|WE {225}have now in a certain sense accomplished our intention of
tracing the evolution of gods and of God. We have shown how polytheism
came to be, and how from it a certain particular group of men, the
early Israelites, rose by slow degrees, through natural stages, to the
monotheistic conception. It might seem, therefore, as though the task
we set before ourselves was now quite completed. Nevertheless, many
abstruse and difficult questions still lie before us. Our problem as
yet is hardly half solved. We have still to ask, I think, How did this
purely local and national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the
civilised world? How from an obscure corner of Lower Syria did the god
of a small tribe of despised and barbaric tributaries slowly live down
the great conquering deities of Babylon and Susa, of Hellas and Italy?
And again, we have further to enquire, Why do most of the modern nations
which have nominally adopted monotheism yet conceive of their god as
compounded in some mystically incomprehensible fashion of Three Persons,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In short, I am not satisfied
with tracing the idea of a god from the primitive mummy or the secondary
ghost to the one supreme God of the ancient Hebrews; I desire also to
follow on that developed concept till it merges at last in the triune
God of modern Christendom. For, naturally, it is the god in whom men
believe here and now that most of all concerns and interests us.
I {226}may also add that, incidentally to this supplementary enquiry,
we shall come upon several additional traits in the idea of deity and
several important sources of earlier godhead, the consideration of which
we had to postpone before till a more convenient season. We shall find
that the process of tracking down Christianity to its hidden springs
suggests to us many aspects of primitive religion which we were
compelled to neglect in our first hasty synthesis.
The reader must remember that in dealing with so complex a subject as
that of human beliefs and human cults, it is impossible ever to condense
the whole of the facts at once into a single conspectus. We cannot grasp
at a time the entire mass of evidence. While we are following out one
clue, we must neglect another. It is only by examining each main set of
components in analytical distinctness that we can proceed by degrees to
a full and complete synthetic reconstruction of the whole vast fabric.
We must therefore correct and supplement in the sequel much that may
have seemed vague, inaccurate, or insufficient in our preliminary
survey.
The Christian religion with which we have next to deal bases itself
fundamentally upon the personality of a man, by name Jesus, commonly
described as the Christ, that is to say “the anointed.” Of this most
sacred and deified person it is affirmed by modern Christianity, and has
been affirmed by orthodox Christians from a very early period, that he
was not originally a mere man, afterwards taken into the godhead, but
that he was born from the first the son of God, that is to say, of the
Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed previously from all time; that he was
miraculously conceived of a virgin mother; that he was crucified and
buried; that on the third day he arose from the dead; and that he is now
a living and distinct person in a divine and mystically-united
Trinity. I propose to show in the subsequent chapters how far all
these conceptions were already familiar throughout the world in which
Christianity {227}was promulgated, and to how large an extent the new
religion owed its rapid success to the fact that it was but a _résumé_
or idealised embodiment of all the chief conceptions already common to
the main cults of Mediterranean civilisation. At the moment when
the empire was cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to
cosmopolitanise religion, by taking into itself whatever was central,
common, and universal in the worship of the peoples among whom it
originated.
We will begin with the question of the incarnation, which lies at the
very root of the Christian concept.
I have said already that in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, “The God was
the Dead King, the King was the Living God.” This is true, literally
and absolutely. Since the early kings are gods, the present kings, their
descendants, are naturally also gods by descent; their blood is divine;
they differ in nature as well as in position from mere common mortals.
While they live, they are gods on earth; when they die, they pass over
to the community of the gods their ancestors, and share with them a
happy and regal immortality. We have seen how this essential divinity
of the Pharaoh is a prime article in the religious faith of the Egyptian
Pyramid-builders. And though in later days, when a Greek dynasty, not
of the old divine native blood, bore sway in Egypt, this belief in the
divinity of the king grew fainter, yet to the very last the Ptolemies
and the Cleopatras bear the title of god or goddess, and carry in
their hands the sacred _tau_ or _crux ansata_, the symbol and mark of
essential divinity.
The inference made in Egypt that the children of gods must be themselves
divine was also made in most other countries, especially in those where
similar great despotisms established themselves at an early grade of
culture. Thus in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were the children of
the Sun; and when they died, it was said that their father, the Sun,
had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings were likewise gods, with full
control of the course of nature; {228}they swore at their accession to
make the sun shine, the rain fall, the rivers flow, and the earth bring
forth her fruit in due season. How they could promise all this seems
at first a little difficult for us to conceive; but it will become more
comprehensible at a later stage of our investigation, when we come to
consider the gods of cultivation: even at present, if we remember that
kings are children of the Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves, and
sacred wells are closely connected with the tombs of their ancestors, we
can guess at the beginning of such a mental connexion. Thus the Chinese
emperor is the Son of Heaven; he is held responsible to his people for
the occurrence of drought or other serious derangements of nature.
The Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says Mr. Frazer, to whom I am
greatly indebted for most of the succeeding facts, styled themselves
brothers of the sun and moon, and were worshipped as deities. Numberless
other cases are cited by Mr. Frazer, who was the first to point out the
full importance of this widespread belief in man-gods. I shall follow
him largely in the subsequent discussion of this cardinal subject,
though I shall often give to the facts an interpretation slightly
different from that which he would allow to be the correct one. For to
me, godhead springs always from the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr.
Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.
Besides these human gods who are gods by descent from deified ancestors,
there is another class of gods who are gods by inspiration or
indwelling of the divine spirit, that is to say of some ghost or god
who temporarily or permanently inhabits the body of a living man. The
germ-idea of such divine possession we may see in the facts of epilepsy,
catalepsy, dream, and madness. In all such cases of abnormal nervous
condition it seems to primitive man, as it still seemed to the Jews of
the age of the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or seized upon by
some spirit, who bodily inhabits him. The spirit may throw {229}the man
down, or may speak through his mouth in strange unknown tongues; it may
exalt him so that he can perform strange feats of marvellous strength,
or may debase him to a position of grovelling abjectness. By fasting
and religious asceticism men and women can even artificially attain this
state, when the god speaks through them, as he spoke through the mouth
of the Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always one of the religious
exercises of god-possessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and ascetics
in general. Where races have learnt how to manufacture intoxicating
drinks, or to express narcotic juices from plants, they also universally
attribute the effects of such plants to the personal action of an
inspiring spirit--an idea so persistent even into civilised ages that
we habitually speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both these ways of
attaining the presence of an indwelling god are commonly practised among
savages and half-civilised people.
When we recollect how we saw already that ancestral spirits may descend
from time to time into the skulls that once were theirs, or into the
clay or wooden images that represent them, and there give oracles, we
shall not be surprised to find that they can thus enter at times into a
human body, and speak through its lips, for good or for evil. Indeed,
I have dwelt but little in this book on this migratory power and this
ubiquitousness of the spirits, because I have desired to fix attention
chiefly on that primary aspect of religion which is immediately and
directly concerned with Worship; but readers familiar with such works as
Dr. Tylor’s and Mr. Frazer’s will be well aware of the common power
which spirits possess of projecting themselves readily into every
part of nature. The faculty of possession or of divination is but one
particular example of this well-known attribute. The mysteries and
oracles of all creeds are full of such phenomena.
Certain persons, again, are born from the womb as incarnations of a
god or an ancestral spirit. “Incarnate gods,” {230}says Mr. Frazer,
“are common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary or
permanent.... When the divine spirit has taken up its abode in a human
body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate his character by
working miracles.” Mr. Frazer gives several excellent examples of both
these classes. I extract a few almost verbatim.
Certain persons are possessed from time to time by a spirit or deity;
while possession lasts, their own personality lies in abeyance, and the
presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shakings and quiverings
of the body. In this abnormal state, the man’s utterances are accepted
as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through
him. In Mangaia, for instance, the priests in whom the gods took up
their abode were called god-boxes or gods. Before giving oracles, they
drank an intoxicating liquor, and the words they spoke in their frenzy
were then regarded as divine. In other cases, the inspired person
produces the desired condition of intoxication by drinking the fresh
blood of a victim, human or animal, which, as we shall see hereafter, is
probably itself an avatar of the inspiring god. In the temple of Apollo
Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a
woman, who had to observe the rule of chastity, tasted its blood, and
then gave oracles. At Ægira in Achæa the priestess of the Earth
drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into her cave to
prophesy. (Note in passing that caves, the places of antique burial, are
also the usual places for prophetic inspiration.) In southern India,
the so-called devil-dancer drinks the blood of a goat, and then becomes
seized with the divine afflatus. He is worshipped as a deity, and
bystanders ask him questions requiring superhuman knowledge to answer.
Mr. Frazer extends this list of oracular practices by many other
striking instances, for which I would refer the reader to the original
volume.
Of permanent living human gods, inspired by the constant {231}indwelling
of a deity, Mr. Frazer also gives several apt examples. In the Marquesas
Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime.
They were supposed to wield supernatural control over the elements. They
could give or withhold rain and good harvests. Human sacrifices were
offered them to appease their wrath. “A missionary has described one
of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a very old
man who lived in a large house within an enclosure.” (A temple in its
_temenos_.) “In the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the
house and on the trees around it were hung human skeletons, head down.
No one entered the enclosure, except the persons dedicated to the
service of the god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed
might ordinary people penetrate into the precinct. This human god
received more sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on
a sort of scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human
victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he inspired
was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offerings were sent
to him from every side.” Indeed, throughout the South Sea Islands,
each island had usually a man who embodied its deity. Such men were
called gods, and were regarded as of divine substance. The man-god was
sometimes a king; oftener he was a priest or a subordinate chief. The
gods of Samoa were sometimes permanently incarnate in men, who gave
oracles, received offerings (occasionally of human flesh), healed the
sick, answered prayer, and generally performed all divine functions.
Of the Fijians it is said: “There appears to be no certain line of
demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor between gods and
living men, for many of the priests and old chiefs are considered as
sacred persons, and not a few of them will also claim to themselves
the right of divinity. ‘I am a god,’ Tuikilakila would say; and he
believed it too.” There is said to be a sect in Orissa who worship the
Queen of England as their chief divinity; {232}and another sect in the
Punjab worshipped during his lifetime the great General Nicholson.
Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine by birth, as descendants of gods;
but sometimes divinity is conferred upon them with the kingship, as
indeed was the case even in the typical instance of Egypt. Tanatoa, king
of Raiatea, was deified by a certain ceremony performed at the chief
temple. He was made a god before the gods his ancestors, as Celtic
chiefs received the chieftainship standing on the sacred stone of their
fathers. As one of the deities of his subjects, therefore, the king was
worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and honoured with sacrifices. The
king of Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred girdle of red
and yellow feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly
station, but also identified him with the heavenly gods. Compare the
way in which the gods of Egypt make the king one of themselves, as
represented in the bas-reliefs, by the presentation of the divine _tau_.
In the Pelew Islands, a god may incarnate himself in a common person;
this lucky man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank, and rules as god
and king over the community. Not unsimilar is the mode of selection of
a Grand Lama. In later stages, the king ceases to be quite a god, but
retains the anointment, the consecration on a holy stone, and the claim
to “divine right”; he also shows some last traces of deity in
his divine power to heal diseases, which fades away at last into the
practice of “touching for king’s evil.” On all these questions,
again, Mr. Frazer’s great work is a perfect thesaurus of apposite
instances. I abstain from quoting his whole two volumes.
But did ideas of this character still survive in the Mediterranean world
of the first and second centuries, where Christianity was evolved? Most
undoubtedly they did. In Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had
only just become extinct. In Rome itself, the divine Cæsar had recently
undergone official apotheosis; the divine Augustus had ruled over the
empire as the adopted son of the new-made {233}god; and altars rose
in provincial cities to the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or
Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity were claimed indirectly for the
god Julius; he was divine by apotheosis, but he was also descended
from the goddess Venus. So the double claim was made for the central
personage of the Christian faith: he was the son of God--that is to
say of Jahweh; but he was also of kingly Jewish origin, a descendant of
David, and in the genealogies fabricated for him in the Gospels extreme
importance is attached to this pretended royal ancestry. Furthermore,
how readily men of the Mediterranean civilisation could then identify
living persons with gods we see in the familiar episode of Paul and
Barnabas at Lystra. Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordinary
feature of religion and daily life as then understood. And to oriental
ideas in particular, the conception was certainly no novelty. “Even
an infant king,” say the laws of Manu, which go to the root of so much
eastern thinking, “must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere
mortal: for he is a great deity in human form.”
To most modern thinkers, however, it would seem at first sight like a
grave difficulty in the way of accepting the deity of an ordinary
man that he should have suffered a violent death at the hands of his
enemies. Yet this fact, instead of standing in the way of acceptance of
Christ’s divinity, is really almost a guarantee and proof of it. For,
strange as it sounds to us, the human gods were frequently or almost
habitually put to death by their votaries. The secret of this curious
ritual and persistent custom has been ingeniously deciphered for us
by Mr. Frazer, whose book is almost entirely devoted to these two main
questions, “_Why do men kill their gods?_” and “_Why do they eat
and drink their flesh and blood under the form of bread and wine?_”
We must go over some of the same ground here in rapid summary, with
additional corollaries; and we must also bring Mr. Frazer’s curious
facts into line with our general principles of the origin of godhead.
Meanwhile, {234}it may be well to add here two similar instances of
almost contemporary apotheoses. The dictator Julius was killed by a band
of reactionary conspirators, and yet was immediately raised to divine
honours. A little later, Antinous, the favourite of the emperor Hadrian,
devoted himself to death in order to avert misfortune from his master;
he was at once honoured with temples and worship. The belief that it
is expedient that “one man should die for the people,” and that the
person who so dies is a god in human shape, formed, as we shall see,
a common component of many faiths, and especially of the faiths of the
eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, a little later, each Christian martyrdom
is followed as a matter of course by canonisation--that is to say, by
minor apotheosis. Mr. Frazer has traced the genesis of this group of
allied beliefs in the slaughter of the man-god in the most masterly
manner. They spring from a large number of converging ideas, some of
which can only come out in full as we proceed in later chapters to other
branches of our subject.
In all parts of the world, one of the commonest prerogatives and
functions of the human god is the care of the weather. As representative
of heaven, it is his business to see that rain falls in proper
quantities, and that the earth brings forth her increase in due season.
But, god though he is, he must needs be coerced if he does not attend to
this business properly. Thus, in West Africa, when prayers and offerings
presented to the king have failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him
with ropes, and take him to the grave of his deified forefathers, that
he may obtain from them the needful change in the weather. Here we see
in the fullest form the nature of the relation between dead gods and
living ones. The Son is the natural mediator between men and the Father.
Among the Antaymours of Madagascar, the king is responsible for bad
crops and all other misfortunes. The ancient Scythians, when food
was scarce, put their kings in bonds. {235}The Banjars in West Africa
ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. As long
as the climate is satisfactory, they load him with presents of grain and
cattle. But if long drought or rain does serious harm, they insult and
beat him till the weather changes. The Burgundians deposed their king if
he failed to make their crops grow to their satisfaction.
Further than that, certain tribes have even killed their kings in times
of scarcity. In the days of the Swedish king Domalde, a mighty famine
broke out, which lasted several years, and could not be stayed by human
or animal sacrifices. So, in a great popular assembly held at Upsala,
the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the
scarcity, and must be sacrificed for good seasons. Then they slew
him, and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Here we must
recollect that the divine king is himself a god, the descendant of gods,
and he is sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own forefathers.
We shall see hereafter how often similar episodes occur--how the god is
sacrificed, himself to himself; how the Son is sacrificed to the Father,
both being gods; and how the Father sacrifices his Son, to make a god
of him. To take another Scandinavian example from Mr. Frazer’s
collection: in the reign of King Olaf, there came a great dearth, and
the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was
sparing in sacrifices. So they mustered an army and marched against
him; then they surrounded his palace and burnt it, with him within it,
“giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.” Many points must
here be noted. Olaf himself was of divine stock, a descendant of Odin.
He is burnt as an offering to his father, much as the Carthaginians
burnt their sons, or the king of Moab his first-born, as sacrifices to
Melcarth and to Chemosh. The royal and divine person is here offered up
to his own fathers, just as on the cross of the founder of Christendom
the inscription ran, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” and just
as in Christian {236}theology God offers his Son as a sacrifice to his
own offended justice.
Other instances elsewhere point to the same analogies. In 1814, a
pestilence broke out among the reindeer of the Chukches (a Siberian
tribe); and the shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be
sacrificed to the angry gods (probably his ancestors); so the chief’s
own son stabbed him with a dagger. On the coral island of Niue in the
South Pacific there once reigned a line of kings; but they were also
“high-priests” (that is to say, divine representatives of divine
ancestors); and they were supposed to make the crops grow, for a reason
which will come out more fully in the sequel. In times of scarcity, the
people “grew angry with them and killed them,” or more probably,
as I would interpret the facts, sacrificed them for crops to their own
deified ancestors. So in time there were no kings left, and the monarchy
ceased altogether on the island.
The divine kings being thus responsible for rain and wind, and for
the growth of crops, whose close dependence upon them we shall further
understand hereafter, it is clear that they are persons of the greatest
importance and value to the community. Moreover, in the ideas of early
men, their spirit is almost one with that of external nature, over which
they exert such extraordinary powers. A subtle sympathy seems to exist
between the king and the world outside. The sacred trees which embody
his ancestors; the crops, which, as we shall see hereafter, equally
embody them; the rain-clouds in which they dwell; the heaven they
inhabit;--all these, as it were, are parts of the divine body, and
therefore by implication part of the god-king’s, who is but the avatar
of his deified fathers. Hence, whatever affects the king, affects the
sky, the crops, the rain, the people. There is even reason to believe
that the man-god, representative of the ancestral spirit and tribal god,
is therefore the representative and embodiment of the tribe itself--the
soul of the nation.
_L’état, c’est moi_ {237}is no mere personal boast of Louis
Quatorze; it is the belated survival of an old and once very powerful
belief, shared in old times by kings and peoples. Whatever hurts the
king, hurts the people, and hurts by implication external nature.
Whatever preserves the king from danger, preserves and saves the world
and the nation.
Mr. Frazer has shown many strange results of these early beliefs--which
he traces, however, to the supposed primitive animism, and not (as
I have done) to the influence of the ghost-theory. Whichever
interpretation we accept, however, his facts at least are equally
valuable. He calls attention to the number of kingly taboos which are
all intended to prevent the human god from endangering or imperilling
his divine life, or from doing anything which might react hurtfully
upon nature and the welfare of his people. The man-god is guarded by the
strictest rules, and surrounded by precautions of the utmost complexity.
He may not set his sacred foot on the ground, because he is a son of
heaven; he may not eat or drink with his sacred mouth certain dangerous,
impure, or unholy foods; he may not have his sacred hair cut, or his
sacred nails pared; he must preserve intact his divine body, and every
part of it--the incarnation of the community,--lest evil come of his
imprudence or his folly.
The Mikado, for example, was and still is regarded as an incarnation of
the sun, the deity who rules the entire universe, gods and men included.
The greatest care must therefore be taken both _by_ him and _of_ him.
His whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that
no act of his may upset the established order of nature. Lest he should
touch the earth, he used to be carried wherever he went on men’s
shoulders. He could not expose his sacred person to the open air, nor
eat out of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every way his sanctity
and his health were jealously guarded, and he was treated like a person
{238}whose security was important to the whole course of nature.
Mr. Frazer quotes several similar examples, of which the most striking
is that of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an ancient people of
Southern Mexico. This spiritual lord, a true Pope or Lama, governed
Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion.
He was looked upon as a god “whom earth was not worthy to hold or the
sun to shine upon.” He profaned his sanctity if he touched the common
ground with his holy foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their
shoulders were chosen from the members of the highest families; he
hardly deigned to look on anything around him; those who met him
prostrated themselves humbly on the ground, lest death should overtake
them if they even saw his divine shadow. (Compare the apparition of
Jahweh to Moses.) A rule of continence was ordinarily imposed upon him;
but on certain days in the year which were high festivals, it was usual
for him to get ceremonially and sacramentally drunk. On such days,
we may be sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into him with the
intoxicating pulque, and the ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead.
While in this exalted state (“full of the god,” as a Greek or Roman
would have said) the divine pontiff received a visit from one of the
most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of the gods. If
the child she bore him was a son, it succeeded in due time to the
throne of the Zapotecs. We have here again an instructive mixture of
the various ideas out of which such divine kingship and godship is
constructed.
It might seem at first sight a paradoxical corollary that people who
thus safeguard and protect their divine king, the embodiment of nature,
should also habitually and ceremonially kill him. Yet the apparent
paradox is, from the point of view of the early worshipper, both natural
and reasonable. We read of the Congo negroes that they have a supreme
pontiff whom they regard as a god upon earth, and {239}all-powerful
in heaven. But, “if he were to die a natural death, they thought the
world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power
and merit, would immediately be annihilated.” This idea of a god as
the creator and supporter of all things, without whom nothing would be,
is of course a familiar component element of the most advanced theology.
But many nations which worship human gods carry out the notion to its
logical conclusion in the most rigorous manner. Since the god is a man,
it would obviously be quite wrong to let him grow old and weak; since
thereby the whole course of nature might be permanently enfeebled; rain
would but dribble; crops would grow thin; rivers would trickle away; and
the race he ruled would dwindle to nothing. Hence senility must never
overcome the sacred man-god; he must be killed in the fulness of
his strength and health (say, about his thirtieth year), so that the
indwelling spirit, yet young and fresh, may migrate unimpaired into the
body of some newer and abler representative. Mr. Frazer was the first, I
believe, to point out this curious result of primitive human reasoning,
and to illustrate it by numerous and conclusive instances.
I cannot transcribe here in full Mr. Frazer’s admirable argument, with
the examples which enforce it; but I must at least give so much of it
in brief as will suffice for comprehension of our succeeding exposition.
“No amount of care and precaution,” he says, “will prevent the
man-god from growing old and feeble, and at last dying. His worshippers
have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best
they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is
dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected
from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction
in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god
must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are
beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a {240}vigorous
successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.
The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing
him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough.
For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means,
according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed
from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been
extracted or at least detained in its wanderings by a demon or
sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to
his worshippers; and with it their prosperity is gone and their very
existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of
the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it
to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, thus dying of
disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage
of weakness and exhaustion, and as such it would continue to drag out a
feeble existence in the body to which it might be transferred. Whereas
by killing him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure
of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable
successor; and, in the second place, by killing him before his natural
force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall
into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore,
was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god
and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous
successor.”
For this reason, when the pontiff of Congo grew old, and seemed likely
to die, the man who was destined to succeed him in the pontificate
entered his house with a rope or club, and strangled or felled him. The
Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods; but when the priests
thought fit, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die,
and alleging an oracle of the gods (or earlier kings) as the reason of
their command. This command the kings always obeyed down to the reign
of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II. of Egypt. So, when {241}the
king of Unyoro in Central Africa falls ill, or begins to show signs of
approaching age, one of his own wives is compelled by custom to kill
him. The kings of Sofala were regarded by their people as gods who could
give rain or sunshine; but the slightest bodily blemish, such as the
loss of a tooth, was considered a sufficient reason for putting one of
these powerful man-gods to death; he must be whole and sound, lest all
nature pay for it. Many kings, human gods, divine priests, or sultans
are enumerated by Mr. Frazer, each of whom must be similarly perfect in
every limb and member. The same perfect manhood is still exacted of the
Christian Pope, who, however, is not put to death in case of extreme age
or feebleness. But there is reason to believe that the Grand Lama, the
divine Pope of the Tibetan Buddhists, is killed from time to time, so as
to keep him “ever fresh and ever young,” and to allow the inherent
deity within him to escape full-blooded into another embodiment.
In all these cases the divine king or priest is suffered by his people
to retain office, or rather to house the godhead, till by some outward
defect, or some visible warning of age or illness, he shows them that
he is no longer equal to the proper performance of his divine functions.
Until such symptoms appear, he is not put to death. Some peoples,
however, as Mr. Frazer shows, have not thought it safe to wait for even
the slightest symptom of decay before killing the human god or king;
they have destroyed him in the plenitude of his life and vigour. In such
cases, the people fix a term beyond which the king may not reign, and at
the close of which he must die, the term being short enough to prevent
the probability of degeneration meanwhile. In some parts of Southern
India, for example, the term was fixed at twelve years; at the
expiration of that time, the king had to cut himself to pieces visibly,
before the great local idol, of which he was in all probability the
human equivalent. “Whoever desires to reign other twelve years,”
says an early observer, “and to undertake {242}this martyrdom for the
sake of the idol, has to be present looking on at this; and from that
place they raise him up as king.”
The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, had also to cut his throat
in public after a twelve years’ reign. But towards the end of the
seventeenth century, the rule was so far relaxed that the king was
allowed to retain the throne, and probably the godship, if he could
protect himself against all comers. As long as he was strong enough to
guard his position, it was held that he was strong enough to retain
the divine power unharmed. The King of the Wood at Aricia held his
priesthood and ghostly kingship on the same condition; as long as he
could hold his own against all comers, he might continue to be priest;
but any runaway slave had the right of attacking the king; and if he
could kill him, he became the King of the Wood till some other in turn
slew him. This curious instance has been amply and learnedly discussed
by Mr. Frazer, and forms the central subject of his admirable treatise.
More often still, however, the divine priesthood, kingship, or godhead
was held for one year alone, for a reason which we shall more fully
comprehend after we have considered the annual gods of cultivation. The
most interesting example, and the most cognate to our present enquiry,
is that of the Babylonian custom cited by Berosus. During the five days
of the festival called the Sacæa, a prisoner condemned to death was
dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed
to eat, drink, and order whatever he chose, and even permitted to
sleep with the king’s concubines. But at the end of five days, he was
stripped of his royal insignia, scourged, and crucified. I need hardly
point out the crucial importance of this singular instance, occurring in
a country within the Semitic circle. Mr. Frazer rightly concludes that
the condemned man was meant to die in the king’s stead; was himself,
in point of fact, a king substitute; and was therefore invested for the
time being with the fullest {243}prerogatives of royalty. Doubtless
we have here to deal with a modification of an older and sterner rule,
which compelled the king himself to be slain annually. “When the time
drew near for the king to be put to death,” says Mr. Frazer, “he
abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and
suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may have been an
innocent person, possibly a member of the king’s own family; but with
the growth of civilisation, the sacrifice of an innocent person would be
revolting to the public sentiment, and accordingly a condemned criminal
would be invested with the brief and fatal sovereignty.... We shall find
other examples of a criminal representing a dying god. For we must not
forget that the king is slain in his character of a god, his death
and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life
unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people
and the world.” I need not point out the importance of such ideas
as assisting in the formation of a groundwork for the doctrines of
Christianity.
Other evidence on this point, of a more indirect nature, has been
collected by Mr. Frazer; and still more will come out in subsequent
chapters. For the present I will only add that the annual character
of some such sacrifices seems to be derived from the analogy of the
annually-slain gods of cultivation, whose origin and meaning we have yet
to examine. These gods, being intimately connected with each year’s
crop, especially with crops of cereals, pulses, and other annual grains,
were naturally put to death at the beginning of each agricultural year,
and as a rule about the period of the spring equinox,--say, at Easter.
Starting from that analogy, as I believe, many races thought it fit that
the other divine person, the man-god king, should also be put to death
annually, often about the same period. And I will even venture to
suggest the possibility that the institution of annual consuls,
archons, etc., may have something to do with such annual sacrifices.
{244}Certainly the legend of Codrus at Athens and of the Regifugium at
Rome seem to point to an ancient king-slaying custom.
At any rate, it is now certain that the putting to death of a public
man-god was a common incident of many religions. And it is also clear
that in many cases travellers and other observers have made serious
mistakes by not understanding the inner nature of such god-slaying
practices. For instance it is now pretty certain that Captain Cook was
killed by the people of Tahiti just _because_ he was a god, perhaps
in order to keep his spirit among them. It is likewise clear that many
rites, commonly interpreted as human sacrifices to a god, are really
god-slayings; often the god in one of his human avatars seems to be
offered to himself, in his more permanent embodiment as an idol or stone
image. This idea of sacrificing a god, himself to himself, is one which
will frequently meet us hereafter; and I need hardly point out that, as
“_the sacrifice of the mass_,” it has even enshrined itself in the
central sanctuary of the Christian religion.
Christianity apparently took its rise among a group of irregular
northern Israelites, the Galilæans, separated from the mass of their
coreligionists, the Jews, by the intervention of a heretical and
doubtfully Israelitish wedge, the Samaritans. The earliest believers
in Jesus were thus intermediate between Jews and Syrians. According to
their own tradition, they were first described by the name of Christians
at Antioch; and they appear on many grounds to have attracted attention
first in Syria in general, and particularly at Damascus. We may be sure,
therefore, that their tenets from the first would contain many elements
more or less distinctly Syrian, and especially such elements as formed
ideas held in common by almost all the surrounding peoples. As a matter
of fact. Christianity, as we shall see hereafter, may be regarded
historically as a magma of the most fundamental religious ideas of the
Mediterranean basin, and especially of the eastern {245}Mediterranean,
grafted on to the Jewish cult and the Jewish scriptures, and clustering
round the personality of the man-god, Jesus. It is interesting therefore
to note that in Syria and the north Semitic area the principal cult
was the cult of just such a slain man-god, Adonis,--originally, as Mr.
Frazer shows, an annually slain man-god, afterwards put to death and
bewailed in effigy, after a fashion of which we shall see not a
few examples in the sequel, and of which the Mass itself is but an
etherealised survival. Similarly in Phrygia, where Christianity early
made a considerable impression, the most devoutly worshipped among the
gods was Attis, who, as Professor Ramsay suggests, was almost certainly
embodied in early times as an annually slain man-god, and whose cult was
always carried on by means of a divine king-priest, bearing himself the
name of Attis. Though in later days the priest did not actually immolate
himself every year, yet on the yearly feast of the god, at the spring
equinox (corresponding to the Christian Easter) he drew blood from
his own arms, as a substitute no doubt for the earlier practice of
self-slaughter. And I may add in this connexion (to anticipate once
more) that in all such godslaughtering rites, immense importance was
always attached to the blood of the man-god; just as in Christianity
“_the blood of Christ_” remains to the end of most saving efficacy.
Both Adonis and Attis were conceived as young men in the prime of life,
like the victims chosen for other god-slaying rites.
I have dealt in this chapter only in very brief summary with this vast
and interesting question of human deities. Mr. Frazer has devoted to it
two large and fascinating volumes. His work is filled with endless facts
as to such man-gods themselves, the mode of their vicarious or expiatory
slaughter on behalf of the community, the gentler substitution of
condemned criminals for the divine kings in more civilised countries,
the occasional mitigation whereby the divine king merely draws his own
blood instead {246}of killing himself, or where an effigy is made to
take the place of the actual victim, and so forth _ad infinitum_. All
these valuable suggestions and ideas I could not reproduce here without
transcribing in full many pages of _The Golden Bough_, where Mr.
Frazer has marshalled the entire evidence on the point with surprising
effectiveness. I will content myself therefore by merely referring
readers to that most learned yet interesting and amusing book. I will
only say in conclusion that what most concerns us here is Mr. Frazer’s
ample and convincing proof of the large part played by such slain (and
rerisen) man-gods in the religion of those self-same east-Mediterranean
countries where Christianity was first evolved as a natural product
of the popular imagination. The death and resurrection of the
humanly-embodied god form indeed the keynote of the greatest and most
sacred religions of western Asia and northeastern Africa.