Chapter 5: The Approaches To Mr. Frazer's Theory

I. THE EVOLUTION OF GODS

Rites so remarkable as those of the pair of criminals, supposed to have played their parts in Babylon and Jerusalem, each with his female mate, are not historically known, but are part of Mr. Frazer’s theory, and have analogies in folklore. Institutions so unparalleled as a whole, in our knowledge of human religion, cannot have been evolved except through a long series of grades of development. Mr. Frazer traces these grades throughout the 1,500 pages of his book. There are, in accordance with the method, large sections of the work devoted to illustrative examples of matters which do not bear directly on the main stream of the argument, and these are apt, by the very abundance of their erudition, to distract attention from the central hypothesis. To that I try to adhere through its numerous ramifications.

To account, then, for these hypothetical rites of the double pairs of divinised human beings, we are to suppose that, before attaining the earliest germs of religion, men were addicted to magic, a theory which we have already examined in the essay ‘Magic and Religion.’ They believed that by imitating the cosmic processes, they could control or assist them. Thus the Arunta of Central Australia have magical rites, by which they assist the development of larvæ into grubs, increase and improve the breed and reproductive energies of kangaroos, foster the growth of edible tubers, and bring down rain. These rites are harmless, and involve no sacrifices, human or animal, for the Arunta, we are to believe, have no god to accept offerings.[1] But as men advanced from almost the lowest savagery, they gradually attained to higher material culture, developing the hitherto unknown arts of agriculture, developing also religion, in the despair of magic, developing gods, and evolving social and political rank, with kings at the head of society. In disgust with their old original magic (by which they had supposed that they controlled cosmic forces and animal and vegetable life), they invented gods and spirits who, as they fancied, did really exercise cosmic control. These gods they propitiated by prayer and sacrifice. But though it was in the despair of magic that men invented gods and religion, yet, as men will, they continued to exercise the magic of which they despaired. They persisted, like the godless Arunta, in imitating the processes of nature, in the belief (which, after all, they had not abandoned) that such imitation magically aided the efforts of nature or of the gods of nature.

Men now evolved three species of god, from one or other of which descends the godhead of the Persian criminal, whipped and hanged, and the Divinity of Christ. First, there were gods ‘of an order different from and superior to man.’ Second, there were men in whom these superior gods became incarnate. Third, there were men who were merely better magicians than their neighbours, ‘sensitives’ who trembled at a touch of nature, and at whose touch nature trembled.[2] It is not, in thought, difficult to draw a firm line between these two kinds of man-gods, though magic and religion overlap and shade into each other. The distinction of the two types, the man incarnating god, and the sorcerer with no god to incarnate, is absolutely essential, and must be kept firmly in mind. Mr. Frazer says ‘In what follows I shall not insist on it, ‘ on this essential distinction.[3] Essential it is: for the second sort, the magical sort, of man-god, may, by Mr. Frazer’s theory, be prior to all religion. He is only a high kind of sorcerer, ‘a dealer in magic and spells.’ The other kind of man-god comes in after magic is despaired of and gods are invented. I shall insist on the distinction.

The growth of society was advancing and developing at the same time as religion and agriculture. The original sorcerer or medicine-man, or magic-worker, through his influence on his neighbours, was apt to acquire leadership, and to accumulate property, as, indeed, I myself remarked long ago in an essay on the ‘Origin of Rank.’[4] In Mr. Frazer’s theory these magic-men finally develop into both kings or chiefs and man-gods. I have observed that there is often a lay or secular king or chief, a war-leader, beside them. His position, if it becomes hereditary, is apt to end in leaving the man-god-king on one side in a partly magical, partly religious, but not secular kingship, whence it may evolve into a priesthood, carrying the royal title. The man is more or less a man-god, more or less a priest, more or less a controller of cosmic processes, but is still a titular king. Of course all sorts of varieties occur in these institutions. The general result is the divinity of kings, and their responsibility for the luck of the state, and for the weather and crops. If the luck, the weather, and the crops are bad, the public asks ‘Who is to be punished for this?’ Under a constitution such as our own, the public notoriously makes the Government responsible for the luck; a general election dismisses the representatives of the party in power. But, four hundred years ago, and previously, executions took the place of mere loss of office: the heads of the Boyds, of Morton, or of Gowrie fell when these nobles lost office.

In the earlier society with which we are dealing, the king, as responsible for the weather and crops, is sometimes punished in bad times. The Banjars ‘beat the king till the weather changes, ‘ elsewhere the king is imprisoned, or, in a more constitutional manner, merely deposed.[5] There are traces of actually killing the unlucky and responsible monarch. In Sweden he is said, in a time of public distress, to have been not only killed, but sacrificed to Odin. This is not, however, an historical statement.

II. THE ALLEGED MORTALITY OF GODS

There were other magico-religious reasons for killing kings. Mr. Frazer writes:[6] ‘Lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself.’

Here is, I venture to think, a notable fault in the argument. Early men, contrary to Mr. Frazer’s account, suppose themselves to be naturally immortal. The myths of perhaps all races tell of a time when death had not yet entered the world. Man was born deathless. Death came in by an accident, or in consequence of an error, or an infraction of a divine command. To this effect we have Zulu, Australian, Maori, Melanesian, Central African, Vedic Aryan, Kamschadal, and countless other myths; not to speak of the first chapters of Genesis.[7] ‘In the thought of immortality’ early man is cradled. His divine beings are usually regarded as prior to and unaffected by the coming of death, which invades men, but not these beings, or not most of them.

Indeed, some low savages have not yet persuaded themselves that death is natural. ‘Amongst the Central Australian natives, ‘ say Spencer and Gillen, ‘there is no such thing as belief in natural death; however old or decrepit a man or woman may be when this takes place, it is at once supposed that it has been brought about by the magic influence of some enemy, ‘ and it is avenged on the enemy, as in the blood-feud.[8] These Australians in Mr. Frazer’s opinion (though not in mine) are ‘primitive.’

Thus, far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, ‘primitive man’ has no other idea. Not that he formulates his idea in such a term as ‘eternal.’ Mariner says, indeed, concerning the Tongan supreme being Ta-li-y-Tooboo, ‘Of his origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal.’ But, in Tongan, the metaphysical idea of eternity is only expressed in the meaning of the god’s name, ‘wait-there-Tooboo.’ This god occasionally inspires the How, or elective king, but the How was never sacrificed to provide the god with a sturdier incarnation, a process which Mr. Frazer’s theory of the Divinity of Christ demands as customary. Being ‘eternal’ Tá-li-y-Tooboo was independent of a human vehicle.[9]

These facts must be remembered, for it is indispensable to Mr. Frazer’s theory to prove that the immortals are believed, to a sufficient extent, to be mortal. Hence the supposed need of killing divine kings, their vehicles. Primitive man, according to Mr. Frazer, thinks his gods mortal. But primitive man by his initial hypothesis had no gods at all. Mr. Frazer clearly means that when man was no longer primitive, he conceived the gods to be mortal like himself. I have elsewhere given many examples of the opposite belief among races of many grades of culture, from the Australian blacks to the immortal gods of Homer.[10] The point will be found to be important later, and I must firmly express my opinion that, so long as people believe their gods to be alive, and testify that belief by prayers, hymns, and sacrifices, it is impossible to argue from a few local, and contradictory, and easily explicable myths, that these peoples believe their gods to be dead, or in danger of dying. Here, I think, the common sense of students will agree with me.

However, as this general and pervading belief in the mortality of the gods is absolutely essential to Mr. Frazer’s argument, perhaps the point had better be settled. As examples of belief in the fact that the god is dead, we have the Greenlanders.[11]

The Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he touched a dog. Mr. Tylor, on the other hand, tells us that to I the summerland’ of the Greenland deity, ‘beneath the sea, Greenland souls hope to descend at death.’ Let us trust that ‘No Dogs are Admitted.’ This Greenland divine being, Torngarsuk, I so clearly held his place as supreme deity in the native mind that, ‘ as Cranz the missionary relates, ‘many Greenlanders hearing of God and His almighty power were apt to fall on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who was meant.’ The Greenland deity was unborrowed; he ‘seems no figure derived from the religion of Scandinavian colonists, ancient or modern.’[12]

From Cranz’s evidence (and much more might be cited) the most powerful god of the Greenlanders was not dead, nor likely to die, in spite of the apprehensions of certain Greenlanders, communicated to a person not named by Mr. Frazer, but quoted in a work of 1806.[13] At the best the Greenland evidence is contradictory; all Greenlanders did not agree with Mr. Frazer’s Greenland authority. Nor was the Accuser of the Brethren currently believed to be deceased, when the ancient folk-song assures us that

Some say the Deil’s deid,

The Deil’s deid, the Deil’s deid,

Some say the Deil’s deid,

And buried in Kirkcaldy:

Some say he’s risen again,

Risen again, risen again,

Some say he’s risen again,

To dance the Hieland Laddie.

‘Risen again’ he was, and did dance the Hieland Laddie at Gledsmuir and Falkirk. The ‘Volkslied’ scientifically represents the conflict of opinion as unsettled, despite the testimony of the grave of Satan at the lang toun of Kirkcaldy; like the grave of Zeus in Crete.

Mr. Frazer, then, ought not, I think, to assume a general belief in the mortality of Greenland gods in face of contradictory but uncited evidence.

1. A North American Indian told Colonel Dodge that ‘the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have lived so long as this.’[14] Now this was the ipse dixit and personal inference of a vague modern ‘North American Indian, ‘ living in an age which, as Mr. Frazer remarks, must ‘breach those venerable walls’ of belief. To prove his case, Mr. Frazer needs to find examples of the opinion that the ‘Great Spirit’ was believed to be dead (if he grants that there ever existed an American belief in a Great Spirit) among the American Indians as first studied by Europeans. I have elsewhere argued that the supreme being of most barbaric races is regarded as otiose, inactive, and so may come to be a mere name and by-word, like the Huron Atahocan, [15] ‘who made everything, ‘ and the Unkulunkulu of the Zulus, who has been so thrust into the background by the competition of ancestral spirits that his very existence is doubted. ‘In process of time we have come to worship the spirits only, because we know not what to say about Unkulunkulu.’ ‘We seek out for ourselves the spirits that we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.’[16] In the same way, throughout the beliefs of barbaric races, the competition of friendly and helpful spirits pushes back such beings as the Australian Baiame and Mungan-ngaur, who exist where sacrifice to ancestral spirits has not yet been developed; and the Canadian Andouagni of 1558.[17] Thus a modern North American Indian may infer, and may tell Colonel Dodge, that the creator is dead, because he is not in receipt of sacrifice or prayer. But the cult of such high beings, where it existed and still exists, in North America, the cult of Ti-ra-wá with whom the Pawnees expect to live after death, of the Blackfoot Ná-pi of Ahone, Okeus, Kiehtan, and the rest, proves belief in gods who are alive, and who are not said to be in any danger of death.

2. A tribe of Philippine Islanders told the Spanish conquerors that the grave of the Creator was on the top of Mount Cabunian. So the Philippine Islanders did believe in a Creator. The grave may have been the result of the usual neglect of the supreme being already explained, or may have meant no more than the grave of Zeus in Crete, while Zeus was being worshipped all over the Greek world.

3. Heitsi Eibib, of the Hottentots, had a number of graves, accounted for by the theory of successive lives and deaths. But so had Tammuz and Adonis yearly lives and deaths, yet the god was en permanence.

The graves of Greek gods maybe due to Euhemerism, a theory much more ancient than Euhemerus. People who worship ancestral spirits sometimes argue, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, that the gods were once spirits of living men, and show the men’s graves as proofs; ‘the bricks are alive to testify to it.’ But that the Greeks regarded their gods as mortal cannot be seriously argued, while they are always styled ‘the immortals’ in contrast to mortal men; and while Apollo (who had a grave) daily inspired the Pythia. Her death did not hurt Apollo. She was not sacrificed for the benefit of Apollo. The grave of Zeus ‘was shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era.’ But was it shown as early as the time of Homer? Euhemerus was prior to our era.

4. The Egyptian gods were kings over death and the dead, with tombs and mummies in every province. But they were also deathless rulers of the world and of men.

‘If Ra rises in the heavens it is by the will of Osiris; if he sets it is at the sight of his glory.’ ‘King of eternity, great god ... whoso knoweth humility and reckoneth deeds of righteousness, thereby knows he Osiris.’[18]

This is a living god, and Seb and Nut can scarcely die. Despite myth and ritual the gods of Egypt lived till they ‘fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.’

5. As to the legend of ‘great Pan is dead, ‘ in the reign of Tiberius, Mr. Frazer mentions a theory that not Pan, but Adonis or Tammuz was dead; he was always dying. The story is pretty, but is not evidence.

6. About 1064 A.D. there was a Turkish story of the death of the King of the Jinn. The Jinn are not gods but fairies, and we have heard of fairy funerals.

7. Concerning ‘the high gods of Babylon’ it is especially needful for Mr. Frazer to prove that they were believed to be mortal and in danger of death, for Dr. Jastrow denies that they are mortal. ‘The privilege of the gods’ is ‘immortality.’[19] But Mr. Frazer’s hypothesis derives the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ from the opinion that he represented, in death, a long line of victims to a barbarous superstition.[20] And that superstition was, in Mr. Frazer’s conjecture, that a substitute died for the King of Babylon, and that the King of Babylon died to reinforce the vitality of a mortal god of Babylon, whose life required a fresh human incarnation annually.

To prove the Babylonian belief in the mortality of the deities, Mr. Frazer writes: ‘The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for like men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and fought and even died.’[21] How many of them died? If they were dead in religious belief, how did they manage to attend ‘the great assembly of the gods which, as we have seen, formed a chief feature of the feast of Zakmuk, and was held annually in the temple of Marduk at Babylon?’[22] Did Marduk die? If so, why is he addressed as

O merciful one who lovest to give life to the dead!

Marduk, King of heaven and earth,

The spell affording life is thine,

The breath of life is thine.

Thou restorest the dead to life, thou bringest things

to completeness (?)[23]

Supposing, again, that the King was really sacrificed to keep a god in good condition--why only one sacrifice? There were at least scores of gods, all of them, if I understand Mr. Frazer, in the same precarious condition of health. They appear, he might argue, to have been especially subject to hepatic diseases.

O supreme mistress of heaven, may thy liver be pacified,

says a hymn to Ishtar.[24]

Of course every one sees that ‘thy liver’ is only a phrase for ‘thy wrath;’ the liver (as in our phrases ‘pluck’ and ‘lily-livered’) being taken for the seat of the ‘pluck’ of men. It is manifest that the Babylonian gods are not dead but living, otherwise they could not attend the yearly divine assembly, nor could they be addressed in prayer. Moreover, if they could only be kept alive by yearly sacrificing their human vehicles, great holocausts of human vehicles would have been needed every year: one man for one god, and their name was legion.

Once more, if men believed that gods could die, unless kept alive by sacrifices of their human vehicles, we must say of the Greeks that they

did not strive

Officiously to keep alive

their deities. Had the Greeks known that this was in their power to do, then Apollo, Dionysus, Cronos, Zeus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares had not died. Yet die they did, if the graves of each of these mortals prove the prevailing belief in their decease.[25] Mankind, according to Mr. Frazer, believed in ‘mighty beings, ‘ ‘who breathed into man’s nostrils and made him live.’ He implored them ‘to bring his immortal spirit ... to some happier world ... where he might rest with them, ‘ and so on.[26] Yet, ‘lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposed the gods to be mortal like himself.’ Mr. Frazer has, we see, also told us that they did not believe their gods to be mortal. Probably, then, the belief in their immortality was a late stage in a gradual process.[27] Yet it had not prevailed when the grave of Zeus was shown ‘about the beginning of our era.’[28] Man, then, believed that he could keep one out of the crowd of gods alive (though he implored them to keep him alive) by sacrificing his rightful king once a year, thereby overthrowing dynasty after dynasty, and upsetting the whole organisation of the state. All this we must steadfastly believe, before we can accept Mr. Frazer’s theory of the origin of the Nicene Creed. It is a large preliminary demand.

The gods keep on being ‘immortals, ‘ and this we must insist on, in view of Mr. Frazer’s theory that man-gods who are slain are slain to keep alive the god who is incarnate in them, of which he does not give one example. His instances of beliefs that the high gods are dead notoriously contradict the prevalent belief that they are deathless. And the prevalent belief regulates religion.

However, man-gods certainly die, and some South Sea Islanders--by a scientific experiment--demonstrated that Captain Cook was no god, because he died when stabbed, which a genuine god would not have done. This, of course, proves that these benighted heathen knew the difference between an immortal god and a deathly man as well as did Anchises in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite.

III. RELIGIOUS REGICIDE

Peoples who think that all the luck depends on their king-man-god (the second sort, the superior sorcerer, with no god in him) hold, we are to believe, that his luck and cosmic influence wane with his waning forces. Therefore they kill him, and get a more vigorous recipient of his soul (not of a god) and of his luck.[29] Of king-killing for this reason Mr. Eraser gives, I think, one adequate example. Of the transmission of the soul of the slain divinity to his successor he ‘has no direct proof, ‘ though souls of incarnating gods are transmitted after natural deaths.[30]

Now this is a very important part of the long-drawn argument which is to suggest that Christ died as a mock-king, who also represented a god. First, we have seen that there are two kinds of man-god. In one kind a real god, ‘of an order different from and superior to man, ‘ is supposed to become incarnate. The other kind of man-god is only a superior ‘sensitive’ and sorcerer.[31]

Now Jesus, by Mr. Frazer’s theory, died as representative of a god, therefore as one of the first two kinds of man-gods. But Mr. Frazer does not here, as I said, produce one solitary example of a man-god proved to be of the first class--a king in whom an acknowledged god is incarnate--being slain to prevent his inspiring god from waning with the man’s waning energies.[32] Many examples of that practice are needed by the argument. I repeat that not one example is produced in this place. Mr. Frazer’s entire argument depends on his announced failure to ‘insist on’ the distinction between two sorts of man-gods which he himself has drawn.[33] So I keep on insisting.

Again, it can hardly be said that any examples are produced of a king of the second sort (a man-god who is really no god at all, but a ‘sensitive, ‘ sorcerer, or magic-man) being slain to preserve the vigour of his magic. The examples to be cited all but universally give no proof of the idea of preserving man’s magical vigour from the decay of old age.

The cases given, as a rule, are mere instances of superannuation. It is possible (would that it were easy) to pension off aged professors in the Scottish Universities. But to pension off a king merely means a series of civil wars. The early middle ages ‘tonsured’ weak kings. How tempting to represent this dedication of them to God as a mitigation of sacrifice! Kings, in fact, among some barbaric races, are slain merely by way of superannuation. Nay, the practice is not confined to kings. It is usual among elderly subjects.[34]

Let us take Mr. Frazer’s examples.[35]

1. A Congo people believe that the world would perish if their chitome, or pontiff, died a natural death. So he was clubbed or strangled by his successor. But what god is incarnate in the chitome? None is mentioned.[36] The king himself ‘is regarded as a god in earth, and all powerful in heaven.’

2. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods, but were ordered to die by the priests, on the authority of an alleged oracle of the gods, ‘whenever the priests chose.’ That they first showed any signs of decay ‘we may conjecture.’[37] We have no evidence except that the priests put an end to the king ‘whenever they chose.’ And, far from alleging the king’s decay or bad crops as the regular recognised reason, they alleged a special oracle of the gods.

3. When the King of Unyoro, in Central Africa, is old, or very ill, his wives kill him (an obvious reason readily occurs: it is the wives, not a god, who need a more spirited person), alleging an old prophecy that the throne will pass from the dynasty if the king dies a natural death. But it is not here shown that this king is a man-god of either species; and the prophecy does not concern injury to a god, or to magical rapport.[38]

4. The King of Kibanga, on the upper Congo, is killed by sorcerers when he ‘seems near his end.’ So are old dogs and cats and horses in this country, and peasants are even thought to provide euthanasia for kinsfolk ‘near their end.’ If the King of Kibanga is a man-god, Mr. Frazer does not say so.

5. If wounded in war the King of Gingero is killed by his comrades or kinsfolk, even if he be reluctant. The reason alleged is ‘that he may not die by the hands of his enemies.’ Did Saul, Brutus, and many other warriors who refuse to survive wounds and defeat die as man-gods? Is the King of Gingero a man-god?

6. Chaka, King of the Zulus, used hair-dye, having a great aversion to grey hairs. The Zulus, a warlike people, would not elect, or accept, a greyhaired king, and, though I know no instance of slaying a Zulu king because he was old, Mr. Isaacs (1836) says that grey hair is ‘always followed by the death of the monarch.’ Even if an historical example were given, a warlike race merely superannuates a disabled war-leader in the only safe way.

7. At last we reach a king-man-god in Sofala, who, according to Dos Santos, was the only god of the Caffres, and was implored to give good weather.[39] A modern Zulu told Dr. Callaway that ‘when people say the heaven is the chief’s they do not believe what they say.’[40] The Sofalese, or rather their neighbours, were perhaps more credulous; and it appears to have been a custom or law among them that a blemished king should kill himself, though a reforming prince denounced this as insanity, and altered the law. We are told that the king-god of the Sofalese was under this law, and a neighbouring king (who is nowhere said to have been a man-god) was. But what god, if any, was incarnate in this man-god, if he was a man-god, like his neighbour?[41]

8. The Spartans were warned by an oracle against a lame king, as the Mackenzies were warned by the Brahan seer against a set of physically blemished lairds. The seer’s prophecy was fulfilled.[42] We do not hear that the Spartans Killed any lame king.

9. The King of the Eyeos is warned to kill himself, warned by a gift of parrot’s eggs, ‘when the people have conceived an opinion of his ill-government.’ His wives strangle him, and his son succeeds, or did so before 1774, when the King refused to die at the request of his ministers. To make a case, it must be shown that the king was a man-god of one or other variety. He is, in fact, merely king while popular, ‘holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he merits the approval of his people.’

10. The old Prussians were governed by a king called God’s Mouth. ‘If he wanted to leave a good name behind, ‘ when weak and ill he burned himself to death, in front of a holy oak.

11. In Quilacare, in Southern India, the king cut himself to pieces, before an idol, after a twelve years’ reign. We are not told that he was an incarnation of the god, if any, incorporated in, or represented by, the idol.

12. The King of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, used to cut his throat in public after a twelve years’ reign. About 1680-1700 this was commuted. If any man could cut his way through 30,000 or 40,000 guardsmen, to kill the king, he succeeded. Three men tried, but numbers over-powered them. Other examples are given in which every regicide might become king, if he could, like Macbeth. It was held, at Passier, that God would not allow the king to be killed if he did not richly deserve it. These kings are not said to incarnate gods.

13. Ibn Batuta once saw a man throw a rope into the air, and climb up it. Another man followed and cut the first to pieces, which fell on the ground, were reunited, and no harm done. This veracious traveller also saw a man, at Java, kill himself for love of the Sultan, thereby securing liberal pensions for his family, as his father and grandfather had done before him. ‘We may conjecture that formerly the Sultans of Java, like the Kings of Quilacare and Calicut, were bound to cut their own throats at the end of a fixed term of years, ‘[43] but that they deputed the duty to one certain family. We may conjecture, but, considering the lack of evidence, and the stories that Ibn Batuta freely tells, I doubt! Ibn, at the Court of Delhi, saw cups and dishes I at a wish appear, and at a wish retire.’ Did the Sultan of Java incarnate a god?

14. This case is so extremely involved and hypothetical (it concerns Sparta, where I never heard that the king was a man-god) that the reader must be referred to the original.[44]

Meanwhile the list of instances is numerically respectable. But are the instances to the point? Do they prove a practice of killing a royal man-god, for the purpose of helping a god incarnate in him, or even of preventing his magical power (or mana, in New Zealand) from waning? They rather prove regicide as a form of superannuation, or as the result of the machinations of priests, or of public discontent. Above all, they do not demonstrate that the king is ever killed as an incarnation of a deity who needs a sturdier person to be incarnate in.

So recalcitrant is the evidence, that of all Mr. Frazer’s kings who are here said to be gods, or to incarnate gods, not one is here said to be put to death by his worshippers.[45] And of all his kings who are here said to be put to death, not one is here said to incarnate a god.[46] Such are the initial difficulties of the theory: to which we may add that elderly men are notoriously killed by many savages just because they are elderly, whether they are kings or commoners.