There were other magico-religious reasons for killing kings. Mr.
Frazer writes:[6] 'Lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man
naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself.'
Here is, I venture to think, a notable fault in the argument. Early
men, contrary to Mr. Frazer's account, suppose themselves to be
_naturally_ immortal. The myths of perhaps all races tell of a time
when death had not yet entered the world. Man was born deathless. Death
came in by an accident, or in consequence of an error, or an infraction
of a divine command. To this effect we have Zulu, Australian, Maori,
Melanesian, Central African, Vedic Aryan, Kamschadal, and countless
other myths; not to speak of the first chapters of Genesis.[7] 'In the
thought of immortality' early man is cradled. His divine beings are
usually regarded as prior to and unaffected by the coming of death,
which invades men, but not these beings, or not most of them.
Indeed, some low savages have not yet persuaded themselves that death
is natural. 'Amongst the Central Australian natives,' say Spencer and
Gillen, 'there is no such thing as belief in natural death; however
old or decrepit a man or woman may be when this takes place, it is at
once supposed that it has been brought about by the magic influence of
some enemy,' and it is avenged on the enemy, as in the blood-feud.[8]
These Australians in Mr. Frazer's opinion (though not in mine) are
'primitive.'
Thus, far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, 'primitive
man' has no other idea. Not that he formulates his idea in such a term
as 'eternal.' Mariner says, indeed, concerning the Tongan supreme being
Ta-li-y-Tooboo, 'Of his origin they had no idea, rather supposing him
to be eternal.' But, in Tongan, the metaphysical idea of eternity is
only expressed in the meaning of the god's name, 'wait-there-Tooboo.'
This god occasionally inspires the How, or elective king, but the How
was never sacrificed to provide the god with a sturdier incarnation,
a process which Mr. Frazer's theory of the Divinity of Christ demands
as customary. Being 'eternal' Tá-li-y-Tooboo was independent of a human
vehicle.[9]
These facts must be remembered, for it is indispensable to Mr. Frazer's
theory to prove that the immortals are believed, to a sufficient
extent, to be mortal. Hence the supposed need of killing divine kings,
their vehicles. Primitive man, according to Mr. Frazer, thinks his gods
mortal. But primitive man by his initial hypothesis had no gods at all.
Mr. Frazer clearly means that when man was no longer primitive, he
conceived the gods to be mortal like himself. I have elsewhere given
many examples of the opposite belief among races of many grades of
culture, from the Australian blacks to the immortal gods of Homer.[10]
The point will be found to be important later, and I must firmly
express my opinion that, so long as people believe their gods to be
alive, and testify that belief by prayers, hymns, and sacrifices, it
is impossible to argue from a few local, and contradictory, and easily
explicable myths, that these peoples believe their gods to be dead, or
in danger of dying. Here, I think, the common sense of students will
agree with me.
However, as this general and pervading belief in the mortality of the
gods is absolutely essential to Mr. Frazer's argument, perhaps the
point had better be settled. As examples of belief in the fact that the
god is dead, we have the Greenlanders.[11]
The Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill their most powerful
god, and that he would certainly die if he touched a dog. Mr. Tylor,
on the other hand, tells us that to I the summerland' of the Greenland
deity, 'beneath the sea, Greenland souls hope to descend at death.'
Let us trust that 'No Dogs are Admitted.' This Greenland divine being,
Torngarsuk, I so clearly held his place as supreme deity in the native
mind that,' as Cranz the missionary relates, 'many Greenlanders hearing
of God and His almighty power were apt to fall on the idea that it was
their Torngarsuk who was meant.' The Greenland deity was unborrowed;
he 'seems no figure derived from the religion of Scandinavian
colonists, ancient or modern.'[12]
From Cranz's evidence (and much more might be cited) the most powerful
god of the Greenlanders was not dead, nor likely to die, in spite of
the apprehensions of certain Greenlanders, communicated to a person not
named by Mr. Frazer, but quoted in a work of 1806.[13] At the best the
Greenland evidence is contradictory; all Greenlanders did not agree
with Mr. Frazer's Greenland authority. Nor was the Accuser of the
Brethren currently believed to be deceased, when the ancient folk-song
assures us that
Some say the Deil's deid,
The Deil's deid, the Deil's deid,
Some say the Deil's deid,
And buried in Kirkcaldy:
Some say he's risen again,
Risen again, risen again,
Some say he's risen again,
To dance the Hieland Laddie.
'Risen again' he was, and did dance the Hieland Laddie at Gledsmuir
and Falkirk. The 'Volkslied' scientifically represents the conflict of
opinion as unsettled, despite the testimony of the grave of Satan at
the lang toun of Kirkcaldy; like the grave of Zeus in Crete.
Mr. Frazer, then, ought not, I think, to assume a general belief in
the mortality of Greenland gods in face of contradictory but uncited
evidence.
1. A North American Indian told Colonel Dodge that 'the Great Spirit
that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have
lived so long as this.'[14] Now this was the _ipse dixit_ and personal
inference of a vague modern 'North American Indian,' living in an age
which, as Mr. Frazer remarks, must 'breach those venerable walls' of
belief. To prove his case, Mr. Frazer needs to find examples of the
opinion that the 'Great Spirit' was believed to be dead (if he grants
that there ever existed an American belief in a Great Spirit) among the
American Indians as first studied by Europeans. I have elsewhere argued
that the supreme being of most barbaric races is regarded as otiose,
inactive, and so may come to be a mere name and by-word, like the
Huron Atahocan,[15] 'who made everything,' and the Unkulunkulu of the
Zulus, who has been so thrust into the background by the competition of
ancestral spirits that his very existence is doubted. 'In process of
time we have come to worship the spirits only, because we know not what
to say about Unkulunkulu.' 'We seek out for ourselves the spirits that
we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'[16] In the same way,
throughout the beliefs of barbaric races, the competition of friendly
and helpful spirits pushes back such beings as the Australian Baiame
and Mungan-ngaur, who exist where sacrifice to ancestral spirits has
not yet been developed; and the Canadian Andouagni of 1558.[17] Thus
a modern North American Indian may infer, and may tell Colonel Dodge,
that the creator is dead, because he is not in receipt of sacrifice or
prayer. But the cult of such high beings, where it existed and still
exists, in North America, the cult of Ti-ra-wá with whom the Pawnees
expect to live after death, of the Blackfoot Ná-pi of Ahone, Okeus,
Kiehtan, and the rest, proves belief in gods who are alive, and who are
not said to be in any danger of death.
2. A tribe of Philippine Islanders told the Spanish conquerors that
the grave of the Creator was on the top of Mount Cabunian. So the
Philippine Islanders did believe in a Creator. The grave may have been
the result of the usual neglect of the supreme being already explained,
or may have meant no more than the grave of Zeus in Crete, while Zeus
was being worshipped all over the Greek world.
3. Heitsi Eibib, of the Hottentots, had a number of graves, accounted
for by the theory of successive lives and deaths. But so had Tammuz and
Adonis yearly lives and deaths, yet the god was _en permanence_.
The graves of Greek gods maybe due to Euhemerism, a theory much more
ancient than Euhemerus. People who worship ancestral spirits sometimes
argue, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, that the gods were once spirits of
living men, and show the men's graves as proofs; 'the bricks are
alive to testify to it.' But that the Greeks regarded their gods as
mortal cannot be seriously argued, while they are always styled 'the
immortals' in contrast to mortal men; and while Apollo (who had a
grave) daily inspired the Pythia. Her death did not hurt Apollo. She
was not sacrificed for the benefit of Apollo. The grave of Zeus 'was
shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era.'
But was it shown as early as the time of Homer? Euhemerus was prior to
our era.
4. The Egyptian gods were kings over death and the dead, with tombs and
mummies in every province. But they were also deathless rulers of the
world and of men.
'If Ra rises in the heavens it is by the will of Osiris; if he sets it
is at the sight of his glory.' 'King of eternity, great god ... whoso
knoweth humility and reckoneth deeds of righteousness, thereby knows he
Osiris.'[18]
This is a living god, and Seb and Nut can scarcely die. Despite myth
and ritual the gods of Egypt lived till they 'fled from the folding
star of Bethlehem.'
5. As to the legend of 'great Pan is dead,' in the reign of Tiberius,
Mr. Frazer mentions a theory that not Pan, but Adonis or Tammuz was
dead; he was always dying. The story is pretty, but is not evidence.
6. About 1064 A.D. there was a Turkish story of the death of the King
of the Jinn. The Jinn are not gods but fairies, and we have heard of
fairy funerals.
7. Concerning 'the high gods of Babylon' it is especially needful
for Mr. Frazer to prove that they were believed to be mortal and
in danger of death, for Dr. Jastrow denies that they are mortal.
'The privilege of the gods' is 'immortality.'[19] But Mr. Frazer's
hypothesis derives the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ from the
opinion that he represented, in death, a long line of victims to a
barbarous superstition.[20] And that superstition was, in Mr. Frazer's
conjecture, that a substitute died for the King of Babylon, and that
the King of Babylon died to reinforce the vitality of a mortal god of
Babylon, whose life required a fresh human incarnation annually.
To prove the Babylonian belief in the mortality of the deities, Mr.
Frazer writes: 'The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared
to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to
be human in their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human
in their fate; for like men they were born into the world, and like
men they loved and fought and even died.'[21] How many of them died?
If they were dead in religious belief, how did they manage to attend
'the great assembly of the gods which, as we have seen, formed a chief
feature of the feast of Zakmuk, and was held annually in the temple of
Marduk at Babylon?'[22] Did Marduk die? If so, why is he addressed as
O merciful one who lovest to give life to the dead!
Marduk, King of heaven and earth,
The spell affording life is thine,
The breath of life is thine.
Thou restorest the dead to life, thou bringest things
to completeness (?)[23]
Supposing, again, that the King was really sacrificed to keep a god in
good condition--why only one sacrifice? There were at least scores of
gods, all of them, if I understand Mr. Frazer, in the same precarious
condition of health. They appear, he might argue, to have been
especially subject to hepatic diseases.
O supreme mistress of heaven, may thy liver be pacified,
says a hymn to Ishtar.[24]
Of course every one sees that 'thy liver' is only a phrase for 'thy
wrath;' the liver (as in our phrases 'pluck' and 'lily-livered')
being taken for the seat of the 'pluck' of men. It is manifest that
the Babylonian gods are not dead but living, otherwise they could
not attend the yearly divine assembly, nor could they be addressed
in prayer. Moreover, if they could only be kept alive by yearly
sacrificing their human vehicles, great holocausts of human vehicles
would have been needed every year: one man for one god, and their name
was legion.
Once more, if men believed that gods could die, unless kept alive by
sacrifices of their human vehicles, we must say of the Greeks that they
did not strive
Officiously to keep alive
their deities. Had the Greeks known that this was in their power to
do, then Apollo, Dionysus, Cronos, Zeus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares had
not died. Yet die they did, if the graves of each of these mortals
prove the prevailing belief in their decease.[25] Mankind, according
to Mr. Frazer, believed in 'mighty beings,' 'who breathed into man's
nostrils and made him live.' He implored them 'to bring his immortal
spirit ... to some happier world ... where he might rest with them,'
and so on.[26] Yet, 'lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive
man naturally supposed the gods to be mortal like himself.' Mr. Frazer
has, we see, also told us that they did not believe their gods to be
mortal. Probably, then, the belief in their immortality was a late
stage in a gradual process.[27] Yet it had not prevailed when the grave
of Zeus was shown 'about the beginning of our era.'[28] Man, then,
believed that he could keep one out of the crowd of gods alive (though
he implored them to keep _him_ alive) by sacrificing his rightful king
once a year, thereby overthrowing dynasty after dynasty, and upsetting
the whole organisation of the state. All this we must steadfastly
believe, before we can accept Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the
Nicene Creed. It is a large preliminary demand.
The gods keep on being 'immortals,' and this we must insist on, in
view of Mr. Frazer's theory that man-gods who are slain are slain to
keep alive the god who is incarnate in them, of which he does not
give one example. His instances of beliefs that the high gods are dead
notoriously contradict the prevalent belief that they are deathless.
And the prevalent belief regulates religion.
However, man-gods certainly die, and some South Sea Islanders--by a
scientific experiment--demonstrated that Captain Cook was no god,
because he died when stabbed, which a genuine god would not have
done. This, of course, proves that these benighted heathen knew the
difference between an immortal god and a deathly man as well as did
Anchises in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite.