whose back the heavy burden was laid when it

had been lifted from nobler shoulders. But the clue, if we have

followed it aright, does not stop at the Jalno; it leads straight

back to the pope of Lhasa himself, the Grand Lama, of whom the Jalno

is merely the temporary vicar. The analogy of many customs in many

lands points to the conclusion that, if this human divinity stoops

to resign his ghostly power for a time into the hands of a

substitute, it is, or rather was once, for no other reason than that

the substitute might die in his stead. Thus through the mist of ages

unillumined by the lamp of history, the tragic figure of the pope of

Buddhism--God's vicar on earth for Asia--looms dim and sad as the

man-god who bore his people's sorrows, the Good Shepherd who laid

down his life for the sheep.

4. On Scapegoats in General

THE FOREGOING survey of the custom of publicly expelling the

accumulated evils of a village or town or country suggests a few

general observations.

In the first place, it will not be disputed that what I have called

the immediate and the mediate expulsions of evil are identical in

intention; in other words, that whether the evils are conceived of

as invisible or as embodied in a material form, is a circumstance

entirely subordinate to the main object of the ceremony, which is

simply to effect a total clearance of all the ills that have been

infesting a people. If any link were wanting to connect the two

kinds of expulsion, it would be furnished by such a practice as that

of sending the evils away in a litter or a boat. For here, on the

one hand, the evils are invisible and intangible; and, on the other

hand, there is a visible and tangible vehicle to convey them away.

And a scapegoat is nothing more than such a vehicle.

In the second place, when a general clearance of evils is resorted

to periodically, the interval between the celebrations of the

ceremony is commonly a year, and the time of year when the ceremony

takes place usually coincides with some well-marked change of

season, such as the beginning or end of winter in the arctic and

temperate zones, and the beginning or end of the rainy season in the

tropics. The increased mortality which such climatic changes are apt

to produce, especially amongst ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed

savages, is set down by primitive man to the agency of demons, who

must accordingly be expelled. Hence, in the tropical regions of New

Britain and Peru, the devils are or were driven out at the beginning

of the rainy season; hence, on the dreary coasts of Baffin Land,

they are banished at the approach of the bitter Arctic winter. When

a tribe has taken to husbandry, the time for the general expulsion

of devils is naturally made to agree with one of the great epochs of

the agricultural year, as sowing, or harvest; but, as these epochs

themselves naturally coincide with changes of season, it does not

follow that the transition from the hunting or pastoral to the

agricultural life involves any alteration in the time of celebrating

this great annual rite. Some of the agricultural communities of

India and the Hindoo Koosh, as we have seen, hold their general

clearance of demons at harvest, others at sowing-time. But, at

whatever season of the year it is held, the general expulsion of

devils commonly marks the beginning of the new year. For, before

entering on a new year, people are anxious to rid themselves of the

troubles that have harassed them in the past; hence it comes about

that in so many communities the beginning of the new year is

inaugurated with a solemn and public banishment of evil spirits.

In the third place, it is to be observed that this public and

periodic expulsion of devils is commonly preceded or followed by a

period of general license, during which the ordinary restraints of

society are thrown aside, and all offences, short of the gravest,

are allowed to pass unpunished. In Guinea and Tonquin the period of

license precedes the public expulsion of demons; and the suspension

of the ordinary government in Lhasa previous to the expulsion of the

scapegoat is perhaps a relic of a similar period of universal

license. Amongst the Hos of India the period of license follows the

expulsion of the devil. Amongst the Iroquois it hardly appears

whether it preceded or followed the banishment of evils. In any

case, the extraordinary relaxation of all ordinary rules of conduct

on such occasions is doubtless to be explained by the general

clearance of evils which precedes or follows it. On the one hand,

when a general riddance of evil and absolution from all sin is in

immediate prospect, men are encouraged to give the rein to their

passions, trusting that the coming ceremony will wipe out the score

which they are running up so fast. On the other hand, when the

ceremony has just taken place, men's minds are freed from the

oppressive sense, under which they generally labour, of an

atmosphere surcharged with devils; and in the first revulsion of joy

they overleap the limits commonly imposed by custom and morality.

When the ceremony takes place at harvest-time, the elation of

feeling which it excites is further stimulated by the state of

physical wellbeing produced by an abundant supply of food.

Fourthly, the employment of a divine man or animal as a scapegoat is

especially to be noted; indeed, we are here directly concerned with

the custom of banishing evils only in so far as these evils are

believed to be transferred to a god who is afterwards slain. It may

be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as

a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from

the examples cited. For, as has already been pointed out, the custom

of killing a god dates from so early a period of human history that

in later ages, even when the custom continues to be practised, it is

liable to be misinterpreted. The divine character of the animal or

man is forgotten, and he comes to be regarded merely as an ordinary

victim. This is especially likely to be 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 the

killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the

execution of a criminal.

If we ask why a dying god should be chosen to take upon himself and

carry away the sins and sorrows of the people, it may be suggested

that in the practice of using the divinity as a scapegoat we have a

combination of two customs which were at one time distinct and

independent. On the one hand we have seen that it has been customary

to kill the human or animal god in order to save his divine life

from being weakened by the inroads of age. On the other hand we have

seen that it has been customary to have a general expulsion of evils

and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to people to combine these

two customs, the result would be the employment of the dying god as

a scapegoat. He was killed, not originally to take away sin, but to

save the divine life from the degeneracy of old age; but, since he

had to be killed at any rate, people may have thought that they

might as well seize the opportunity to lay upon him the burden of

their sufferings and sins, in order that he might bear it away with

him to the unknown world beyond the grave.

The use of the divinity as a scapegoat clears up the ambiguity

which, as we saw, appears to hang about the European folk-custom of

"carrying out Death." Grounds have been shown for believing that in

this ceremony the so-called Death was originally the spirit of

vegetation, who was annually slain in spring, in order that he might

come to life again with all the vigour of youth. But, as I pointed

out, there are certain features in the ceremony which are not

explicable on this hypothesis alone. Such are the marks of joy with

which the effigy of Death is carried out to be buried or burnt, and

the fear and abhorrence of it manifested by the bearers. But these

features become at once intelligible if we suppose that the Death

was not merely the dying god of vegetation, but also a public

scapegoat, upon whom were laid all the evils that had afflicted the

people during the past year. Joy on such an occasion is natural and

appropriate; and if the dying god appears to be the object of that

fear and abhorrence which are properly due not to himself, but to

the sins and misfortunes with which he is laden, this arises merely

from the difficulty of distinguishing, or at least of marking the

distinction, between the bearer and the burden. When the burden is

of a baleful character, the bearer of it will be feared and shunned

just as much as if he were himself instinct with those dangerous

properties of which, as it happens, he is only the vehicle.

Similarly we have seen that disease-laden and sin-laden boats are

dreaded and shunned by East Indian peoples. Again, the view that in

these popular customs the Death is a scapegoat as well as a

representative of the divine spirit of vegetation derives some

support from the circumstance that its expulsion is always

celebrated in spring and chiefly by Slavonic peoples. For the

Slavonic year began in spring; and thus, in one of its aspects, the

ceremony of "carrying out Death" would be an example of the

widespread custom of expelling the accumulated evils of the old year

before entering on a new one.

LVIII. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity

1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome

WE are now prepared to notice the use of the human scapegoat in

classical antiquity. Every year on the fourteenth of March a man

clad in skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome,

beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. He was

called Mamurius Veturius, that is, "the old Mars," and as the

ceremony took place on the day preceding the first full moon of the

old Roman year (which began on the first of March), the skin-clad

man must have represented the Mars of the past year, who was driven

out at the beginning of a new one. Now Mars was originally not a god

of war but of vegetation. For it was to Mars that the Roman

husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and his vines, his

fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the priestly college

of the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to sacrifice for the

growth of the crops, addressed their petitions almost exclusively;

and it was to Mars, as we saw, that a horse was sacrificed in

October to secure an abundant harvest. Moreover, it was to Mars,

under his title of "Mars of the woods" (_Mars Silvanus_), that

farmers offered sacrifice for the welfare of their cattle. We have

already seen that cattle are commonly supposed to be under the

special patronage of tree-gods. Once more, the consecration of the

vernal month of March to Mars seems to point him out as the deity of

the sprouting vegetation. Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old

Mars at the beginning of the new year in spring is identical with

the Slavonic custom of "carrying out Death," if the view here taken

of the latter custom is correct. The similarity of the Roman and

Slavonic customs has been already remarked by scholars, who appear,

however, to have taken Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding

figures in the Slavonic ceremonies to be representatives of the old

year rather than of the old god of vegetation. It is possible that

ceremonies of this kind may have come to be thus interpreted in

later times even by the people who practised them. But the

personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be

primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic, ceremony, the

representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a

deity of vegetation but also as a scapegoat. His expulsion implies

this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such,

should be expelled from the city. But it is otherwise if he is also

a scapegoat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the

boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other

lands. And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius appears to have been driven

away to the land of the Oscans, the enemies of Rome.

2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece

THE ANCIENT Greeks were also familiar with the use of a human

scapegoat. In Plutarch's native town of Chaeronea a ceremony of this

kind was performed by the chief magistrate at the Town Hall, and by

each householder at his own home. It was called the "expulsion of

hunger." A slave was beaten with rods of the _agnus castus,_ and

turned out of doors with the words, "Out with hunger, and in with

wealth and health." When Plutarch held the office of chief

magistrate of his native town he performed this ceremony at the Town

Hall, and he has recorded the discussion to which the custom

afterwards gave rise.

But in civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker

forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious

Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most

brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the

poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole

year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice

and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred

garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city,

while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might

fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to

death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly

maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public

expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine,

befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.

One of the victims was sacrificed for the men and the other for the

women. The former wore round his neck a string of black, the latter

a string of white figs. Sometimes, it seems, the victim slain on

behalf of the women was a woman. They were led about the city and

then sacrificed, apparently by being stoned to death outside the

city. But such sacrifices were not confined to extraordinary

occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the

festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and

one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death. The

city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one

of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a

scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others; six

days before his execution he was excommunicated, "in order that he

alone might bear the sins of all the people."

From the Lover's Leap, a white bluff at the southern end of their

island, the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal into the sea

as a scapegoat. But to lighten his fall they fastened live birds and

feathers to him, and a flotilla of small boats waited below to catch

him and convey him beyond the boundary. Probably these humane

precautions were a mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the

scapegoat into the sea to drown. The Leucadian ceremony took place

at the time of a sacrifice to Apollo, who had a temple or sanctuary

on the spot. Elsewhere it was customary to cast a young man every

year into the sea, with the prayer, "Be thou our offscouring." This

ceremony was supposed to rid the people of the evils by which they

were beset, or according to a somewhat different interpretation it

redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to the sea-god. As

practised by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century before

our era, the custom of the scapegoat was as follows. When a city

suffered from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or

deformed person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which

afflicted the community. He was brought to a suitable place, where

dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These

he ate. Then he was beaten seven times upon his genital organs with

squills and branches of the wild fig and other wild trees, while the

flutes played a particular tune. Afterwards he was burned on a pyre

built of the wood of forest trees; and his ashes were cast into the

sea. A similar custom appears to have been annually celebrated by

the Asiatic Greeks at the harvest festival of the Thargelia.

In the ritual just described the scourging of the victim with

squills, branches of the wild fig, and so forth, cannot have been

intended to aggravate his sufferings, otherwise any stick would have

been good enough to beat him with. The true meaning of this part of

the ceremony has been explained by W. Mannhardt. He points out that

the ancients attributed to squills a magical power of averting evil

influences, and that accordingly they hung them up at the doors of

their houses and made use of them in purificatory rites. Hence the

Arcadian custom of whipping the image of Pan with squills at a

festival, or whenever the hunters returned empty-handed, must have

been meant, not to punish the god, but to purify him from the

harmful influences which were impeding him in the exercise of his

divine functions as a god who should supply the hunter with game.

Similarly the object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital

organs with squills and so on, must have been to release his

reproductive energies from any restraint or spell under which they

might be laid by demoniacal or other malignant agency; and as the

Thargelia at which he was annually sacrificed was an early harvest

festival celebrated in May, we must recognise in him a

representative of the creative and fertilising god of vegetation.

The representative of the god was annually slain for the purpose I

have indicated, that of maintaining the divine life in perpetual

vigour, untainted by the weakness of age; and before he was put to

death it was not unnatural to stimulate his reproductive powers in

order that these might be transmitted in full activity to his

successor, the new god or new embodiment of the old god, who was

doubtless supposed immediately to take the place of the one slain.

Similar reasoning would lead to a similar treatment of the scapegoat

on special occasions, such as drought or famine. If the crops did

not answer to the expectation of the husbandman, this would be

attributed to some failure in the generative powers of the god whose

function it was to produce the fruits of the earth. It might be

thought that he was under a spell or was growing old and feeble.

Accordingly he was slain in the person of his representative, with

all the ceremonies already described, in order that, born young

again, he might infuse his own youthful vigour into the stagnant

energies of nature. On the same principle we can understand why

Mamurius Veturius was beaten with rods, why the slave at the

Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the _agnus castus_ (a tree to

which magical properties were ascribed), why the effigy of Death in

some parts of Europe is assailed with sticks and stones, and why at

Babylon the criminal who played the god scourged before he was

crucified. The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the

agony of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any

malignant influences by which at the supreme moment he might

conceivably be beset.

Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia

represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been

well remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to

have masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He

points out that the process of caprification, as it is called, that

is, the artificial fertilisation of the cultivated fig-trees by

hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs, takes place in Greece

and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date of the

Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white

figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom

represented the men and the other the women, may have been a direct

imitation of the process of caprification designed, on the principle

of imitative magic, to assist the fertilisation of the fig-trees.

And since caprification is in fact a marriage of the male fig-tree

with the female fig-tree, Mr. Paton further supposes that the loves

of the trees may, on the same principle of imitative magic, have

been simulated by a mock or even a real marriage between the two

human victims, one of whom appears sometimes to have been a woman.

On this view the practice of beating the human victims on their

genitals with branches of wild fig-trees and with squills was a

charm intended to stimulate the generative powers of the man and

woman who for the time being personated the male and the female

fig-trees respectively, and who by their union in marriage, whether

real or pretended, were believed to help the trees to bear fruit.

The interpretation which I have adopted of the custom of beating the

human scapegoat with certain plants is supported by many analogies.

Thus among the Kai of German New Guinea, when a man wishes to make

his banana shoots bear fruit quickly, he beats them with a stick cut

from a banana-tree which has already borne fruit. Here it is obvious

that fruitfulness is believed to inhere in a stick cut from a

fruitful tree and to be imparted by contact to the young banana

plants. Similarly in New Caledonia a man will beat his taro plants

lightly with a branch, saying as he does so, "I beat this taro that

it may grow," after which he plants the branch in the ground at the

end of the field. Among the Indians of Brazil at the mouth of the

Amazon, when a man wishes to increase the size of his generative

organ, he strikes it with the fruit of a white aquatic plant called

_aninga,_ which grows luxuriantly on the banks of the river. The

fruit, which is inedible, resembles a banana, and is clearly chosen

for this purpose on account of its shape. The ceremony should be

performed three days before or after the new moon. In the county of

Bekes, in Hungary, barren women are fertilised by being struck with

a stick which has first been used to separate pairing dogs. Here a

fertilising virtue is clearly supposed to be inherent in the stick

and to be conveyed by contact to the women. The Toradjas of Central

Celebes think that the plant _Dracaena terminalis_ has a strong

soul, because when it is lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence when

a man is ill, his friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of

the head with _Dracaena_ leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul

with the strong soul of the plant.

These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which,

following my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have

given of the beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek

harvest festival of the Thargelia. That beating, being administered

to the generative organs of the victims by fresh green plants and

branches, is most naturally explained as a charm to increase the

reproductive energies of the men or women either by communicating to

them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by ridding them

of the maleficent influences; and this interpretation is confirmed

by the observation that the two victims represented the two sexes,

one of them standing for the men in general and the other for the

women. The season of the year when the ceremony was performed,

namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with the theory

that the rite had an agricultural significance. Further, that it was

above all intended to fertilise the fig-trees is strongly suggested

by the strings of black and white figs which were hung round the

necks of the victims, as well as by the blows which were given their

genital organs with the branches of a wild fig-tree; since this

procedure closely resembles the procedure which ancient and modern

husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly resorted to for the purpose

of actually fertilising their fig-trees. When we remember what an

important part the artificial fertilisation of the date palm-tree

appears to have played of old not only in the husbandry but in the

religion of Mesopotamia, there seems no reason to doubt that the

artificial fertilisation of the fig-tree may in like manner have

vindicated for itself a place in the solemn ritual of Greek

religion.

If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude that

while the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in later

classical times to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats, who

carried away with them the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of the

whole people, at an earlier time they may have been looked on as

embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of the corn but particularly of

the fig-trees; and that the beating which they received and the

death which they died were intended primarily to brace and refresh

the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish under

the torrid heat of the Greek summer.

The view here taken of the Greek scapegoat, if it is correct,

obviates an objection which might otherwise be brought against the

main argument of this book. To the theory that the priest of Aricia

was slain as a representative of the spirit of the grove, it might

have been objected that such a custom has no analogy in classical

antiquity. But reasons have now been given for believing that the

human being periodically and occasionally slain by the Asiatic

Greeks was regularly treated as an embodiment of a divinity of

vegetation. Probably the persons whom the Athenians kept to be

sacrificed were similarly treated as divine. That they were social

outcasts did not matter. On the primitive view a man is not chosen

to be the mouth-piece or embodiment of a god on account of his high

moral qualities or social rank. The divine afflatus descends equally

on the good and the bad, the lofty and the lowly. If then the

civilised Greeks of Asia and Athens habitually sacrificed men whom

they regarded as incarnate gods, there can be no inherent

improbability in the supposition that at the dawn of history a

similar custom was observed by the semibarbarous Latins in the

Arician Grove.

But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove that

the custom of putting to death a human representative of a god was

known and practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the Arician

Grove. This proof I now propose to adduce.

3. The Roman Saturnalia

WE have seen that many peoples have been used to observe an annual

period of license, when the customary restraints of law and morality

are thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to

extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a

vent which would never be allowed them in the more staid and sober

course of ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of

human nature, too often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and

crime, occur most commonly at the end of the year, and are

frequently associated, as I have had occasion to point out, with one

or other of the agricultural seasons, especially with the time of

sowing or of harvest. Now, of all these periods of license the one

which is best known and which in modern language has given its name

to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This famous festival fell in

December, the last month of the Roman year, and was popularly

supposed to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing

and of husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and

beneficent king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on

the mountains together, taught them to till the ground, gave them

laws, and ruled in peace. His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the

earth brought forth abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled

the happy world: no baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the

blood of the industrious and contented peasantry. Slavery and

private property were alike unknown: all men had all things in

common. At last the good god, the kindly king, vanished suddenly;

but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines were reared in

his honour, and many hills and high places in Italy bore his name.

Yet the bright tradition of his reign was crossed by a dark shadow:

his altars are said to have been stained with the blood of human

victims, for whom a more merciful age afterwards substituted

effigies. Of this gloomy side of the god's religion there is little

or no trace in the descriptions which ancient writers have left us

of the Saturnalia. Feasting and revelry and all the mad pursuit of

pleasure are the features that seem to have especially marked this

carnival of antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets

and public squares and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth

to the twenty-third of December.

But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it

seems to have struck the ancients themselves more than the license

granted to slaves at this time. The distinction between the free and

the servile classes was temporarily abolished. The slave might rail

at his master, intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down at

table with them, and not even a word of reproof would be

administered to him for conduct which at any other season might have

been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more,

masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them

at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the

board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this

inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time a

mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by

the slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the law as if they

were indeed invested with all the dignity of the consulship, the

praetorship, and the bench. Like the pale reflection of power thus

accorded to bondsmen at the Saturnalia was the mock kingship for

which freemen cast lots at the same season. The person on whom the

lot fell enjoyed the title of king, and issued commands of a playful

and ludicrous nature to his temporary subjects. One of them he might

order to mix the wine, another to drink, another to sing, another to

dance, another to speak in his own dispraise, another to carry a

flute-girl on his back round the house.

Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this

festive season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of

society in Saturn's time, and that in general the Saturnalia passed

for nothing more or less than a temporary revival or restoration of

the reign of that merry monarch, we are tempted to surmise that the

mock king who presided over the revels may have originally

represented Saturn himself. The conjecture is strongly confirmed, if

not established, by a very curious and interesting account of the

way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by the Roman soldiers

stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and Diocletian. The

account is preserved in a narrative of the martyrdom of St. Dasius,

which was unearthed from a Greek manuscript in the Paris library,

and published by Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer

descriptions of the event and of the custom are contained in

manuscripts at Milan and Berlin; one of them had already seen the

light in an obscure volume printed at Urbino in 1727, but its

importance for the history of the Roman religion, both ancient and

modern, appears to have been overlooked until Professor Cumont drew

the attention of scholars to all three narratives by publishing them

together some years ago. According to these narratives, which have

all the appearance of being authentic, and of which the longest is

probably based on official documents, the Roman soldiers at

Durostorum in Lower Moesia celebrated the Saturnalia year by year in

the following manner. Thirty days before the festival they chose by

lot from amongst themselves a young and handsome man, who was then

clothed in royal attire to resemble Saturn. Thus arrayed and

attended by a multitude of soldiers he went about in public with

full license to indulge his passions and to taste of every pleasure,

however base and shameful. But if his reign was merry, it was short

and ended tragically; for when the thirty days were up and the

festival of Saturn had come, he cut his own throat on the altar of

the god whom he personated. In the year A.D. 303 the lot fell upon

the Christian soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the

heathen god and soil his last days by debauchery. The threats and

arguments of his commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his

constancy, and accordingly he was beheaded, as the Christian

martyrologist records with minute accuracy, at Durostorum by the

soldier John on Friday the twentieth day of November, being the

twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the fourth hour.

Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its

historical character, which had been doubted or denied, has received

strong confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of

the cathedral which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is

preserved, among other remarkable antiquities, a white marble

sarcophagus bearing a Greek inscription, in characters of the age of

Justinian, to the following effect: "Here lies the holy martyr

Dasius, brought from Durostorum." The sarcophagus was transferred to

the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the church of San

Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from a Latin

inscription let into the masonry, the martyr's bones still repose

with those of two other saints. How long the sarcophagus was

deposited in the church of San Pellegrino, we do not know; but it is

recorded to have been there in the year 1650. We may suppose that

the saint's relics were transferred for safety to Ancona at some

time in the troubled centuries which followed his martyrdom, when

Moesia was occupied and ravaged by successive hordes of barbarian

invaders. At all events it appears certain from the independent and

mutually confirmatory evidence of the martyrology and the monuments

that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a real man, who suffered

death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the early centuries of

the Christian era. Finding the narrative of the nameless

martyrologist thus established as to the principal fact recorded,

namely, the martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his

testimony as to the manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more

because his narrative is precise, circumstantial, and entirely free

from the miraculous element. Accordingly I conclude that the account

which he gives of the celebration of the Saturnalia among the Roman

soldiers is trustworthy.

This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King of

the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the

winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus. It seems to

prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin

or merry-andrew whose only care was that the revelry should run high

and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and

crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive

crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the north,

Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare this comic

monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim

counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the

long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other

ages and in other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in sceptred

palls, have played their little pranks for a few brief hours or

days, then passed before their time to a violent death, we can

hardly doubt that in the King of the Saturnalia at Rome, as he is

depicted by classical writers, we see only a feeble emasculated copy

of that original, whose strong features have been fortunately

preserved for us by the obscure author of the _Martyrdom of St.

Dasius._ In other words, the martyrologist's account of the

Saturnalia agrees so closely with the accounts of similar rites

elsewhere which could not possibly have been known to him, that the

substantial accuracy of his description may be regarded as

established; and further, since the custom of putting a mock king to

death as a representative of a god cannot have grown out of a

practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel, whereas

the reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in

assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the

universal practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn

prevailed, to choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the

traditionary privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died,

whether by his own or another's hand, whether by the knife or the

fire or on the gallows-tree, in the character of the good god who

gave his life for the world. In Rome itself and other great towns

the growth of civilisation had probably mitigated this cruel custom

long before the Augustan age, and transformed it into the innocent

shape it wears in the writings of the few classical writers who

bestow a passing notice on the holiday King of the Saturnalia. But

in remoter districts the older and sterner practice may long have

survived; and even if after the unification of Italy the barbarous

usage was suppressed by the Roman government, the memory of it would

be handed down by the peasants and would tend from time to time, as

still happens with the lowest forms of superstition among ourselves,

to lead to a recrudescence of the practice, especially among the

rude soldiery on the outskirts of the empire over whom the once iron

hand of Rome was beginning to relax its grasp.

The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the Carnival

of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the

facts that have come before us, we may well ask whether the

resemblance does not amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy,

Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of

Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the

Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season,

which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly

shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine

delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the Carnival

is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct

successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the

revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were

over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of

the Bean on Twelfth Night and the mediaeval Bishop of Fools, Abbot

of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may

perhaps have had a similar origin. Whether that was so or not, we

may conclude with a fair degree of probability that if the King of

the Wood at Aricia lived and died as an incarnation of a sylvan

deity, he had of old a parallel at Rome in the men who, year by

year, were slain in the character of King Saturn, the god of the

sown and sprouting seed.

LIX. Killing the God in Mexico

BY NO PEOPLE does the custom of sacrificing the human representative

of a god appear to have been observed so commonly and with so much

solemnity as by the Aztecs of ancient Mexico. With the ritual of

these remarkable sacrifices we are well acquainted, for it has been

fully described by the Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the

sixteenth century, and whose curiosity was naturally excited by the

discovery in this distant region of a barbarous and cruel religion

which presented many curious points of analogy to the doctrine and

ritual of their own church. "They took a captive," says the Jesuit

Acosta, "such as they thought good; and afore they did sacrifice him

unto their idols, they gave him the name of the idol, to whom he

should be sacrificed, and apparelled him with the same ornaments

like their idol, saying, that he did represent the same idol. And

during the time that this representation lasted, which was for a

year in some feasts, in others six months, and in others less, they

reverenced and worshipped him in the same manner as the proper idol;

and in the meantime he did eat, drink, and was merry. When he went

through the streets, the people came forth to worship him, and every

one brought him an alms, with children and sick folks, that he might

cure them, and bless them, suffering him to do all things at his

pleasure, only he was accompanied with ten or twelve men lest he

should fly. And he (to the end he might be reverenced as he passed)

sometimes sounded upon a small flute, that the people might prepare

to worship him. The feast being come, and he grown fat, they killed

him, opened him, and ate him, making a solemn sacrifice of him."

This general description of the custom may now be illustrated by

particular examples. Thus at the festival called Toxcatl, the

greatest festival of the Mexican year, a young man was annually

sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca, "the god of gods,"

after having been maintained and worshipped as that great deity in

person for a whole year. According to the old Franciscan monk

Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion, the sacrifice of

the human god fell at Easter or a few days later, so that, if he is

right, it would correspond in date as well as in character to the

Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer.

More exactly he tells us that the sacrifice took place on the first

day of the fifth Aztec month, which according to him began on the

twenty-third or twenty-seventh day of April.

At this festival the great god died in the person of one human

representative and came to life again in the person of another, who

was destined to enjoy the fatal honour of divinity for a year and to

perish, like all his predecessors, at the end of it. The young man

singled out for this high dignity was carefully chosen from among

the captives on the ground of his personal beauty. He had to be of

unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar, neither

too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too fat, he

was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water. And in order

that he might behave in his lofty station with becoming grace and

dignity he was carefully trained to comport himself like a gentleman

of the first quality, to speak correctly and elegantly, to play the

flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a dandified air.

He was honourably lodged in the temple, where the nobles waited on

him and paid him homage, bringing him meat and serving him like a

prince. The king himself saw to it that he was apparelled in

gorgeous attire, "for already he esteemed him as a god." Eagle down

was gummed to his head and white cock's feathers were stuck in his

hair, which drooped to his girdle. A wreath of flowers like roasted

maize crowned his brows, and a garland of the same flowers passed

over his shoulders and under his armpits. Golden ornaments hung from

his nose, golden armlets adorned his arms, golden bells jingled on

his legs at every step he took; earrings of turquoise dangled from

his ears, bracelets of turquoise bedecked his wrists; necklaces of

shells encircled his neck and depended on his breast; he wore a

mantle of network, and round his middle a rich waistcloth. When this

bejewelled exquisite lounged through the streets playing on his

flute, puffing at a cigar, and smelling at a nosegay, the people

whom he met threw themselves on the earth before him and prayed to

him with sighs and tears, taking up the dust in their hands and

putting it in their mouths in token of the deepest humiliation and

subjection. Women came forth with children in their arms and

presented them to him, saluting him as a god. For "he passed for our

Lord God; the people acknowledged him as the Lord." All who thus

worshipped him on his passage he saluted gravely and courteously.

Lest he should flee, he was everywhere attended by a guard of eight

pages in the royal livery, four of them with shaven crowns like the

palace-slaves, and four of them with the flowing locks of warriors;

and if he contrived to escape, the captain of the guard had to take

his place as the representative of the god and to die in his stead.

Twenty days before he was to die, his costume was changed, and four

damsels delicately nurtured and bearing the names of four

goddesses--the Goddess of Flowers, the Goddess of the Young Maize,

the Goddess "Our Mother among the Water," and the Goddess of

Salt--were given him to be his brides, and with them he consorted.

During the last five days divine honours were showered on the

destined victim. The king remained in his palace while the whole

court went after the human god. Solemn banquets and dances followed

each other in regular succession and at appointed places. On the

last day the young man, attended by his wives and pages, embarked in

a canoe covered with a royal canopy and was ferried across the lake

to a spot where a little hill rose from the edge of the water. It

was called the Mountain of Parting, because there his wives bade him

a last farewell. Then, accompanied only by his pages, he repaired to

a small and lonely temple by the wayside. Like the Mexican temples

in general, it was built in the form of a pyramid; and as the young

man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on

which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the summit

he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block

of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand

into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in sacrifice

to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the bodies of

common victims, sent rolling down the steps of the temple, but was

carried down to the foot, where the head was cut off and spitted on

a pike. Such was the regular end of the man who personated the

greatest god of the Mexican pantheon.

The honour of living for a short time in the character of a god and

dying a violent death in the same capacity was not restricted to men

in Mexico; women were allowed, or rather compelled, to enjoy the

glory and to share the doom as representatives of goddesses. Thus at

a great festival in September, which was preceded by a strict fast

of seven days, they sanctified a young slave girl of twelve or

thirteen years, the prettiest they could find, to represent the

Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. They invested her with the ornaments

of the goddess, putting a mitre on her head and maize-cobs round her

neck and in her hands, and fastening a green feather upright on the

crown of her head to imitate an ear of maize. This they did, we are

told, in order to signify that the maize was almost ripe at the time

of the festival, but because it was still tender they chose a girl

of tender years to play the part of the Maize Goddess. The whole

long day they led the poor child in all her finery, with the green

plume nodding on her head, from house to house dancing merrily to

cheer people after the dulness and privations of the fast.

In the evening all the people assembled at the temple, the courts of

which they lit up by a multitude of lanterns and candles. There they

passed the night without sleeping, and at midnight, while the

trumpets, flutes, and horns discoursed solemn music, a portable

framework or palanquin was brought forth, bedecked with festoons of

maize-cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all sorts. This the

bearers set down at the door of the chamber in which the wooden

image of the goddess stood. Now the chamber was adorned and

wreathed, both outside and inside, with wreaths of maize-cobs,

peppers, pumpkins, roses, and seeds of every kind, a wonder to

behold; the whole floor was covered deep with these verdant

offerings of the pious. When the music ceased, a solemn procession

came forth of priests and dignitaries, with flaring lights and

smoking censers, leading in their midst the girl who played the part

of the goddess. Then they made her mount the framework, where she

stood upright on the maize and peppers and pumpkins with which it

was strewed, her hands resting on two bannisters to keep her from

falling. Then the priests swung the smoking censers round her; the

music struck up again, and while it played, a great dignitary of the

temple suddenly stepped up to her with a razor in his hand and

adroitly shore off the green feather she wore on her head, together

with the hair in which it was fastened, snipping the lock off by the

root. The feather and the hair he then presented to the wooden image

of the goddess with great solemnity and elaborate ceremonies,

weeping and giving her thanks for the fruits of the earth and the

abundant crops which she had bestowed on the people that year; and

as he wept and prayed, all the people, standing in the courts of the

temple, wept and prayed with him. When that ceremony was over, the

girl descended from the framework and was escorted to the place

where she was to spend the rest of the night. But all the people

kept watch in the courts of the temple by the light of torches till

break of day.

The morning being come, and the courts of the temple being still

crowded by the multitude, who would have deemed it sacrilege to quit

the precincts, the priests again brought forth the damsel attired in

the costume of the goddess, with the mitre on her head and the cobs

of maize about her neck. Again she mounted the portable framework or

palanquin and stood on it, supporting herself by her hands on the

bannisters. Then the elders of the temple lifted it on their

shoulders, and while some swung burning censers and others played on

instruments or sang, they carried it in procession through the great

courtyard to the hall of the god Huitzilopochtli and then back to

the chamber, where stood the wooden image of the Maize Goddess, whom

the girl personated. There they caused the damsel to descend from

the palanquin and to stand on the heaps of corn and vegetables that

had been spread in profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber.

While she stood there all the elders and nobles came in a line, one

behind the other, carrying saucers full of dry and clotted blood

which they had drawn from their ears by way of penance during the

seven days' fast. One by one they squatted on their haunches before

her, which was the equivalent of falling on their knees with us, and

scraping the crust of blood from the saucer cast it down before her

as an offering in return for the benefits which she, as the

embodiment of the Maize Goddess, had conferred upon them. When the

men had thus humbly offered their blood to the human representative

of the goddess, the women, forming a long line, did so likewise,

each of them dropping on her hams before the girl and scraping her

blood from the saucer. The ceremony lasted a long time, for great

and small, young and old, all without exception had to pass before

the incarnate deity and make their offering. When it was over, the

people returned home with glad hearts to feast on flesh and viands

of every sort as merrily, we are told, as good Christians at Easter

partake of meat and other carnal mercies after the long abstinence

of Lent. And when they had eaten and drunk their fill and rested

after the night watch, they returned quite refreshed to the temple

to see the end of the festival. And the end of the festival was

this. The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed

the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back

on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing

blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the

goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn,

peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor.

After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests

made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so

they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn; they put the

mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs about his neck,

the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed

they led him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of

drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head

of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do,

incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin of the girl and by

her clothes, which must have been much too small for a grown man.

In the foregoing custom the identification of the young girl with

the Maize Goddess appears to be complete. The golden maize-cobs

which she wore round her neck, the artificial maize-cobs which she

carried in her hands, the green feather which was stuck in her hair

in imitation (we are told) of a green ear of maize, all set her

forth as a personification of the corn-spirit; and we are expressly

informed that she was specially chosen as a young girl to represent

the young maize, which at the time of the festival had not yet fully

ripened. Further, her identification with the corn and the

corn-goddess was clearly announced by making her stand on the heaps

of maize and there receive the homage and blood-offerings of the

whole people, who thereby returned her thanks for the benefits which

in her character of a divinity she was supposed to have conferred

upon them. Once more, the practice of beheading her on a heap of

corn and seeds and sprinkling her blood, not only on the image of

the Maize Goddess, but on the piles of maize, peppers, pumpkins,

seeds, and vegetables, can seemingly have had no other object but to

quicken and strengthen the crops of corn and the fruits of the earth

in general by infusing into their representatives the blood of the

Corn Goddess herself. The analogy of this Mexican sacrifice, the

meaning of which appears to be indisputable, may be allowed to

strengthen the interpretation which I have given of other human

sacrifices offered for the crops. If the Mexican girl, whose blood

was sprinkled on the maize, indeed personated the Maize Goddess, it

becomes more than ever probable that the girl whose blood the

Pawnees similarly sprinkled on the seed corn personated in like

manner the female Spirit of the Corn; and so with the other human

beings whom other races have slaughtered for the sake of promoting

the growth of the crops.

Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of

the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with

all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before the people in

this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that

it was intended to ensure that the divine death should be

immediately followed by the divine resurrection. If that was so, we

may infer with some degree of probability that the practice of

killing a human representative of a deity has commonly, perhaps

always, been regarded merely as a means of perpetuating the divine

energies in the fulness of youthful vigour, untainted by the

weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered if

the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.

These Mexican rites suffice to prove that human sacrifices of the

sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia were, as a matter of

fact, regularly offered by a people whose level of culture was

probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to

that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the

origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred. The positive and

indubitable evidence of the prevalence of such sacrifices in one

part of the world may reasonably be allowed to strengthen the

probability of their prevalence in places for which the evidence is

less full and trustworthy. Taken all together, the facts which we

have passed in review seem to show that the custom of killing men

whom their worshippers regard as divine has prevailed in many parts

of the world.

LX. Between Heaven and Earth

1. Not to touch the Earth

AT THE OUTSET of this book two questions were proposed for answer:

Why had the priest of Aricia to slay his predecessor? And why,

before doing so, had he to pluck the Golden Bough? Of these two

questions the first has now been answered. The priest of Aricia, if

I am right, was one of those sacred kings or human divinities on

whose life the welfare of the community and even the course of

nature in general are believed to be intimately dependent. It does

not appear that the subjects or worshippers of such a spiritual

potentate form to themselves any very clear notion of the exact

relationship in which they stand to him; probably their ideas on the

point are vague and fluctuating, and we should err if we attempted

to define the relationship with logical precision. All that the

people know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves,

their cattle, and their crops are mysteriously bound up with their

divine king, so that according as he is well or ill the community is

healthy or sickly, the flocks and herds thrive or languish with

disease, and the fields yield an abundant or a scanty harvest. The

worst evil which they can conceive of is the natural death of their

ruler, whether he succumb to sickness or old age, for in the opinion

of his followers such a death would entail the most disastrous

consequences on themselves and their possessions; fatal epidemics

would sweep away man and beast, the earth would refuse her increase,

nay, the very frame of nature itself might be dissolved. To guard

against these catastrophes it is necessary to put the king to death

while he is still in the full bloom of his divine manhood, in order

that his sacred life, transmitted in unabated force to his

successor, may renew its youth, and thus by successive transmissions

through a perpetual line of vigorous incarnations may remain

eternally fresh and young, a pledge and security that men and

animals shall in like manner renew their youth by a perpetual

succession of generations, and that seedtime and harvest, and summer

and winter, and rain and sunshine shall never fail. That, if my

conjecture is right, was why the priest of Aricia, the King of the

Wood at Nemi, had regularly to perish by the sword of his successor.

But we have still to ask, What was the Golden Bough? and why had

each candidate for the Arician priesthood to pluck it before he

could slay the priest? These questions I will now try to answer.

It will be well to begin by noticing two of those rules or taboos by

which, as we have seen, the life of divine kings or priests is

regulated. The first of the rules to which I would call the reader's

attention is that the divine personage may not touch the ground with

his foot. This rule was observed by the supreme pontiff of the

Zapotecs in Mexico; he profaned his sanctity if he so much as

touched the ground with his foot. Montezuma, emperor of Mexico,

never set foot on the ground; he was always carried on the shoulders

of noblemen, and if he lighted anywhere they laid rich tapestry for

him to walk upon. For the Mikado of Japan to touch the ground with

his foot was a shameful degradation; indeed, in the sixteenth

century, it was enough to deprive him of his office. Outside his

palace he was carried on men's shoulders; within it he walked on

exquisitely wrought mats. The king and queen of Tahiti might not

touch the ground anywhere but within their hereditary domains; for

the ground on which they trod became sacred. In travelling from

place to place they were carried on the shoulders of sacred men.

They were always accompanied by several pairs of these sanctified

attendants; and when it became necessary to change their bearers,

the king and queen vaulted on to the shoulders of their new bearers

without letting their feet touch the ground. It was an evil omen if

the king of Dosuma touched the ground, and he had to perform an

expiatory ceremony. Within his palace the king of Persia walked on

carpets on which no one else might tread; outside of it he was never

seen on foot but only in a chariot or on horseback. In old days the

king of Siam never set foot upon the earth, but was carried on a

throne of gold from place to place. Formerly neither the kings of

Uganda, nor their mothers, nor their queens might walk on foot

outside of the spacious enclosures in which they lived. Whenever

they went forth they were carried on the shoulders of men of the

Buffalo clan, several of whom accompanied any of these royal

personages on a journey and took it in turn to bear the burden. The

king sat astride the bearer's neck with a leg over each shoulder and

his feet tucked under the bearer's arms. When one of these royal

carriers grew tired he shot the king onto the shoulders of a second

man without allowing the royal feet to touch the ground. In this way

they went at a great pace and travelled long distances in a day,

when the king was on a journey. The bearers had a special hut in the

king's enclosure in order to be at hand the moment they were wanted.

Among the Bakuba, or rather Bushongo, a nation in the southern

region of the Congo, down to a few years ago persons of the royal

blood were forbidden to touch the ground; they must sit on a hide, a

chair, or the back of a slave, who crouched on hands and feet; their

feet rested on the feet of others. When they travelled they were

carried on the backs of men; but the king journeyed in a litter

supported on shafts. Among the Ibo people about Awka, in Southern

Nigeria, the priest of the Earth has to observe many taboos; for

example, he may not see a corpse, and if he meets one on the road he

must hide his eyes with his wristlet. He must abstain from many

foods, such as eggs, birds of all sorts, mutton, dog, bush-buck, and

so forth. He may neither wear nor touch a mask, and no masked man

may enter his house. If a dog enters his house, it is killed and

thrown out. As priest of the Earth he may not sit on the bare

ground, nor eat things that have fallen on the ground, nor may earth

be thrown at him. According to ancient Brahmanic ritual a king at

his inauguration trod on a tiger's skin and a golden plate; he was

shod with shoes of boar's skin, and so long as he lived thereafter

he might not stand on the earth with his bare feet.

But besides persons who are permanently sacred or tabooed and are

therefore permanently forbidden to touch the ground with their feet,

there are others who enjoy the character of sanctity or taboo only

on certain occasions, and to whom accordingly the prohibition in

question only applies at the definite seasons during which they

exhale the odour of sanctity. Thus among the Kayans or Bahaus of

Central Borneo, while the priestesses are engaged in the performance

of certain rites they may not step on the ground, and boards are

laid for them to tread on. Warriors, again, on the war-path are

surrounded, so to say, by an atmosphere of taboo; hence some Indians

of North America might not sit on the bare ground the whole time

they were out on a warlike expedition. In Laos the hunting of

elephants gives rise to many taboos; one of them is that the chief

hunter may not touch the earth with his foot. Accordingly, when he

alights from his elephant, the others spread a carpet of leaves for

him to step upon.

Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call

that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or

tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a

physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged

just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the

electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good

conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be

discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on this

theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid. Hence

in order to preserve the charge from running to waste, the sacred or

tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from touching the

ground; in electrical language he must be insulated, if he is not to

be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with which he, as a

vial, is filled to the brim. And in many cases apparently the

insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a precaution not

merely for his own sake but for the sake of others; for since the

virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive

which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the

interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest

breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes

into contact with.

2. Not to see the Sun

THE SECOND rule to be here noted is that the sun may not shine upon

the divine person. This rule was observed both by the Mikado and by

the pontiff of the Zapotecs. The latter "was looked upon as a god

whom the earth was not worthy to hold, nor the sun to shine upon."

The Japanese would not allow that the Mikado should expose his

sacred person to the open air, and the sun was not thought worthy to

shine on his head. The Indians of Granada, in South America, "kept

those who were to be rulers or commanders, whether men or women,

locked up for several years when they were children, some of them

seven years, and this so close that they were not to see the sun,

for if they should happen to see it they forfeited their lordship,

eating certain sorts of food appointed; and those who were their

keepers at certain times went into their retreat or prison and

scourged them severely." Thus, for example, the heir to the throne

of Bogota, who was not the son but the sister's son of the king, had

to undergo a rigorous training from his infancy; he lived in

complete retirement in a temple, where he might not see the sun nor

eat salt nor converse with a woman; he was surrounded by guards who

observed his conduct and noted all his actions; if he broke a single

one of the rules laid down for him, he was deemed infamous and

forfeited all his rights to the throne. So, too, the heir to the

kingdom of Sogamoso, before succeeding to the crown, had to fast for

seven years in the temple, being shut up in the dark and not allowed

to see the sun or light. The prince who was to become Inca of Peru

had to fast for a month without seeing light.

3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

NOW it is remarkable that the foregoing two rules--not to touch the

ground and not to see the sun--are observed either separately or

conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the world. Thus

amongst the negroes of Loango girls at puberty are confined in

separate huts, and they may not touch the ground with any part of

their bare body. Among the Zulus and kindred tribes of South Africa,

when the first signs of puberty show themselves "while a girl is

walking, gathering wood, or working in the field, she runs to the

river and hides herself among the reeds for the day, so as not to be

seen by men. She covers her head carefully with her blanket that the

sun may not shine on it and shrivel her up into a withered skeleton,

as would result from exposure to the sun's beams. After dark she

returns to her home and is secluded" in a hut for some time. With

the Awa-nkonde, a tribe at the northern end of Lake Nyassa, it is a

rule that after her first menstruation a girl must be kept apart,

with a few companions of her own sex, in a darkened house. The floor

is covered with dry banana leaves, but no fire may be lit in the

house, which is called "the house of the Awasungu," that is, "of

maidens who have no hearts."

In New Ireland girls are confined for four or five years in small

cages, being kept in the dark and not allowed to set foot on the

ground. The custom has been thus described by an eye-witness. "I

heard from a teacher about some strange custom connected with some

of the young girls here, so I asked the chief to take me to the

house where they were. The house was about twenty-five feet in

length, and stood in a reed and bamboo enclosure, across the

entrance to which a bundle of dried grass was suspended to show that

it was strictly '_tabu._' Inside the house were three conical

structures about seven or eight feet in height, and about ten or

twelve feet in circumference at the bottom, and for about four feet

from the ground, at which point they tapered off to a point at the

top. These cages were made of the broad leaves of the pandanus-tree,

sewn quite close together so that no light and little or no air

could enter. On one side of each is an opening which is closed by a

double door of plaited cocoa-nut tree and pandanus-tree leaves.

About three feet from the ground there is a stage of bamboos which

forms the floor. In each of these cages we were told there was a

young woman confined, each of whom had to remain for at least four

or five years, without ever being allowed to go outside the house. I

could scarcely credit the story when I heard it; the whole thing

seemed too horrible to be true. I spoke to the chief, and told him

that I wished to see the inside of the cages, and also to see the

girls that I might make them a present of a few beads. He told me

that it was '_tabu,_' forbidden for any men but their own relations

to look at them; but I suppose the promised beads acted as an

inducement, and so he sent away for some old lady who had charge,

and who alone is allowed to open the doors. While we were waiting we

could hear the girls talking to the chief in a querulous way as if

objecting to something or expressing their fears. The old woman came

at length and certainly she did not seem a very pleasant jailor or

guardian; nor did she seem to favour the request of the chief to

allow us to see the girls, as she regarded us with anything but

pleasant looks. However, she had to undo the door when the chief

told her to do so, and then the girls peeped out at us, and, when

told to do so, they held out their hands for the beads. I, however,

purposely sat at some distance away and merely held out the beads to

them, as I wished to draw them quite outside, that I might inspect

the inside of the cages. This desire of mine gave rise to another

difficulty, as these girls were not allowed to put their feet to the

ground all the time they were confined in these places. However,

they wished to get the beads, and so the old lady had to go outside

and collect a lot of pieces of wood and bamboo, which she placed on

the ground, and then going to one of the girls, she helped her down

and held her hand as she stepped from one piece of wood to another

until she came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I

then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had

come, but could scarely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was

so hot and stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few

short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for

the girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo

platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite

dark inside. The girls are never allowed to come out except once a

day to bathe in a dish or wooden bowl placed close to each cage.

They say that they perspire profusely. They are placed in these

stifling cages when quite young, and must remain there until they

are young women, when they are taken out and have each a great

marriage feast provided for them. One of them was about fourteen or

fifteen years old, and the chief told us that she had been there for

five years, but would soon be taken out now. The other two were

about eight and ten years old, and they have to stay there for

several years longer."

In Kabadi, a district of British New Guinea, "daughters of chiefs,

when they are about twelve or thirteen years of age, are kept

indoors for two or three years, never being allowed, under any

pretence, to descend from the house, and the house is so shaded that

the sun cannot shine on them." Among the Yabim and Bukaua, two

neighbouring and kindred tribes on the coast of Northern New Guinea,

a girl at puberty is secluded for some five or six weeks in an inner

part of the house; but she may not sit on the floor, lest her

uncleanliness should cleave to it, so a log of wood is placed for

her to squat on. Moreover, she may not touch the ground with her

feet; hence if she is obliged to quit the house for a short time,

she is muffled up in mats and walks on two halves of a coco-nut

shell, which are fastened like sandals to her feet by creeping

plants. Among the Ot Danoms of Borneo girls at the age of eight or

ten years are shut up in a little room or cell of the house, and cut

off from all intercourse with the world for a long time. The cell,

like the rest of the house, is raised on piles above the ground, and

is lit by a single small window opening on a lonely place, so that

the girl is in almost total darkness. She may not leave the room on

any pretext whatever, not even for the most necessary purposes. None

of her family may see her all the time she is shut up, but a single

slave woman is appointed to wait on her. During her lonely

confinement, which often lasts seven years, the girl occupies

herself in weaving mats or with other handiwork. Her bodily growth

is stunted by the long want of exercise, and when, on attaining

womanhood, she is brought out, her complexion is pale and wax-like.

She is now shown the sun, the earth, the water, the trees, and the

flowers, as if she were newly born. Then a great feast is made, a

slave is killed, and the girl is smeared with his blood. In Ceram

girls at puberty were formerly shut up by themselves in a hut which

was kept dark. In Yap, one of the Caroline Islands, should a girl be

overtaken by her first menstruation on the public road, she may not

sit down on the earth, but must beg for a coco-nut shell to put

under her. She is shut up for several days in a small hut at a

distance from her parents' house, and afterwards she is bound to

sleep for a hundred days in one of the special houses which are

provided for the use of menstruous women.

In the island of Mabuiag, Torres Straits, when the signs of puberty

appear on a girl, a circle of bushes is made in a dark corner of the

house. Here, decked with shoulder-belts, armlets, leglets just below

the knees, and anklets, wearing a chaplet on her head, and shell

ornaments in her ears, on her chest, and on her back, she squats in

the midst of the bushes, which are piled so high round about her

that only her head is visible. In this state of seclusion she must

remain for three months. All this time the sun may not shine upon

her, but at night she is allowed to slip out of the hut, and the

bushes that hedge her in are then changed. She may not feed herself

or handle food, but is fed by one or two old women, her maternal

aunts, who are especially appointed to look after her. One of these

women cooks food for her at a special fire in the forest. The girl

is forbidden to eat turtle or turtle eggs during the season when the

turtles are breeding; but no vegetable food is refused her. No man,

not even her own father, may come into the house while her seclusion

lasts; for if her father saw her at this time he would certainly

have bad luck in his fishing, and would probably smash his canoe the

very next time he went out in it. At the end of the three months she

is carried down to a freshwater creek by her attendants, hanging on

to their shoulders in such a way that her feet do not touch the

ground, while the women of the tribe form a ring round her, and thus

escort her to the beach. Arrived at the shore, she is stripped of

her ornaments, and the bearers stagger with her into the creek,

where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing

water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the

water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge

to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab,

tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here

in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted

at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted

claws. After that she is freshly decorated, and the whole party

marches back to the village in a single rank, the girl walking in

the centre between her two old aunts, who hold her by the wrists.

The husbands of her aunts now receive her and lead her into the

house of one of them, where all partake of food, and the girl is

allowed once more to feed herself in the usual manner. A dance

follows, in which the girl takes a prominent part, dancing between

the husbands of the two aunts who had charge of her in her

retirement.

Among the Yaraikanna tribe of Cape York Peninsula, in Northern

Queensland, a girl at puberty is said to live by herself for a month

or six weeks; no man may see her, though any woman may. She stays in

a hut or shelter specially made for her, on the floor of which she

lies supine. She may not see the sun, and towards sunset she must

keep her eyes shut until the sun has gone down, otherwise it is

thought that her nose will be diseased. During her seclusion she may

eat nothing that lives in salt water, or a snake would kill her. An

old woman waits upon her and supplies her with roots, yams, and

water. Some Australian tribes are wont to bury their girls at such

seasons more or less deeply in the ground, perhaps in order to hide

them from the light of the sun.

Among the Indians of California a girl at her first menstruation

"was thought to be possessed of a particular degree of supernatural

power, and this was not always regarded as entirely defiling or

malevolent. Often, however, there was a strong feeling of the power

of evil inherent in her condition. Not only was she secluded from

her family and the community, but an attempt was made to seclude the

world from her. One of the injunctions most strongly laid upon her

was not to look about her. She kept her head bowed and was forbidden

to see the world and the sun. Some tribes covered her with a

blanket. Many of the customs in this connection resembled those of

the North Pacific Coast most strongly, such as the prohibition to

the girl to touch or scratch her head with her hand, a special

implement being furnished her for the purpose. Sometimes she could

eat only when fed and in other cases fasted altogether."

Among the Chinook Indians who inhabited the coast of Washington

State, when a chief's daughter attained to puberty, she was hidden

for five days from the view of the people; she might not look at

them nor at the sky, nor might she pick berries. It was believed

that if she were to look at the sky, the weather would be bad; that

if she picked berries, it would rain; and that when she hung her

towel of cedar-bark on a spruce-tree, the tree withered up at once.

She went out of the house by a separate door and bathed in a creek

far from the village. She fasted for some days, and for many days

more she might not eat fresh food.

Amongst the Aht or Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, when girls

reach puberty they are placed in a sort of gallery in the house "and

are there surrounded completely with mats, so that neither the sun

nor any fire can be seen. In this cage they remain for several days.

Water is given them, but no food. The longer a girl remains in this

retirement the greater honour is it to the parents; but she is

disgraced for life if it is known that she has seen fire or the sun

during this initiatory ordeal." Pictures of the mythical

thunder-bird are painted on the screens behind which she hides.

During her seclusion she may neither move nor lie down, but must

always sit in a squatting posture. She may not touch her hair with

her hands, but is allowed to scratch her head with a comb or a piece

of bone provided for the purpose. To scratch her body is also

forbidden, as it is believed that every scratch would leave a scar.

For eight months after reaching maturity she may not eat any fresh

food, particularly salmon; moreover, she must eat by herself, and

use a cup and dish of her own.

In the Tsetsaut tribe of British Columbia a girl at puberty wears a

large hat of skin which comes down over her face and screens it from

the sun. It is believed that if she were to expose her face to the

sun or to the sky, rain would fall. The hat protects her face also

against the fire, which ought not to strike her skin; to shield her

hands she wears mittens. In her mouth she carries the tooth of an

animal to prevent her own teeth from becoming hollow. For a whole

year she may not see blood unless her face is blackened; otherwise

she would grow blind. For two years she wears the hat and lives in a

hut by herself, although she is allowed to see other people. At the

end of two years a man takes the hat from her head and throws it

away. In the Bilqula or Bella Coola tribe of British Columbia, when

a girl attains puberty she must stay in the shed which serves as her

bedroom, where she has a separate fireplace. She is not allowed to

descend to the main part of the house, and may not sit by the fire

of the family. For four days she is bound to remain motionless in a

sitting posture. She fasts during the day, but is allowed a little

food and drink very early in the morning. After the four days'

seclusion she may leave her room, but only through a separate

opening cut in the floor, for the houses are raised on piles. She

may not yet come into the chief room. In leaving the house she wears

a large hat which protects her face against the rays of the sun. It

is believed that if the sun were to shine on her face her eyes would

suffer. She may pick berries on the hills, but may not come near the

river or sea for a whole year. Were she to eat fresh salmon she

would lose her senses, or her mouth would be changed into a long

beak.

Amongst the Tlingit (Thlinkeet) or Kolosh Indians of Alaska, when a

girl showed signs of womanhood she used to be confined to a little

hut or cage, which was completely blocked up with the exception of a

small air-hole. In this dark and filthy abode she had to remain a

year, without fire, exercise, or associates. Only her mother and a

female slave might supply her with nourishment. Her food was put in

at the little window; she had to drink out of the wing-bone of a

white-headed eagle. The time of her seclusion was afterwards reduced

in some places to six or three months or even less. She had to wear

a sort of hat with long flaps, that her gaze might not pollute the

sky; for she was thought unfit for the sun to shine upon, and it was

imagined that her look would destroy the luck of a hunter, fisher,

or gambler, turn things to stone, and do other mischief. At the end

of her confinement her old clothes were burnt, new ones were made,

and a feast was given, at which a slit was cut in her under lip

parallel to the mouth, and a piece of wood or shell was inserted to

keep the aperture open. Among the Koniags, an Esquimau people of

Alaska, a girl at puberty was placed in a small hut in which she had

to remain on her hands and feet for six months; then the hut was

enlarged a little so as to allow her to straighten her back, but in

this posture she had to remain for six months more. All this time

she was regarded as an unclean being with whom no one might hold

intercourse.