I am going with more than diffidence to offer a guess at the reasons,
asking it to be remembered that I do so merely because the case is
isolated, and cannot at present be illustrated by parallel ceremonies.
But first, returning to the periods of licence, I must show that they
are not peculiar to agricultural races, nor, therefore, necessarily
instituted to aid the farmer. This in itself is a great comfort, for
one wearies of being told that the crops are so eternally the cause of
custom and rite. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many ways a
backward race and not agricultural, 'considerable licence is allowed on
certain occasions, when a large number of men and women are gathered
together to perform certain corroborees' (or sacred dances). So say
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.
The laws of marriage are then turned upside down. A man is ordered to
have relations with the woman who is his 'Mura--that is, one to whom he
may not, under ordinary circumstances, even speak, or go near, much
less have anything like marital relations with.' Every man is expected
to send his wife to these dances, for the express purpose of violating,
in this period of licence, the most sacred laws of the tribe.[18] These
backward persons, the Arunta, have no native strong drink, and cannot
get intoxicated, but what they can they do in the way of licence, like
more civilised races, and necessarily not for agricultural reasons, as
they have no agriculture. They break their most sacred law, just as the
Jews, at Purim, deliberately broke the law of Moses.[19] Conceivably,
then, even stripping, scourging, and hanging a mock-king at the Sacæa
may also have been done for some reason not agricultural.
What view did the Persians themselves take of their festival? I do not
think that Mr. Frazer insists enough on this point. The Persians regard
the Sacæa as commemorative of a great massacre of the Sacæ near the
Euxine. In both forms of the Persian legend, in Strabo, their ancestors
fell on the Sacæ when that tribe was hopelessly intoxicated: 'drunk and
frantic, drowsy and asleep, or dancing and maddened with wine.' The
Sacæ were massacred, and the Sacæa, a feast of licence, was dedicated
to the Persian goddess Anaitis; obviously in memory of the intoxicated
revels of the Sacæ,[20] or so tradition averred.
The Persians thus, by dint of a popular etymology (Sacæa from Sacæ),
accounted to themselves for the origin of a period of chartered
licence, in which, says Strabo, 'both men and women, dressed in the
Scythian habit, drink and sport wantonly by night and day.' As in many
other cases, collected by Athenæus, the lawless revel had its kings of
unreason: slaves acting as masters and kings. Just one of these kings,
the Zoganes in the royal household, was afterwards stripped, scourged,
and hanged. What could the reason be? We have seen that in Tonquin
all crimes committed in the period of licence are overlooked, except
treason and murder.[21] We have been told that in the Roman Saturnalia
a slave might do, unreproved, what at any other time would be punished
'with stripes, imprisonment, or death.'[22] We have read that, at the
Pondo period of licence, nobody was later made responsible for his
actions, though at Tonquin murder and treason were excepted.[23] The
same irresponsibility pervades the Zulu period of licence.[24]
To reinforce this fact, that the most sacred laws are purposefully
broken at some periods of licence, I cite the Nanga orgies in old Fiji.
'The Nanga is frequently spoken of as the Mbaki, or harvest;' people
being 'full of devilry and food' at harvest, which, perhaps, they need
not be in March-April. All distinctions of property were suspended at
the Nanga. Men and women, in fantastic dresses, publicly 'practised
unmentionable abominations.' Even the relationship of brother and
sister 'seemed to be no bar to the general licence.' But after the
Nanga, as before the Nanga, brothers and sisters might not even speak
to each other. This precisely answers to the Australian incest with the
Mura. Brothers and sisters at the Nanga were 'intentionally coupled.'
The ceremonies included initiatory mysteries, like the Bora of the
Australian blacks. As at the Arunta corroborees, the great point was
to break the most sacred laws: those of incest.[25] This peculiar
'burst' then is in Australia pre-agricultural, though, as in Fiji, it
survives among an agricultural people.