|ONE {347}more element of some importance yet remains in the complex
conception of the human or animal victim, or slain god, which we must
briefly examine before we can proceed with advantage to the evolution
of Christianity; I mean the doctrine of piacular sacrifice--or, in other
words, of the atonement.
“_Without shedding of blood,” says the author of one of the earliest
Christian tractates, “there is no remission of sin_.” This is a
common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is regarded, not
merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or incarnate
god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed. “_Behold the Lamb
of God,” says the Baptist in the legend, “which taketh away the sins
of the world_.”
This idea, I take it, is not primitive. Sin must be regarded as a late
ethical intruder into the domain of religion. Early man for the most
part takes his gods joyously. He is on the best of terms with them. He
eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. They join in his phallic
and bacchanalian orgies. They are not great moral censors, like the
noble creation of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold
iniquity.” They are creatures of like passions and failings with
himself,--dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human
frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the
most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen.
Angry they may be at times, {348}no doubt; but their anger as a rule
can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered
goats and bulls. Under normal circumstances, they are familiar
housemates. Their skulls or images adorn the hearth. They assist at the
family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or
wine made to them with a smiling countenance. In short, they are average
members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they
continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and
merry-makings of their relatives.
Thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a
temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most
primitive religions. It is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude
themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is
primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the
gods, makes itself slowly visible. In many cases, later glosses seem to
put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy
a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. But in more
consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains
ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of
communion or feasting together. Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of
as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this
is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the
hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in many works of Hellenic and Semitic
literature.
In particular, the piacular sacrifice seems to have crystallised and
solidified round the sacred person of the artificial deity. “The
accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people,” says Mr.
Frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to
bear them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.”
“Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” says one
of the Hebrew poets, whose verses are conjecturally attributed {349}to
Isaiah, about one such divine scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our
transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of
our peace was upon him, and with his stripes are we healed. Jahweh hath
laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”
The ideas here expressed in such noble language were common to all the
later man-gods of the more advanced and ethical religions.
Mr. Frazer is probably right in connecting the notion of the scapegoat,
human or animal, with _the popular barbaric idea of the transference of
evils_. Thus, in popular magic of all nations, diseases of every sort,
from serious fevers and plagues, down to headache, toothache, warts, and
sores, are transferred by some simple ceremony of witchcraft to animals,
rags, or other people. I will quote examples but briefly. Epilepsy is
made over to leaves and thrown away in the Malay Archipelago. Toothache
is put into a stone in Australia. A Bechuana king gave his illness to
an ox, which was drowned in his stead, to secure his recovery. Mr. Gomme
quotes a terrible story of a Scotch nobleman who transferred his mortal
disease to his brother by a magical ceremony. “Charms” for fever or
for warts generally contain some such amiable element of transferring
the trouble to a string, a rag, or a piece of paper, which is flung away
to carry the evil with it to the person who next touches it. Numerous
cases of like implication may be found in the works of Mr. Gomme and Mr.
Hartland, to which I would refer enquirers after further evidence.
Closely connected with these notions of transference are also the
occasional or periodical ceremonies undertaken for the expulsion of
evils from a village or a community. Devils, demons, hostile spirits,
diseases, and other misfortunes of every sort are frequently thus
expelled with gongs, drums, and other magical instruments. Often the
boundaries of the tribe or parish are gone over, a {350}perlustration
is performed, and the evil influences are washed out of the territory or
forcibly ejected. Our own rite of Beating the Bounds represents on one
of its many sides this primitive ceremony. Washings and dippings are
frequent accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in Peru, it was also
bound up with that common feature of the corn-god sacrament--a cake
kneaded with the blood of living children. The periodical exorcism
generally takes place once a year, but is sometimes biennial: it has
obvious relations with the sacrifice of the human or animal victim.
In Europe, it still survives in many places as the yearly expulsion of
witches. The whole subject has been so admirably treated by Mr. Frazer
that I have nothing to add to his excellent exposition.
Putting these two cardinal ideas together, we arrive at the compound
conception of the _scapegoat_. A scapegoat is a human or animal victim,
chosen to carry off, at first the misfortunes or diseases, later the
sin and guilt of the community. The name by which we designate it
in English, being taken from the derivative Hebrew usage, has animal
implications; but, as in all analogous cases, I do not doubt that the
human evil-bearer precedes the animal one.
A good example of this incipient stage in the evolution of the scapegoat
occurs at Onitsha, on the Quorra River. Two human beings are there
annually sacrificed, “to take away the sins of the land”--though
I suspect it would be more true to native ideas to say, “the
misfortunes.” The number two, as applied to the victims, crops
up frequently in this special connexion. The victims here again are
“bought with a price”--purchased by public subscription. All persons
who during the previous year have committed gross offences against
native ethics are expected to contribute to the cost of the victims. Two
sickly people are bought with the money, “one for the land and one for
the river.” The victims are dragged along the ground to the place
of execution, face downward. The crowd who accompany {351}them cry,
“Wickedness! wickedness!” So in Siam it was customary to choose
a broken-down woman of evil life, carry her on a litter through the
streets (which is usually a symbol of kingship or godhead) and throw her
on a dunghill or hedge of thorns outside the wall, forbidding her ever
again to enter the city. In this eastern case, there is mere expulsion,
not actual killing.
In other instances, however, the divine character attributed to the
human scapegoat is quite unmistakable. Among the Gonds of India, at the
festival of the god of the crops, the deity descends on the head of
one of the worshippers, who is seized with a fit, and rushes off to the
jungle. There, it is believed he would die of himself, if he were not
brought back and tenderly treated: but the Gonds, more merciful here
than in many other cases, take him back and restore him. The idea is
that he is thus singled out to bear the sins of the rest of the village.
At Halberstadt in Thuringia an exactly similar custom survived till
late in the middle ages. A man was chosen, stained with deadly sin,
as the public scapegoat. On the first day of Lent he was dressed in
mourning, and expelled from church. For forty days, he wandered about,
fed only by the priests, and no one would speak to him. He slept in the
street. On the day before Good Friday, however, he was absolved of
his sins, and being called Adam, was believed to be now in a state
of innocence. This is a mitigated and Christianised form of the human
sin-offering.
Again, the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of sacred
slaves in the temple of the moon, many of whom were inspired and
prophesied. When one of these men exhibited unusual symptoms of
inspiration, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain, and
maintained for a year in luxury, like the Mexican corn-god. This fact
immediately brings the human scapegoat into line with the annual human
gods we have already considered. At the end of a year, he was anointed
with unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and led forth to be
sacrificed. {352}The sacrifice was accomplished as a purificatory
ceremony.
Mr. Frazer, to whom I owe all these examples, connects with such rites
the curious ceremony of the expulsion of the Old Mars, the Mamurius
Veturius, at Rome. Every year on the 14th of March (near the spring
equinox), a man, called by the name of a god, was clad in skins--the
significance of which rite we now know--and after being beaten with
long white rods, was expelled the city. From one point of view, this
personage no doubt represented the god of vegetation of the previous
year (for the Mars was originally an annual corn-god). But from another
point of view, being now of no further use to the community, he was
utilised with true old Roman parsimony as a scapegoat, and sent to carry
away the offences of the people. Indeed, there seems to be some reason
for believing that he was driven into the territory of the hostile
Oscans. In this case we perceive that an annual god is made the
sin-offering for the crimes of a nation.
In Greece, we get similar traces of the human scapegoat. At Chæronea in
Boeotia, the chief magistrate at the town-hall, and every householder in
his own house, as we learn from Plutarch (who was himself a magistrate
there) had on a certain day to beat a slave with rods of _agnus castus_,
and turn him out of doors, with the formula, “Out, hunger! in, health
and wealth!” Elsewhere the custom retained more unpleasant features.
At Marseilles, when the colony was ravaged by plague, a man of the
poorer classes used voluntarily to offer himself as a sin-offering or
scapegoat. Here we have once more the common episode of the willing
victim. For a whole year, like other annual gods, he was fed at the
public expense, and treated as a gentleman--that is to say, a kingly
man-god. At the end of that time, he was dressed in sacred garments
--another mark of godship--decked with holy branches, the common
insignia of gods of vegetation, and led through the city, while prayers
were offered up that the sins of {353}the people might fall on his
head. He was then cast out of the colony. The Athenians kept a number of
outcasts as public victims at the expense of the town; and when plague,
drought, or famine befell, sacrificed two of them (note the number) as
human scapegoats. One was said to be a substitute for the men, and one
for the women. They were led about the city (like Beating the Bounds
again) and then apparently stoned to death without it. Moreover,
periodically every year, at the festival of the Thargelia, two victims
were stoned to death as scapegoats at Athens, one for the men, and one
for the women. I would conjecturally venture to connect this sacred
number, not merely with the African practice already noted, but also
with the dual kings at Sparta, the two consuls at Rome, and the two
suffetes at Carthage and in other Semitic cities. The duality of kings,
indeed, is a frequent phenomenon.
I can only add here that the many other ceremonies connected with these
human scapegoats have been well expounded and explained by Mannhardt,
who shows that they were all of a purificatory character, and that the
scourging of the god before putting him to death was a necessary point
of divine procedure. Hence the significance of the _agnus castus_.
Briefly, then, the evidence collected by Mannhardt and Frazer suffices
to suggest that the human scapegoat was the last term of a god,
condemned to death, upon whose head the transgression or misfortunes of
the community were laid as substitute. He was the vicarious offering who
died for the people.
It is only here and there, however, that the scapegoat retains to
historical times his first early form as a human victim. Much more
often, in civilised lands at least, we get the usual successive
mitigations of the custom. Sometimes, as we have seen already in these
cases, the victim is not actually killed, but merely expelled, or
even only playfully and ceremonially driven out of the city. In other
instances, {354}we get the familiar substitution of the condemned
criminal, or the imbecile, as in the Attic Thargelia.’ The Greeks of
Asia Minor used actually to burn their atonement-victim, and cast his
ashes into the sea; but the Leucadians merely threw down a condemned
prisoner from a cliff, and lightened his fall by fastening live birds
to him, while they kept boats below to save him from drowning, and carry
him well beyond the frontier. In the vast majority of cases, however, we
have the still more common substitution of a sacred animal for a human
victim; and this appears to be in large part the origin of that common
religious feature, the piacular sacrifice.
Occasionally we get historical or half-historical evidence of the
transition from a human victim to a divine or quasidivine animal. Thus,
the people of Nias offer either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the
land; but formerly, a man was bound to the same stake with the buffalo,
and when the buffalo was killed, the man was driven away, no native
daring to receive him or feed him. The sacrificial camel of the ancient
Arabs, presumably piacular, is expressly stated to be a substitute for
a human victim. The favourite victims of the Saracens were young and
beautiful captives: but if such were not to be procured, they contented
themselves with a white and faultless camel. The step hence to the
habitual immolation or driving forth of a divine animal in place of a
divine or quasi-divine man is a very small one. In Malabar, the cow is
a sacred beast, and to kill or eat a cow is a crime like murder.
Nevertheless, the Brahmans transfer the sins of the people to a cow
or cows, which are then driven out wherever the Brahmans appoint. The
ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice a bull, and lay upon its head all
the evils which might otherwise happen to themselves and their country;
then they sold the bull’s head to the Greeks, or flung it into the
river. (Contrast this effort to get rid of the accursed head with the
careful preservation and worship of the sacred one.) The best-known case
of all, of course, is the Hebrew scapegoat, which was {355}the sacred
animal of a shepherd people, turned out to die of hunger or thirst in
the desert, and bearing on its head the sins of the people. (Contrast
the scapegoat with the paschal lamb, and compare with the goats and
sheep of the last judgment.) When cholera rages among the aboriginal
tribes of India, they take a goat or a buffalo--in either case a female,
the most sacred sex in Indian sacrifice, and black all over, like Apis
and Mnevis; they turn it out of the village, with magical ceremonies,
and do not allow it to return within their precincts. In many other
similar poojahs, the victim is a goat. Mr. Frazer has collected, here as
elsewhere, a vast number of valuable and illustrative instances.
As a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not
actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven
away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst.
Sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned,
and sometimes slaughtered. And in later and less perfect forms of
piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning
had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the
various elements of the complex problem. People had got accustomed to
certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that
one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial,
and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr. Robertson Smith writes of ancient
Egypt: “Bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten
in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a
piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public
lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” Compare the annual
mourning for Adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament,
and atonement in the Mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of
the Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the
solemn mourning of Good Friday.
Now, I do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these {356}very
mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. Often
enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of
public expiation are evidently present. Usually, too, the victim is
slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god,
and its blood poured forth for him. Thus, in the Hebrew ritual both of
the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar,
“before Jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has
a special significance. In the Semitic held, as Dr. Robertson Smith
observes (and I would add, in most others), “_the fundamental idea
of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion
between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the
living flesh and blood of a sacred victim_.” But the identity of
god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the
sheep-Aphrodite was worshipped in Cyprus with an annual mystic and
piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad
in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to
us.
On the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, I will not
attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed
ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. Most sacrifices seem in the last
resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. Most seem to be
sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. I do not
even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of
rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by
consideration of numerous mixed examples, I have always placed
each particular fact in its best and most effective position for
illustration. The elements of the problem are so involved and so closely
interosculating. For instance, I do not doubt that the great Phoenician
and Carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which I was compelled at
first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor
do I doubt that the Greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was
a mitigation or attenuation {357}of such gigantic human holocausts as
these, or as those attributed to the British Druids. Asclepiades states
expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for
human sacrifice; and so, in the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt
sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of Isaac, the
dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, Abraham, intends to offer as
a royal victim to his tribal god. Abraham says that the god himself
will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers
itself. So at the great temple of Astarte at Eryx, where the victims
were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the
chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the
altar. At the Dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven
together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which
voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only
showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first
because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he
swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity.
(Compare, of course, the Hebrew shewbread.) I need not pursue this line
of thought any further. _It must be obvious that many sacrifices at
least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in
most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal
form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I
point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline
theology_.
I would like to add, however, that the ideas here formulated must give
a new meaning to many points we could not at first understand in
ceremonies mentioned in our earlier chapters. I will take only
one example--that of the place of Samoyed sacrifice which Baron
Nordenskiôld saw on Vaygats Island. We can now divine the meaning of
the heap of reindeer skulls piled around the rude open-air shrine; for
reindeer are the sacred and the-anthropic animals of the northern races;
while the preservation {358}of their heads at the hypœthral altar of
the elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and oracular meaning. We
can also guess why remains of a fireplace could be seen by the side, at
which the sacrificial and sacramental meal was habitually prepared; and
why the mouths of the idols were smeared with blood, in order to make
the older gods or ghosts participators in the festival. Indeed, any
reader who has followed me thus far, and who now turns back to the
earlier chapters of this book, will find that many details appear to him
in quite a different light, and will see why I have insisted beforehand
on some minor points which must have seemed to him at the time wholly
irrelevant.
Many other curious ceremonies that seem equally meaningless at first in
narratives of travel will also come to have a significant meaning when
thus regarded. For instance. Mr. Chalmers tells us that among the New
Guinea natives of particular districts, “pigs are never killed but
in the one place, and then they are offered to the spirit. The blood is
poured out there, and the carcase is then carried back to the village,
to be divided, cooked, and eaten. Pigs’ skulls are kept and hung up
in the house. Food for a feast, such as at house-building”--a most
pregnant hint--“is placed near the post where the skulls hang, and
a prayer is said. When the centre-post is set up, the spirits have
wallaby, fish, and bananas presented to them, and they are besought to
keep that house always full of food, and that it may not fall when the
wind is strong.” If we recall other cases elsewhere, we can hardly
doubt that the pigs in these instances are killed as sacred victims at
the grave of the chief family ancestor; especially when Mr. Chalmers
also tells us that “each family has a sacred place where they
carry offerings to the spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they greatly
fear.” When sickness, famine, or scarcity of fish occur, it is these
spirits that have to be appeased. And if we recollect once more that in
so many cases the central post of the hut is based on a human or animal
victim, both {359}in New Guinea and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that
to this household god or foundation-ghost the offerings at the central
post are presented. Finally, the skulls of the pigs which are kept in
the house and hung on the post remind us on the one hand of the skulls
of ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on the other hand of the
skulls of theanthropic victims kept by the people of India at their
festivals, or fastened by early Greeks and Romans on their temples.
“They cook the heads of their slain enemies,” says Mr. Chalmers
again, “to secure clean skulls to put on sacred places.” Adequately
to develop the hints thus suggested, however, would require another book
as long as the present one.
Yet here is just one more such hint, from the same author, too pregnant
to be omitted.
“When the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas
and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation, and call over
the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding: ‘There is
your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let
it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentiful, you all will be
full of shame, and so shall we.’
“When they go on trading expeditions, they present their food to
the spirits at the centre-post of the house, and ask the spirits to
go before them and prepare the people, so that the trading may be
prosperous.
“When sickness is in the family, a pig is brought to the sacred place
of the great spirit” (probably the chief ancestral ghost), “and
killed. The carcase is then taken to the sacred place of the family, and
the spirits are asked to accept it. Sins are confessed, such as bananas
that are taken, or cocoanuts, and none have been presented, and leave
not given to eat them. ‘There is a pig; accept, and remove the
sickness.’ Death follows, and the day of burial arrives. The friends
all stand round the open grave, and the chief’s sister or cousin”
(the primitive priestess) “calls out in a loud voice, ‘You have been
angry with us for {360}the bananas we have taken (or cocoanuts, as the
case may be), and you have, in your anger, taken this child. Now let it
suffice, and bury your anger.’ The body is then placed in the grave,
and covered over with earth.”
Here we have in brief a perfect epitome of savage theology, savage
ceremonial, and savage atonement. I could enlarge not a little on its
numerous implications.
A single quotation from Mr. Savage Landor’s work on The Hairy Ainu
of Japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic
barbaric theology. “If they have any belief at all,” he says, “it
is an imperfect kind of Totemism, and the central point of that belief
is their own descent from the bear. This does not include the smallest
reverence for their ancestor. They capture their Totem and keep it in
captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to
it. When the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated
and baited by all the men present.” Like the Khond Meriah and the
tortures of martyrs. “It is tied to a stake” or _stauros_ or
accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor
beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks,
shot at with blunted arrows,” like St. Sebastian, “bruised with
stones,” like St. Stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is
killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish
and _raison d’etre_ of a festival, where all the members of the tribe
partake of its flesh. The owner of the hut in which the feast takes
place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside
with the others at the east end of his hut. The skin is made into
garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” Here, I need hardly
say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use
of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of
theanthropic substitution.
It is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal
points: _first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected
as a convenient vehicle for the {361}sins of the people; and second,
that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”_
These two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but
especially in that Eastern Mediterranean world where Christianity was
first evolved. Indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the
writers of the earliest Christian tractates, the Apostolic Epistles,
take them for granted as self-evident--as principles of which every
intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency.