CHAPTER IV. PUBLIC SCAPEGOATS.

§ 1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils.

(M128) Thus far we have dealt with that class of the general expulsion of

evils which I have called direct or immediate. In this class the evils are

invisible, at least to common eyes, and the mode of deliverance consists

for the most part in beating the empty air and raising such a hubbub as

may scare the mischievous spirits and put them to flight. It remains to

illustrate the second class of expulsions, in which the evil influences

are embodied in a visible form or are at least supposed to be loaded upon

a material medium, which acts as a vehicle to draw them off from the

people, village, or town.

(M129) The Pomos of California celebrate an expulsion of devils every

seven years, at which the devils are represented by disguised men. “Twenty

or thirty men array themselves in harlequin rig and barbaric paint, and

put vessels of pitch on their heads; then they secretly go out into the

surrounding mountains. These are to personify the devils. A herald goes up

to the top of the assembly-house, and makes a speech to the multitude. At

a signal agreed upon in the evening the masqueraders come in from the

mountains, with the vessels of pitch flaming on their heads, and with all

the frightful accessories of noise, motion, and costume which the savage

mind can devise in representation of demons. The terrified women and

children flee for life, the men huddle them inside a circle, and, on the

principle of fighting the devil with fire, they swing blazing firebrands

in the air, yell, whoop, and make frantic dashes at the marauding and

bloodthirsty devils, so creating a terrific spectacle, and striking great

fear into the hearts of the assembled hundreds of women, who are screaming

and fainting and clinging to their valorous protectors. Finally the devils

succeed in getting into the assembly-house, and the bravest of the men

enter and hold a parley with them. As a conclusion of the whole farce, the

men summon courage, the devils are expelled from the assembly-house, and

with a prodigious row and racket of sham fighting are chased away into the

mountains.”(423) In spring, as soon as the willow-leaves were full grown

on the banks of the river, the Mandan Indians celebrated their great

annual festival, one of the features of which was the expulsion of the

devil. A man, painted black to represent the devil, entered the village

from the prairie, chased and frightened the women, and acted the part of a

buffalo bull in the buffalo dance, the object of which was to ensure a

plentiful supply of buffaloes during the ensuing year. Finally he was

chased from the village, the women pursuing him with hisses and gibes,

beating him with sticks, and pelting him with dirt.(424) The Mayas of

Yucatan divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and

they added five supplementary days at the end of the year in order to make

a total of three hundred and sixty-five days. These five supplementary

days were deemed unlucky. In the course of them the people banished the

evils that might threaten them in the year on which they were about to

enter. For that purpose they made a clay image of the demon of evil

Uuayayab, that is _u-uayab-haab_, “He by whom the year is poisoned,”

confronted it with the deity who had supreme power over the coming year,

and then carried it out of the village in the direction of that cardinal

point to which, on the system of the Mayan calendar, the particular year

was supposed to belong. Having thus rid themselves of the demon, they

looked forward to a happy New Year.(425)

(M130) Some of the native tribes of Central Queensland believe in a

noxious being called Molonga, who prowls unseen and would kill men and

violate women if certain ceremonies were not performed. These ceremonies

last for five nights and consist of dances, in which only men,

fantastically painted and adorned, take part. On the fifth night Molonga

himself, personified by a man tricked out with red ochre and feathers and

carrying a long feather-tipped spear, rushes forth from the darkness at

the spectators and makes as if he would run them through. Great is the

excitement, loud are the shrieks and shouts, but after another feigned

attack the demon vanishes in the gloom.(426) On the last night of the year

the palace of the Kings of Cambodia is purged of devils. Men painted as

fiends are chased by elephants about the palace courts. When they have

been expelled, a consecrated thread of cotton is stretched round the

palace to keep them out.(427) In Munzerabad, a district of Mysore in

Southern India, when cholera or smallpox has broken out in a parish, the

inhabitants assemble and conjure the demon of the disease into a wooden

image, which they carry, generally at midnight, into the next parish. The

inhabitants of that parish in like manner pass the image on to their

neighbours, and thus the demon is expelled from one village after another,

until he comes to the bank of a river into which he is finally

thrown.(428) Russian villagers seek to protect themselves against

epidemics, whether of man or beast, by drawing a furrow with a plough

right round the village. The plough is dragged by four widows and the

ceremony is performed at night; all fires and lights must be extinguished

while the plough is going the round. The people think that no unclean

spirit can pass the furrow which has thus been traced. In the village of

Dubrowitschi a puppet is carried before the plough with the cry, “Out of

the village with the unclean spirit!” and at the end of the ceremony it is

torn in pieces and the fragments scattered about.(429) No doubt the demon

of the disease is supposed to be in the puppet and to be destroyed with

it. Sometimes in an Esthonian village a rumour will get about that the

Evil One himself has been seen in the place. Instantly the whole village

is in an uproar, and the entire population, armed with sticks, flails, and

scythes, turns out to give him chase. They generally expel him in the

shape of a wolf or a cat, occasionally they brag that they have beaten the

devil to death.(430) At Carmona, in Andalusia, on one day of the year,

boys are stripped naked and smeared with glue in which feathers are stuck.

Thus disguised, they run from house to house, the people trying to avoid

them and to bar their houses against them.(431) The ceremony is probably a

relic of an annual expulsion of devils.

(M131) Some of the Khasis of Assam annually expel the demon of plague. The

ceremony is called _Beh-dieng-khlam_, that is “Driving away (_beh_) the

plague (_khlam_) with sticks (_dieng_)”; it takes place in the Deep-water

month (June). On the day fixed for the expulsion the men rise early and

beat the roof with sticks, calling upon the demon of the plague to leave

the house. Later in the day they go down to the stream where the goddess

Aitan dwells. Then long poles or bamboos, newly cut, are laid across the

stream and the people jump on them, trying to break them; when they

succeed, they give a great shout. Next a very large pole or bamboo is

similarly laid across the stream, and the people divide themselves into

two parties, one on each side of the stream, and pull against each other

at opposite ends of the pole. According to one account the party which

succeeds in dragging the pole to their side of the stream is supposed to

gain health and prosperity during the coming year. According to another

account, if the people on the east bank win in the contest or

“tug-of-war,” good luck and prosperity are assured; but if the people on

the west bank are victorious, then everything will go wrong. On this

occasion the people disguise themselves as giants and wild beasts, and

they parade images of serpents, elephants, tigers, peacocks, and so on.

The men dance with enthusiasm, and the girls, dressed in their best, look

on. Before the assembly breaks up, the men play a sort of game of hockey

with wooden balls.(432) In this ceremonial contest or “tug of war” between

two parties of the people, we may conjecture that the one party represents

the expelled demons of the plague; and if that is so, we may perhaps

assume that in the struggle the representatives of the demons generally

allow themselves to be overcome by their adversaries, in order that the

village may be free from pestilence in the coming year. Similarly in

autumn the Central Esquimaux divide themselves into two parties,

representing summer and winter respectively, which pull at opposite ends

of a rope; and they draw omens of the weather to be expected in the coming

winter according as the party of summer or of winter prevails in the

struggle.(433) That in such contests, resembling our English game of

“French and English” or the “Tug of War,” the one side may represent

demons is proved by a custom observed by the Chukmas, a tribe of the

Chittagong Hill Tracts in South-Eastern India. “On the death of a Dewan or

of a priest a curious sport is customary at the funeral. The corpse is

conveyed to the place of cremation on a car; to this car ropes are

attached, and the persons attending the ceremony are divided into two

equal bodies and set to work to pull in opposite directions. One side

represents the good spirits; the other, the powers of evil. The contest is

so arranged that the former are victorious. Sometimes, however, the young

men representing the demons are inclined to pull too vigorously, but a

stick generally quells this unseemly ardour in the cause of evil.”(434)

The contest is like that between the angels and devils depicted in the

frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. In Burma a similar struggle takes

place at the funeral of a Buddhist monk who passed for a saint in the

popular estimation: ropes are attached to opposite ends of the car on

which the coffin is placed, all the able-bodied men of the neighbourhood

hold on to one or other of the two ends and pull as if for dear life

against each other; even the women and girls sometimes join in the tug of

war, and policemen have been seen, in a state of frantic excitement,

waving their batons to encourage the combatants and dragging back shirkers

by main force into the fighting line. The struggle is sometimes prolonged

for hours or even days.(435) With the example of the Chukmas before us, we

may conjecture that the original motive of this internecine strife was a

persuasion that the eternal happiness or misery of the departed saint

depended on the issue of this contest between the powers of good and evil

for the possession of his mortal remains.

(M132) But in Burma the tug of war has been employed for more secular

purposes than the salvation or perdition of souls. “The inhabitants,” we

are told, “still have a custom of pulling a rope to produce rain. A rain

party and a drought party tug against each other, the rain party being

allowed the victory, which in the popular notion is generally followed by

rain.”(436) The mode in which this salutary result follows from tugging at

a rope is explained by the Burmese doctrine of _nats_ or spirits who cause

rain. But it is only when these spirits sport in the air that rain falls;

when they shut themselves up in their houses there is drought. Now in some

Burmese writings “it is said, that when the sun is in the path of the

goat, these _Nat_ do not chuse to leave their houses on account of the

great heat, whence there is then no rain. For this reason, the inhabitants

of the Burma empire, in times of drought, are wont to assemble in great

numbers, with drums and a long cable. Dividing themselves into two

parties, with a vast shouting and noise, they drag the cable contrary

ways, the one party endeavouring to get the better of the other: and they

think, by this means, to invite the _Nat_ to come out from their houses,

and to sport in the air. The thunder and lightning, which frequently

precede rain, are the clashing and shining of the arms of these _Nat_, who

sometimes sport in mock battles.”(437) Apparently, therefore, in the tug

of war, practised as a rain-charm, the one party represent the spirits who

have to be dragged reluctantly from their houses in order to make rain in

the sky. Similarly in the Timor-laut Islands, when the people want a rainy

wind from the west, the population of the village, men, women, and

children divide into two parties and pull against each other at the end of

a long bamboo. But the party at the eastern end must pull the harder, in

order to draw the desired wind out of the west.(438) We can now perhaps

understand why among the Khasis the victory of the eastern side in the tug

of war is thought to prognosticate good luck and prosperity, and why the

victory of the western side is believed to portend the contrary; the

distinction is at once intelligible when we remember that in the country

of the Khasis the rainy wind is the monsoon which blows from the

south-west, whereas the wind which blows from the south-east is hot and

dry.(439) Thus a victory of the eastern party in the tug of war means that

they have drawn rain and consequently fertility into the country from the

west; whereas a victory of the western party signifies that they have

dragged drought and consequently dearth into the country from the east.

(M133) However, a somewhat different turn is given to the ceremony of

rope-pulling in the East Indies by another writer, who informs us, that

while the contest only takes place in some of these islands when rain is

wanted, it is closely connected with those licentious rites performed for

the fertilization of the ground which have been described in another part

of this work.(440) According to this account the men and women appear to

take opposite sides in the tug of war, and in pulling against each other

they imitate by their movements the union of the sexes.(441) If that is

so, it would seem that the rite is a magical ceremony designed to promote

the fertility of the ground by means of homoeopathic or imitative magic.

The same may perhaps be the intention of the tug of war as it is practised

for the benefit of the crops by some of the Naga tribes of Assam, and this

is the more likely because in the case of these tribes we are definitely

told that the sexes take opposite sides, the women and girls tugging

against the men and boys. This is done by the Tangkhuls of Assam a month

after the rice has been sown; the ceremony is performed “in order to take

the omens for the future of the crops,” and it “is followed by

considerable license.” The tug of war between the sexes with its attendant

license is repeated before the first-fruits are cut by the sacred

headman.(442) In Corea about the fifteenth day of the first month villages

engage in the same kind of contest with each other, and it is thought that

the village which wins will have a good harvest. The rope which they pull

is made of straw, two feet in diameter, with its ends divided into

branches. The men lay hold of the main stem, while the women grasp the

branches, and they often tug harder than the men, for they load their

skirts with stones, which adds weight to the force of their muscles.(443)

In Kamtchatka, when the fishing season is over, the people used to divide

into two parties, one of which tried to pull a birch-tree by a strap

through the smoke-hole into their subterranean winter dwelling, while the

other party outside, pulling at the end of the tree, endeavoured to hinder

them. If the party in the house succeeded, they raised shouts of joy and

set up a grass effigy of a wolf, which they preserved carefully throughout

the year, believing that it espoused their young women and prevented them

from giving birth to twins. For they deem the birth of twins a dreadful

misfortune and a horrible sin; they put it down to the wolf in the forest,

and all who chance to be in the house at the time shew a clean pair of

heels, leaving the mother and her infants to shift for themselves. Should

the twins be both girls, the calamity is even greater.(444) In the village

of Doreh, in Dutch New Guinea, when some of the inhabitants have gone on a

long journey, the people who stay at home engage in a Tug of War among

themselves to determine whether the journey will be prosperous or not. One

side represents the voyagers and the other side those who are left behind.

They pull at opposite ends of a long bamboo, and if the bamboo breaks or

the side which represents the people at home is obliged to let go, the

omen is favourable.(445)

(M134) In Morocco, also, the Tug of War is resorted to as a means of

influencing the weather, sometimes in order to procure rain and sometimes

to procure sunshine; and here men and women appear usually to take

opposite sides in the contest. For example, among the Igliwa, a Berber

people of the Great Atlas, when rain is wanted, they take a rope and the

men pull at one end and women at the other. While they are tugging away, a

man suddenly cuts the rope and the women fall down. The same device for

procuring rain in time of drought is practised by the Ait Warain, another

Berber tribe of Morocco; but among them in the heat of the contest the

women as well as the men will sometimes let go the rope and allow the

opposite party to fall on their backs. However, the Tsûl, another Berber

tribe of Morocco, employ the Tug of War for the opposite purpose of

ensuring a supply of sunshine and heat in autumn, when they wish to dry

their figs and grapes; the contest takes place at night by the light of

the moon.(446) The apparent contradiction of employing the same procedure

for opposite purposes vanishes if we suppose that, as the Assamese custom

seems to indicate, the intention is to draw either a rainy or a dry wind

out of the quarters from which the breezes that bring rain or sunshine

usually blow, and which will usually be on opposite sides of the sky.

Hence in order fully to understand the Tug of War, when it is practised

for the purpose of influencing the weather, we should know, first, the

directions from which the rainy and the dry winds respectively come in the

country under consideration, and second, the direction in which the rope

is stretched between the contending parties. If, for example, as happens

in Assam, the rainy wind blows from the west, and a victory of the eastern

party in the Tug of War is an omen of prosperity, we may conclude with a

fair degree of probability that the intention of the contest is to draw

the rain from the quarter of the sky in which it is lingering. But these

niceties of observation have usually escaped the attention of those who

have described the Tug of War.

(M135) In various parts of Morocco games of ball are played for the sake

now of procuring rain and now of procuring dry weather; the ball is

sometimes propelled with sticks and sometimes with the feet of the

competitors. An Arab questioned as to why a game of ball should bring on

rain explained that the ball is dark like a rain-cloud.(447) Perhaps the

answer furnishes the clue to the meaning of the rite. If in such games

played to influence the weather the ball represents a rain-cloud, the

success or failure of the charm will depend on which side contrives to get

the ball home in the enemy’s quarters. For example, if rain is desired and

the rainy wind blows in Morocco, as may perhaps be assumed, from the west,

then should the western side succeed in driving the ball through the

eastern goal, there will be rain; but if the eastern party wins, then the

rain is driven away and the drought will continue. Thus a game of ball

would in theory and practice answer exactly to the Tug of War practised

for the same purposes.

(M136) In Morocco, however, the Tug of War is apparently used also for the

purpose of ensuring prosperity in general without any special reference to

the weather. Dr. Westermarck was informed by an old Arab from the Hiaina

that the Tug of War “is no longer practised at the Great Feast, as it was

in his childhood, but that it is performed in the autumn when the

threshing is going on and the fruits are ripe. Then men and women have a

tug of war by moonlight so that the _bäs_, or evil, shall go away, that

the year shall be good, and that the people shall live in peace. Some man

secretly cuts two of the three cords of which the rope is made, with the

result that both parties tumble down.”(448) In this contest one party

perhaps represents the powers of good and the other the powers of evil in

general. But why in these Moroccan cases of the Tug of War the rope should

be so often cut and one or both sides laid on their backs, is not

manifest. Perhaps the simple device of suddenly slacking the rope in order

to make the opposite side lose their footing, and so to haul the rope away

from them before they can recover themselves, may have led to the more

trenchant measure of cutting it with a knife for the same purpose.

(M137) These examples make it probable that wherever the Tug of War is

played only at certain definite seasons or on certain particular

occasions, it was originally performed, not as a mere pastime, but as a

magical ceremony designed to work some good for the community. Further, we

may surmise that in many cases the two contending parties represent

respectively the powers of good and evil struggling against each other for

the mastery, and as the community has always an interest in the prevalence

of the powers of good, it may well happen that the powers of evil do not

always get fair play in these conflicts; though no doubt when it comes to

be “pull devil, pull baker,” the devil is apt, in the spirit of a true

sportsman, to tug with as hearty good will as his far more deserving

adversary the baker. To take cases in which the game is played without any

alleged practical motive, the Roocooyen Indians of French Guiana engage in

the Tug of War as a sort of interlude during the ceremonial tortures of

the youth.(449) Among the Cingalese the game “is connected with the

superstitious worship of the goddess Patiné; and is more intended for a

propitiation to that deity, than considered as an indulgence, or pursued

as an exercise. Two opposite parties procure two sticks of the strongest

and toughest wood, and so crooked as to hook into one another without

slipping; they then attach strong cords or cable-rattans of sufficient

length to allow of every one laying hold of them. The contending parties

then pull until one of the sticks gives way.” The victorious piece of wood

is gaily decorated, placed in a palanquin, and borne through the village

amid noisy rejoicings, often accompanied with coarse and obscene

expressions.(450) The use of foul language on this occasion suggests that

the ceremony is here, as elsewhere, observed for the purpose of ensuring

fertility. In the North-Western provinces of India the game is played on

the fourteenth day of the light half of the month Kuar. The rope (_barra_)

is made of the grass called _makra_, and is thicker than a man’s arm. The

various quarters of a village pull against each other, and the one which

is victorious keeps possession of the rope during the ensuing year. It is

chiefly in the east of these provinces that the game is played; in the

west it is unknown.(451) Sometimes the contest is between the inhabitants

of neighbouring villages, and the rope is stretched across the boundary;

plenty is supposed to attend the victorious side.(452) At the Great Feast,

a yearly sacrificial festival of the Mohammedan world, some tribes in

Morocco practise a Tug of War. Thus among the Ait Sadden it is observed on

the first day of the festival before the sacrifice; among the Ait Yusi it

is performed either before the religious service or in the afternoon of

the same day, and also in the morning of the Little Feast. Both sexes

generally take part in the contest, the men tugging at one end of the rope

and the women at the other, and sometimes the weaker party applies for

help to persons of the same sex in a neighbouring village. When they are

all hard at it, the men may suddenly let go the rope and so send the women

sprawling on their backs.(453)

(M138) At Ludlow in Shropshire a grand Tug of War used to take place on

Shrove Tuesday between the inhabitants of Broad Street Ward on the one

side and of Corve Street Ward on the other. The rope was three inches

thick and thirty-six yards long, with a red knob at one end and a blue

knob at the other. The rope was paid out by the Mayor in person from a

window in the Market Hall at four o’clock in the afternoon. The shops then

put up their shutters, and the population engaged in the struggle with

enthusiasm, gentle and simple, lawyers and parsons bearing a hand on one

side or the other, till their clothes were torn to tatters on their backs.

The injured were carried into the neighbouring houses, where their hurts

were attended to. If the party of the Red Knob won, they carried the rope

in triumph to the River Leme and dipped it in the water. Finally, the rope

was sold, the money which it brought in was devoted to the purchase of

beer, and drinking, squabbling, and fighting ended the happy day. This

ancient and highly popular pastime was suppressed in 1851 on the frivolous

pretext that it gave rise to disorderly scenes and dangerous

accidents.(454) A similar custom has long been observed on Shrove Tuesday

at Presteign in Radnorshire. The rope is pulled by two parties

representing the upper and the lower portions of the town, who strive to

drag it either to a point in the west wall or to another point in Broad

Street, where the River Lugg is reached.(455) In the Bocage of Normandy

most desperate struggles used to take place between neighbouring parishes

on Shrove Tuesday for the possession of a large leathern ball stuffed with

bran and called a _soule_. The ball was launched on the village green and

contended for by representatives of different parishes, who sometimes

numbered seven or eight hundred, while five or six thousand people might

assemble to witness the combat; for indeed it was a fight rather than a

game. The conflict was maintained with the utmost fury; old scores were

paid off between personal enemies; there were always many wounded, and

sometimes there were deaths. The aim of each side was to drive the ball

over a stream and to lodge it in a house of their own parish. It was

thought that the parish which was victorious in the struggle would have a

better crop of apples that year than its neighbours. At Lande-Patry the

ball was provided by the bride who had been last married, and she had the

honour of throwing it into the arena. The scene of the fiercest battles

was St. Pierre d’Entremont, on the highroad between Condé and Tinchebray.

After several unsuccessful attempts the custom was suppressed at that

village in 1852 with the help of four or five brigades of police. It is

now everywhere extinct.(456) The belief that the parish which succeeded in

carrying the ball home would have a better crop of apples that year raises

a presumption that these conflicts were originally practised as magical

rites to ensure fertility. The local custom of Lande-Patry, which required

that the ball should be provided and thrown by the last bride,(457) points

in the same direction. It is possible that the popular English, or rather

Scotch, game of football had a similar origin: the winning side may have

imagined that they secured good crops, good weather, or other substantial

advantages to their village or ward.

(M139) In like manner, wherever a sham or a real conflict takes place

between two parties annually, above all at the New Year, we may suspect

that the old intention was to ensure prosperity in some form for the

people throughout the following year, whether by obtaining possession of a

material object in which the luck of the year was supposed to be embodied,

or by defeating and driving away a band of men who personated the powers

of evil. For example, among the Tenggerese of eastern Java the New Year

festival regularly includes a sham fight fought between two bands of men,

who are armed with spears and swords and advance against each other again

and again at a dancing step, thrusting at their adversaries with their

spears, but always taking care to miss their aim.(458) Again, in Ferghana,

a province of Turkestan, it is or used to be customary on the first day of

the year for the king and chiefs to divide into two parties, each of which

chose a champion. Then the two champions, clad in armour, engaged in a

combat with each other, while the crowd joined in with bricks and stones.

When one of them was slain the scrimmage stopped, and omens were drawn as

to whether the year on which they had entered would be prosperous or the

reverse.(459) In these combats it seems probable that one side represents

the demons or other powers of evil whom the people hope to vanquish and

expel at the beginning of the New Year.

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.

(M140) 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.(460)

(M141) 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

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

and rice and to drink palm-wine. 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.(461) 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.(462) 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;(463)

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.(464) In Amboyna, for a

similar purpose, the whole body of the patient is rubbed with a live white

cock, which is then placed on a little proa and committed to the

waves;(465) and in the Babar archipelago the bark which is to carry away

to sea the sickness of a whole village contains a bowl of ashes taken from

every kitchen in the village, and another bowl into which all the sick

people have spat.(466) The plan of putting puppets in the boat to

represent sick persons, in order to lure the demons after them, is not

uncommon.(467) 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.(468)

(M142) In Selangor, one of the native states in the Malay Peninsula, the

ship employed in the export of disease is, or used to be, a model of a

special kind of Malay craft called a _lanchang_. This was a two-masted

vessel with galleries fore and aft, armed with cannon, and used by Malay

rajahs on the coast of Sumatra. So gallant a ship would be highly

acceptable to the spirits, and to make it still more beautiful in their

eyes it was not uncommonly stained yellow with turmeric or saffron, for

among the Malays yellow is the royal colour. Some years ago a very fine

model of a _lanchang_, with its cargo of sickness, was towed down the

river to sea by the Government steam launch. A common spell uttered at the

launching of one of these ships runs as follows:—

“_Ho, elders of the upper reaches,_

_Elders of the lower reaches,_

_Elders of the dry land_,

_Elders of the river-flats,_

_Assemble ye, O people, lords of hill and hill-foot,_

_Lords of cavern and hill-locked basin,_

_Lords of the deep primeval forest,_

_Lords of the river-bends,_

_Come on board this_ lanchang, _assembling in your multitudes._

_So may ye depart with the ebbing stream,_

_Depart on the passing breeze,_

_Depart in the yawning earth,_

_Depart in the red-dyed earth._

_Go ye to the ocean which has no wave,_

_And the plain where no green herb grows,_

_And never return hither._

_But if ye return hither,_

_Ye shall be consumed by the curse._

_At sea ye shall get no drink,_

_Ashore ye shall get no food,_

_But gape in vain about the world_.”(469)

(M143) The practice of sending away diseases in boats is known outside the

limits of the Malay region. Thus when smallpox raged among the Yabim of

German New Guinea, they used to make a little model of a canoe with mast,

sail, and rudder. Then they said to the small vessel, on which the spirit

of smallpox was supposed to have taken his passage, “Bear him away to

another village. When the people come forth to draw you ashore, give them

‘the thing’ and do to them what you have done to us.” Lest the spirit

should be hungry on the voyage, they put some taro on board, and to make

sure of getting rid of the disease, they wiped their hands on the tiny

canoe, after which they let it drift away. It often happened that the wind

or tide drove the vessel back to the place from which it started. Then

there would be a deafening rub-a-dub of drums and blowing of

shell-trumpets; and the little ship, or rather its invisible passenger,

would be again apostrophized, “Do go away, you have already raged among us

so that the air is poisoned with the stench of corpses.” If this time it

sailed away, they would stand on the shore and watch it with glad hearts

disappearing; then they would climb the trees to get a last glimpse of it

till it vanished in the distance. After that they came down joyfully and

said to each other, “We have had enough of it. The sickness has happily

gone away.”(470) When the Tagbanuas and other tribes of the Philippines

suffered from epidemics, they used to make little models of ships, supply

them with rice and fresh drinking water, and launch them on the sea, in

order that the evil spirits might sail away in them.(471) When the people

of Tikopia, a small island in the Pacific, to the north of the New

Hebrides, were attacked by an epidemic cough, they made a little canoe and

adorned it with flowers. Four sons of the principal chiefs carried it on

their shoulders all round the island, accompanied by the whole population,

some of whom beat the bushes, while others uttered loud cries. On

returning to the spot from which they had set out, they launched the canoe

on the sea.(472) In the Nicobar Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, when there

is much sickness in a village or no fish are caught, the blame is laid

upon the spirits. They must be propitiated with offerings. All relations

and friends are invited, a huge pig is roasted, and the best of it is

eaten, but some parts are offered to the shades. The heap of offerings

remains in front of the house till it is carried away by the rising tide.

Then the priests, their faces reddened with paint and swine’s blood,

pretend to catch the demon of disease, and after a hand-to-hand tussle,

force him into a model boat, made of leaves and decked with garlands,

which is then towed so far to sea that neither wind nor tide is likely to

drive it back to the shore.(473) In Annam, when the population of a

village has been decimated by cholera, they make a raft and lade it with

offerings of money and food, such as a sucking pig, bananas, and oranges.

Sticks of incense also smoke on the floating altar; and when all is ready

and earnest prayers have been uttered, the raft is abandoned to the

current of the river. The people hope that the demon of cholera, allured

and gratified by these offerings, will float away on the raft and trouble

them no more.(474)

(M144) 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.(475) When cholera rages among the Bhars, Malians,

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.(476) Sometimes the buffalo is marked with a red pigment

and driven to the next village, where he carries the plague with him.(477)

The people of the city and cantonments of Sagar being afflicted with a

violent influenza, General Sir William Sleeman received a request from the

old Queen Dowager of Sagar “to allow of a noisy religious procession for

the purpose of imploring deliverance from this great calamity. Men, women,

and children in this procession were to do their utmost to add to the

noise by ‘raising their voices in psalmody,’ beating upon their brass pots

and pans with all their might, and discharging firearms where they could

get them; and before the noisy crowd was to be driven a buffalo, which had

been purchased by general subscription, in order that every family might

participate in the merit. They were to follow it out for eight miles,

where it was to be turned loose for any man who would take it. If the

animal returned, the disease, it was said, must return with it, and the

ceremony be performed over again.... It was, however, subsequently

determined that the animal should be a goat, and he was driven before the

crowd accordingly. I have on several occasions been requested to allow of

such noisy _pūjās_ in cases of epidemics.”(478) Once, when influenza was

raging in Pithoria, a village to the north-west of Sagar, a man had a

small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scapegoats,

which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some distance, where

they were let loose. From that hour the disease entirely ceased in the

town. The goats never returned; had they done so, it was affirmed that the

disease must have come back with them.(479)

(M145) The use of a scapegoat is not uncommon in the hills of the Eastern

Ghats. In 1886, during a severe outbreak of smallpox, the people of Jepur

did reverence to a goat, marched it to the Ghats, and let it loose on the

plains.(480) In Southern Konkan, on the appearance of cholera, the

villagers went in procession from the temple to the extreme boundaries of

the village, carrying a basket of cooked rice covered with red powder, a

wooden doll representing the pestilence, and a cock. The head of the cock

was cut off at the village boundary, and the body was thrown away. When

cholera had thus been transferred from one village to another, the second

village observed the same ceremony and passed on the scourge to its

neighbours, and so on through a number of villages.(481) Among the Korwas

of Mirzapur, when cholera has broken out, the priest offers a black cock

or, if the disease is very malignant, a black goat, at the shrine of the

local deity, and then drives the animal away in the direction of some

other village. But it has not gone far before he overtakes it, kills it,

and eats it; which he may do with perfect safety in virtue of his sacred

office. Again, when cholera is raging among the Pataris, an aboriginal

Dravidian race of South Mirzapur, the wizard and the village elders feed a

black cock with grain and drive it beyond the boundaries, ordering the

fowl to take the disease away with it. A little oil, red lead, and a

spangle worn by a woman on her forehead are usually fastened to the bird’s

head before it is let loose. The cost of purchasing the cock is defrayed

by public subscription. When such a bird of ill-omen appears in a village,

the priest takes it to the shrine of the local deity and sacrifices it

there; but sometimes he merely bows before it at the shrine and passes it

on to some other village. If a murrain attacks their cattle, the Kharwars

of Northern India take a black cock and put red lead on its head, antimony

on its eyes, a spangle on its forehead, and a pewter bangle on its leg;

thus arrayed they let it loose, calling out to the disease, “Mount on the

fowl and go elsewhere into the ravines and thickets; destroy the sin.”

Perhaps, as has been suggested, this tricking out of the bird with women’s

ornaments may be a relic of some grosser form of expiation in which a

human being was sacrificed or banished.(482) Charms of this sort in India

no doubt date from a remote antiquity. An ancient Indian book of magic,

known as the _Kausika Sutra_, describes a ceremony of letting loose

against a hostile army a white-footed ewe in which the power of disease

was believed to be incarnate.(483) In the same treatise we read of a mode

of getting rid of ill-luck by fastening a hook to the left leg of a crow,

attaching a sacrificial cake to the hook, and then letting the bird fly

away in a south-westerly direction, while the priest or magician recites

as usual the appropriate formula.(484)

(M146) 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.(485) When influenza broke out in a virulent

form among the negroes of Togoland during the winter of 1892, the natives

set the trouble down to the machinations of evil spirits, who must be

expelled the country. The principal instrument of expulsion was a fat

toad, which was dragged through the streets of every town or village,

followed by an elder who sprinkled holy water to right and left. All the

evil was thus concentrated in the toad, which was finally thrown away into

the forest. Thus the natives expected to rid the village of the

influenza.(486) 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.(487)

(M147) In some parts of India a principal means of expelling an epidemic

is a little toy chariot called a _ratha_ or _rath_, in which the goddess

of the disease is supposed to be carted away. It is carried or drawn in

procession to the next village, the inhabitants of which pass it on in

like manner, with great alacrity, to their neighbours. Thus the goddess

and the plague are transferred from village to village, until at last they

come to one which is so far away from its next neighbour that the people

do not care to undertake the long weary journey. In that case they content

themselves with conveying the chariot to a place so shut in by hills that

the disease cannot possibly escape, and there they leave it to die. Or if

the village is near the sea, they drown the sickness by throwing the

chariot into the water. However, in Central India the real home of the

goddess of cholera is at Unkareshwar; and accordingly the chariot in which

she is politely escorted out of a village is finally deposited at or near

that place. It is usual and proper for the people of a village to give a

friendly notice to their neighbours that they are going to cart the

cholera, smallpox, or whatever it may be, to their village, so that the

inhabitants may be ready to receive the goddess with due honour and to

escort her on her progress. But some unneighbourly folk, without giving

notice, go by night and stealthily deposit the chariot on the outskirts of

the next village. If the inhabitants are not on the watch, and suffer the

fatal little vehicle to remain there, the disease will naturally cleave to

them. Sometimes, perhaps generally, the procession with the chariot is

accompanied by a goat, a cock, and a pot of native beer or wine, which

serve as additional attractions to the goddess to set out on her

travels.(488)

(M148) 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

recognized. 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. So, too, after a war the gods sometimes

advised the king to send back a scapegoat in order to free the warriors

from some evil that had attached itself to the army. One of the women

slaves, a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog would be chosen from among the

captives and sent back to the borders of the country whence they had come;

there they were maimed and left to die. After that the army would be

pronounced clean and allowed to return to the capital. In each case a

bundle of herbs would be rubbed over the people and the cattle, and would

then be tied to the victims, who would thus carry back the evil with

them.(489) A similar use of scapegoats, human and animal, was regularly

made after a King of Uganda had been crowned. Two men were brought to the

king; one of them he wounded slightly with an arrow shot from a bow. The

man was then sent away, under a strong guard, as a scapegoat to Bunyoro,

the enemy’s country, and with him were sent a cow, a goat, and a dog. On

his sad journey he took with him the dust and ashes of the sacred fire,

which had burned day and night at the entrance to the late king’s

enclosure and had been extinguished, as usual, at his death. Arrived at

their destination, the man and the animals were maimed and left to die.

They were believed to bear away with them any uncleanness that might

cleave to the new King or Queen.(490)

(M149) 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.(491) 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.(492)

When disease breaks out among a herd, the Oraons take the herdsman

himself, tie a wooden bell from one of the cows round his neck, beat him

with sticks, and drive him out of the village to a cross-road, where the

bell and sticks are deposited.(493) In the territory of Kumaon, lying on

the southern slopes of the Western Himalayas, the custom of employing a

human scapegoat appears to have taken a somewhat peculiar form in the

ceremony known as Barat. First of all a thick rope of grass is stretched

from the top of a cliff to the valley beneath, where it is made fast to

posts driven into the ground. Next a wooden saddle, with a very sharp

ridge and unpadded, is attached by thongs to the cable, along which it

runs in a deep groove. A man now seats himself on the saddle and is

strapped to it, while sand-bags or heavy stones are suspended from his

feet to secure his balance. Then, after various ceremonies have been

performed and a kid sacrificed, he throws himself as far back in the

saddle as he can go, and is started off to slide down the rope into the

valley. Away he shoots at an ever-increasing speed; the saddle under him,

however well greased, emits volumes of smoke during the greater part of

his progress; and he is nearly senseless when he reaches the bottom. Here

men are waiting to catch him and run forward with him some distance in

order to break gradually the force of his descent. This ceremony, regarded

as a propitiation of Mahadeva, is performed as a means of delivering a

community from present or impending calamity. Thus, for example, it was

performed when cholera was raging at Almora, and the people traced the

immunity they enjoyed to the due observance of the rite. Each district has

its hereditary Badi, as the performer is called; he is supported by annual

contributions in grain from the inhabitants, as well as by special

payments for each performance. When the ceremony is over, the grass rope

is cut up and distributed among the villagers, who hang the pieces as

charms at the eaves of their houses; and they preserve the hair of the

Badi for a similar purpose. Yet while his severed locks bring fertility to

other people’s lands, he entails sterility on his own; and it is firmly

believed that no seed sown by his hand could ever sprout. Formerly the

rule prevailed that, if a Badi had the misfortune to fall from the rope in

the course of his flying descent, he was immediately despatched with a

sword by the spectators. The rule has naturally been abolished by the

English Government; but its former observance seems to indicate that the

custom of letting a man slide down a rope as a charm to avert calamity is

only a mitigation of an older custom of putting him to death.(494)

(M150) A somewhat similar ceremony is annually performed at Lhasa a few

days after the beginning of the Tibetan New Year, which falls in spring.

The scene of the performance is Potala Hill, on the summit and slope of

which is built the superb castle of the Grand Lama of Tibet, a massive and

imposing pile of buildings which attracts the eye and dominates the

landscape from afar. On the day in question a rope of hide is stretched

from the top to the bottom of the steep hill, and men from a distant

province of Tibet climb up it with the agility of monkeys. They are called

Flying Spirits. Arrived at the top, each of them places a piece of wood on

his breast, stretches out his hands and feet, and letting himself go

shoots down the rope (in the words of a Chinese writer) “like the bolt

flying from the bow, or the swallow skimming the water. ’Tis a wondrous

sight!” Considering that these performers are called Spirits, and that the

performance takes place a few days after the New Year, a season so

commonly selected for the expulsion of demons, we may conjecture that the

Flying Spirits represent the powers of evil who are thus shot out of the

Tibetan pope’s palace at the beginning of the year.(495)

§ 3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle.

(M151) In this last case the expulsion of evils, if I am right in so

interpreting the ceremony, is periodic, not occasional, being repeated

every spring at the beginning of a new year. It brings us accordingly to

the consideration of a whole class of such cases, for 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 in Perak, a state on the west coast

of the Malay Peninsula, it was in ancient times the custom to perform

periodically a ceremony intended to ensure the prosperity of the country

by the propitiation of friendly spirits and the expulsion of evil

influences. The writer who records the custom is uncertain as to the

period which elapsed between two successive celebrations; he suggests with

hesitation that the rite was performed once in seven years or once in a

Rajah’s reign. The name of the ceremony was _pĕlas negri_, which means

“the cleansing of the country from evils.” When the time came, the Rajah,

the chiefs, and a great following of people assembled at a point as far up

the river as possible, but short of the rapids which further up impede

navigation. There a number of rafts were prepared, some of them

elaborately built with houses on them. Four of them were devoted to the

four great classes of spirits which are found in Perak, namely the _Hantu

Blian_ or “Tiger-spirits,” the _Hantu Sungkei_, the _Hantu Malayu_, and

the _Jin Raja_. In each of these rafts a number of wizards (_pawangs_)

took up their post, according to the particular class of demon which they

affected. The procession was headed by the raft devoted to the

Tiger-spirits; and in it was set up a _prah_ tree with all its branches,

kept erect by stays. It was followed by the three rafts dedicated to the

other three classes of spirits, and behind them came a train of other

rafts bearing mere common mortals, the royal bandsmen, the Rajah himself,

the chiefs, and the people. As the long procession floated down the river

with the current, the wizards, standing on sheets of tin, waved white

cloths and shouted invocations to the spirits and demons who inhabited the

country through which the rafts were drifting seaward. The burden of the

invocations was to invite the spirits and demons to come aboard the rafts

and partake of the food which had been considerately made ready for them.

At every village on the bank large enough to possess a mosque (for the

Malays of Perak are professing Mohammedans) the procession halted; a

buffalo, subscribed for by the inhabitants, was slaughtered, and its head

placed on one of the spirit-barks, while people feasted on the flesh. The

ceremony ended at Bras Basah, a village on the left bank of the Perak

river, not far from its mouth. There the rafts were abandoned to the

current, which swept them out to sea,(496) doubtless bearing with them the

hapless demons who had been lured by the tempting viands to embark and

were now left to toss forlorn on the great deep at the mercy of the waves

and the winds.

(M152) Again, 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 it 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.”(497) 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.(498) 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, who indeed play the

principal part in all religious ceremonies among the Dusuns, while the

humble duty of beating drums and banging gongs is discharged by members of

the inferior sex. On this momentous occasion a procession of women, in

full ceremonial dress, goes from house to house, stopping at each to go

through their performances. At the head of the procession marches a boy

carrying a spear on which is impaled a bundle of palm leaves containing

rice. He is followed by two men, who carry a large gong and a drum slung

on a pole between them. Then come the women. 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.(499)

(M153) 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.(500) 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 the name of _Intō-nga-Sĭya_, 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.(501)

(M154) At Sucla-Tirtha, in India, an earthen pot containing the

accumulated sins of the people is (annually?) set adrift on the river.

Legend says that the custom originated with a wicked priest who, after

atoning for his guilt by a course of austerities and expiatory ceremonies,

was directed to sail upon the river in a boat with white sails. If the

white sails turned black, it would be a sign that his sins were forgiven

him. They did so, and he joyfully allowed the boat to drift with his sins

to sea.(502) 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.(503) On New Year’s Day people in Corea seek to rid themselves

of all their distresses by painting images on paper, writing against them

their troubles of body or mind, and afterwards giving the papers to a boy

to burn. Another method of effecting the same object at the same season is

to make rude dolls of straw, stuff them with a few copper coins, and throw

them into the street. Whoever picks up such an effigy gets all the

troubles and thereby relieves the original sufferer.(504) Again, on the

fourteenth day of the first month the Coreans fly paper kites inscribed

with a wish that all the ills of the year may fly away with them.(505) Mr.

George Bogle, the English envoy sent to Tibet by Warren Hastings,

witnessed the celebration of the Tibetan New Year’s Day at Teshu Lumbo,

the capital of the Teshu Lama. Monks walked in procession round the court

to the music of cymbals, tabors, trumpets, hautboys and drums. Then

others, clad in masquerade dress and wearing masks which represented the

heads of animals, mostly wild beasts, danced with antic motions. “After

this, the figure of a man, chalked upon paper, was laid upon the ground.

Many strange ceremonies, which to me who did not understand them appeared

whimsical, were performed about it; and a great fire being kindled in a

corner of the court, it was at length held over it, and being formed of

combustibles, vanished with much smoke and explosion. I was told it was a

figure of the devil.”(506) Another Tibetan mode of expelling demons from a

dwelling is to make a paste image, into which the lamas by their

incantations conjure all the evil spirits that may be lurking in the

house. This image is carried to a distance by a runner and thrown away. He

is attended by men, who shout at the top of their voices, brandish swords,

and fire guns, all to frighten the demons and drive them far from human

habitations.(507)

(M155) 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. This biennial

expulsion of spirits goes by the name of _Ndok_, and the effigies by which

it is effected are called _Nabikem_ or _Nabikim_.(508)

(M156) Further to the west similar ceremonies are or were till recently

enacted at Porto Novo, the seaport of Dahomey. One of them has been

described by an eye-witness, a Catholic missionary, who interpreted the

rites as a Funeral of Death. He says: “Some time ago a curious event took

place: the King had commanded to celebrate the funeral of Death. Every

year, at the season of the rains, the predecessors of his sable Majesty,

in order to preserve the life of their dear subjects, had caused the

fetish of that terrible and pitiless enemy, who spares not even kings, to

be drowned in the lagoon. Toffa wished to comply with the traditions of

his ancestors.” However, the ceremony as described by the missionary seems

to conform closely to the type of the expulsion of ghosts and demons. Two

days before the crowning act of the celebration the streets were carefully

swept and all the filth which usually encumbered them was removed, “lest

Death should there find a refuge.” All the people from the neighbouring

villages assembled; their fetishes, daubed with red paint, were carried in

great pomp through the streets of the capital attended by noisy

processions of mummers. A great multitude passed the night in the public

square, drinking, singing, and shouting. Finally, a number of rude and

hideous effigies were escorted by a noisy crowd to the shore of the

lagoon; there canoes were waiting to receive them and paddle them out to

deep water, where they were flung overboard. These effigies the missionary

regarded as so many images of Death, who thus received his passport and

was dismissed from the territory of Porto Novo. But more probably they

represented the hosts of demons and ghosts who were believed to lurk about

the town and to massacre people under the form of sickness and disease.

Having made a clean sweep of the whole baleful crew the inhabitants no

doubt thought that they had removed the principal, if not the only, cause

of death, and that accordingly they had taken out a new lease of

life.(509) It is not without interest to observe that in cleansing their

streets the people did actually retrench one of the most fruitful sources

of disease and death, especially in the sweltering heat of a damp tropical

climate; hence the measures they took for the prolongation of their lives

were really to a certain extent effectual, though they did not accomplish

their object in the precise way they imagined. So curiously does it often

happen that the savage reaches the goal of his wishes by a road which to

civilized man might appear at first sight to lead far away from it.

(M157) Before the Hos of Togoland, to the west of Dahomey, celebrate their

festival of the new yams, which has been described in another part of this

work,(510) they say that it is necessary to clean the town and to put it

in order. The way in which they do so is this. They take leaves of two

particular sorts of trees (the _adzu_ and the _wo_), together with

creepers and ashes, and bind all the leaves fast to a pole of the _adzu_

tree. As they do so they pray or command the evil spirits, the witches,

and all other evils in the town to enter into the band and be bound with

it. Then they make a paste out of the ashes mixed with urine and smear it

on the bundle of leaves, saying, “We smear it on the face of the Evil Ones

who are in this bundle, in order that they may not be able to see any

more.” Then they throw the bundle on the ground and mock at it. Next they

take all the similar poles, wrapt in creepers, in which they have bound up

all the evil powers, and carry them out of the town and stick them in the

ground on the various roads leading into the town. When they have done

this, they say that they have driven the evils out of the town and shut

the door against them. After that they wash the faces of all the people

with a medicine which has been prepared by the oldest men. Thereupon they

all return home to sweep out their houses and yards; they sweep even the

ground in front of the yards, so that the whole town is thoroughly clean.

All the grass-stalks and refuse of stock-yams which have been swept

together are carried out of the town, and the people rail at the

stock-yams. In the course of the night the oldest men assemble and tie a

toad to a young palm-leaf. They say that they wish now to sweep the town

and finish the ceremony. So they drag the toad behind them through the

whole town in the direction of Mount Adaklu. When that has been done, the

priests say that they will now remove the sicknesses. In the evening they

give public notice that they are about to take to the road, so nobody may

light a fire on the hearth or eat. At dead of night, when people are

asleep, three men go through the town. One of them drags behind them a

toad fastened to a bunch of herbs; another carries a calabash of holy

herbs and water, with which he sprinkles the streets; and the third

whistles softly. As soon as they have thus passed through the whole town,

they throw away the toad and the holy herbs in the direction of Mount

Adaklu. Next morning the women sweep out their houses and hearths and set

the sweepings on broken wooden plates. Many put on torn mats or torn

clothes; others tie grasses and creepers about them. While they do so,

they pray, saying, “All ye sicknesses which are in our body and plague us,

we are come this day to cast you out!” When they set out so to do, the

priest commands every man to cry out thrice and thereby to smite himself

on the mouth. In a moment they all cry out, smite themselves on the mouth,

and run as fast as their legs can carry them in the direction of Mount

Adaklu. As they run, they say, “Out to-day! Out to-day! What kills

anybody, out to-day! Ye evil spirits, out to-day! And all that makes our

heads to ache, out to-day! Anlo and Adaklu are the places whither all evil

ought to go.” Now on Mount Adaklu there stands a _klo_ tree; and when they

have come thither they throw everything away and return home. After their

return every man washes himself with the medicine which is set forth for

that purpose in the public street; then he goes into his house. Such is

the ceremony by which the Hos prepare themselves to eat the new yams.(511)

Thus among the Hos the public expulsion of evils is definitely connected

with the crops and therefore takes place every year, not every two years,

as at Old Calabar.

(M158) 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.(512)

(M159) 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.”(513) 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.

(M160) 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.(514) 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!”(515) It appears that the white dogs

annually sacrificed by the Iroquois at their New Year Festival are, or

have been, regarded as scapegoats. According to Mr. J. V. H. Clark, who

witnessed the ceremony in January 1841, on the first day of the festival

all the fires in the village were extinguished, the ashes scattered to the

winds, and a new fire kindled with flint and steel. On a subsequent day,

men dressed in fantastic costumes went round the village, gathering the

sins of the people. When the morning of the last day of the festival was

come, two white dogs, decorated with red paint, wampum, feathers, and

ribbons, were led out. They were soon strangled, and hung on a ladder.

Firing and yelling succeeded, and half an hour later the animals were

taken into a house, “where the people’s sins were transferred to them.”

The carcases were afterwards burnt on a pyre of wood.(516) According to

the Rev. Mr. Kirkland, who wrote in the eighteenth century, the ashes of

the pyre upon which one of the white dogs was burnt were carried through

the village and sprinkled at the door of every house.(517) Formerly,

however, as we have seen, the Iroquois expulsion of evils was immediate

and not by scapegoat.(518) 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.(519)

(M161) 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.”(520) Similar customs are said to

be still secretly practised every year by many tribes on the delta of the

Niger in spite of the vigilance of the British Government.(521) Among the

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

who may be either a free-born 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 parading done, he is taken

through a temporary sacred shed of palm and other tree branches, and

especially of the former, the Igbodu(522) and to its first division, where

many persons might follow him, and through a second where only the chiefs

and other very important persons might escort and accompany him to, and to

a third where only the Babalawo [priest] and his official assistant, the

Ajigbona, are permitted to enter with him. Here, after he himself has

given out or started his last song, which is to be taken up by the large

assembly of people who will have been waiting to hear his last word or his

last groan, his head is taken off and his blood offered to the gods. The

announcement of his last word or his last groan heard and taken up by the

people, would be a signal for joy, gladness, and thanksgiving, and for

drum beating and dancing, as an expression of their gratification because

their sacrifice has been accepted, the divine wrath is appeased, and the

prospect of prosperity or increased prosperity assured.”(523)

(M162) 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.(524) In Japan the “_tsuina_ or _oni-yarahi_, that is to

say, demon expelling, is a sort of drama in which disease, or more

generally ill-luck, is personified, and driven away with threats and a

show of violence. Like the _oho-harahi_,(525) it was performed on the last

day of the year. This association is only natural. The demons of the

_tsuina_ are personified wintry influences, with the diseases which they

bring with them, while the _oho-harahi_ is intended to cleanse the people

from sin and uncleanness, things closely related to disease, as well as

from disease itself. Though probably of Chinese origin, the _tsuina_ is a

tolerably ancient rite. It is alluded to in the _Nihongi_ under the date

A.D. 689. It was at one time performed at Court on an imposing scale. Four

bands of twenty youths, each wearing a four-eyed mask, and each carrying a

halberd in the left hand, marched simultaneously from the four gates of

the palace, driving the devils before them. Another account of this

ceremony says that a man disguised himself as the demon of pestilence, in

which garb he was shot at and driven off by the courtiers armed with

peach-wood bows and arrows of reed. Peach-wood staves were used for the

same purpose. There was formerly a practice at Asakusa in Tokio on the

last day of the year for a man got up as a devil to be chased round the

pagoda there by another wearing a mask. After this 3,000 tickets were

scrambled for by the spectators. These were carried away and pasted up

over the doors as a charm against pestilence.”(526) The Battas 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.(527) Doubtless he was supposed to carry away the sins and

misfortunes of the people.

(M163) Human scapegoats, as we shall see presently, were well known in

classical antiquity, and even in mediæval Europe the custom seems not to

have been wholly extinct. In the town of Halberstadt, in Thüringen, there

was a church said to have been founded by Charlemagne. In this church

every year they chose a man, who was believed to be stained with heinous

sins. On the first day of Lent he was brought to the church, dressed in

mourning garb, with his head muffled up. At the close of the service he

was turned out of the church. During the forty days of Lent he

perambulated the city barefoot, neither entering the churches nor speaking

to any one. The canons took it in turn to feed him. After midnight he was

allowed to sleep in the streets. On the day before Good Friday, after the

consecration of the holy oil, he was readmitted to the church and absolved

from his sins. The people gave him money. He was called Adam, and was now

believed to be in a state of innocence.(528) At Entlebuch, in Switzerland,

down to the close of the eighteenth century, the custom of annually

expelling a scapegoat was preserved in the ceremony of driving “Posterli”

from the village into the lands of the neighbouring village. “Posterli”

was represented by a lad disguised as an old witch or as a goat or an ass.

Amid a deafening noise of horns, clarionets, bells, whips, and so forth,

he was driven out. Sometimes “Posterli” was represented by a puppet, which

was drawn on a sledge and left in a corner of the neighbouring village.

The ceremony took place on the Thursday evening of the last week but one

before Christmas.(529)

(M164) In Munich down to about a hundred years ago the expulsion of the

devil from the city used to be annually enacted on Ascension Day. On the

Eve of Ascension Day a man disguised as a devil was chased through the

streets, which were then narrow and dirty in contrast to the broad,

well-kept thoroughfares, lined with imposing buildings, which now

distinguish the capital of Bavaria. His pursuers were dressed as witches

and wizards and provided with the indispensable crutches, brooms, and

pitchforks which make up the outfit of these uncanny beings. While the

devil fled before them, the troop of maskers made after him with wild

whoops and halloos, and when they overtook him they ducked him in puddles

or rolled him on dunghills. In this way the demon at last succeeded in

reaching the palace, where he put off his hideous and now filthy disguise

and was rewarded for his vicarious sufferings by a copious meal. The

devilish costume which he had thrown off was then stuffed with hay and

straw and conveyed to a particular church (the Frauenkirche), where it was

kept over night, being hung by a rope from a window in the tower. On the

afternoon of Ascension Day, before the Vesper service began, an image of

the Saviour was drawn up to the roof of the church, no doubt to symbolize

the event which the day commemorates. Then burning tow and wafers were

thrown on the people. Meantime the effigy of the devil, painted black,

with a pair of horns and a lolling red tongue, had been dangling from the

church tower, to the delight of a gaping crowd of spectators gathered

before the church. It was now flung down into their midst, and a fierce

struggle for possession of it took place among the rabble. Finally, it was

carried out of the town by the Isar gate and burned on a neighbouring

height, “in order that the foul fiend might do no harm to the city.” The

custom died out at Munich towards the end of the eighteenth century; but

it is said that similar ceremonies are observed to this day in some

villages of Upper Bavaria.(530)

(M165) This quaint ceremony suggests that the pardoned criminal who used

to play the principal part in a solemn religious procession on Ascension

Day at Rouen(531) may in like manner have originally served, if not as a

representative of the devil, at least as a public scapegoat, who relieved

the whole people of their sins and sorrows for a year by taking them upon

himself. This would explain why the gaol had to be raked in order to

furnish one who would parade with the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries

in their gorgeous vestments through the streets of Rouen, while the church

bells pealed out, the clergy chanted, banners waved, and every

circumstance combined to enhance the pomp and splendour of the pageant. It

would add a pathetic significance to the crowning act of the ceremony,

when on a lofty platform in the public square, with the eyes of a great

and silent multitude turned upon him, the condemned malefactor received

from the Church the absolution and remission of his sins; for if the rite

is to be interpreted in the way here suggested, the sins which were thus

forgiven were those not of one man only but of the whole people. No

wonder, then, that when the sinner, now a sinner no more, rose from his

knees and thrice lifted the silver shrine of St. Romain in his arms, the

whole vast assembly in the square broke out into joyous cries of “_Noel!

Noel! Noel!_” which they understood to signify, “God be with us!” In

Christian countries no more appropriate season could be selected for the

ceremony of the human scapegoat than Ascension Day, which commemorates the

departure from earth of Him who, in the belief of millions, took away the

sins of the world.(532)

(M166) 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.”(533) 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.(534) 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.(535) 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.(536) 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.(537)

(M167) 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.(538) 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.(539) 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.

(M168) 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.

(M169) 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.(540)

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.(541)

(M170) 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 fossilization, 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.