Chapter 6: Attempts to Prove the Sacæan Criminal Divine

As our historical evidence does not meet Mr. Frazer’s needs, as the Sacæan victim is not regarded as divine, as he is no ‘victim’ but a criminal, as he is not sacrificed, as the feast is not religious but a secular merrymaking, as no resurrection is mentioned, as the historical date does not fit Eastertide, Mr. Frazer has to invent theories which will prove far more than the facts alleged by Dio Chrysostom, Berosus in Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius; or will prove that originally the facts were the opposite of those historically recorded.

Through his whole argument Mr. Frazer seems to me to present two distinct theories alternately, and only at the close can I detect any attempt at reconciliation. A third theory, distinct from either, appears to be rejected. Indeed, Mr. Frazer’s task is not easy. He may say that the Sacæan victim represents the king, and that the king being, by the hypothesis, divine, the victim is divine also. But he needs, moreover, a resurrection of the dead man, hence the theory that the victim represents not only the king, but a god of the type of Tammuz or Adonis. At the feasts of that god, a god of vegetable life, there was wailing for his death, rejoicing for his resurrection. At Babylon this occurred in June-July. But there is no evidence that a human victim was slain for Tammuz: none that he was scourged and hanged. How are the two theories, the victim as divine king, the victim as Tammuz, to be combined? Their combination is necessary, for the king is needed to yield the royal robes; while Tammuz is needed to yield the resurrection, and the fast preceding the feast before Purim, a fast of wailing for Tammuz. We hear of no fast before the Sacæa, but if Purim be borrowed from the Sacæa (which is indispensable to the theory), the Sacæa too must have been preceded by a fast, though it is unrecorded.

Clearly the king theory alone, or the Tammuz theory alone, will not yield the facts necessary to the hypothesis. Consequently the two theories must be combined. The king must not only be divine, be a god; he must also be a god of vegetation, a god of the Tammuz type, who has a resurrection. Now we have no evidence, or none is adduced, to prove that the king, whether Babylonian or Persian, was ever deemed to be an incarnation of Tammuz or any such vegetable deity. Without sound evidence to that effect the theory cannot move a step. We have abundance of Babylonian sacred and secular texts: not one is adduced to prove that the king incarnated any god, especially Tammuz.

Mr. Frazer then, after putting forward alternately the king theory and the Tammuz theory, does finally, if I understand him, combine them. He talks of ‘the human god, the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called.’[1] Thus the victim is the king, and we get the royal robes, and the five days of royalty. The king is also Tammuz (unless I fail to grasp the meaning), the victim too is Tammuz, and we get the fast (though we hear of none before the Sacæa), the feast, and the resurrection. But this is a late and rather casually introduced theory, quite destitute of evidence as regards the king’s being recognised for Tammuz.

Previously, throughout two volumes, the victim had alternately derived his necessary divinity from the king and from the Tammuz god. He derived more: as king he had the entrée of the royal harem; as Tammuz he was the consort of a woman, ‘probably a sacred harlot, who represented the great Semitic goddess Ishtar or Astarte.’ His union with her magically fertilised the crops.[2] A similar duty, in the dream-time of Mr. Frazer’s hypotheses, had been that of the majesty of Babylon. ‘Originally, we may conjecture, such couples exercised their function for a whole year, on the conclusion of which the male partner--the divine king--was put to death; but in historical times it seems that, as a rule, the human god--the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called--enjoyed his divine privileges, and discharged his divine duties, only for a short part of the year, ‘ namely five days, at the Sacæa.[3]

The divine duties of the early kings of Babylon (if I understand Mr. Frazer) were ‘to stand for the powers that make for the fertility of plants and perhaps also of animals.’ Are we to conceive that these pleasing exercises with the lady of the divine pair were all the duties of the early kings of Babylon? In that case, who carried on the civil and military control of the Empire? Of course, if the early king did nothing at all but associate with ‘the human goddess who shared his bed and transmitted his beneficent energies to the rest of nature, ‘[4] then he may have been a man-god, a Tammuz, if the texts say so, and his substitute might die at once as royal proxy, to save the king’s life, and also as Tammuz. Moreover, it would not matter a pin’s fee whether such a king died or not. Only, no man could take the billet of king.

Thus it may be Mr. Frazer’s intention to combine in one the two theories of the victim as Tammuz and as royal proxy. In that case his two apparently inconsistent theories are one theory.

But, if I apprehend it correctly, it is a very audacious theory. Where have we a proven case of a king who incarnates a god of vegetation, plays the part of ‘making for the fertility of plants’ by the assistance of ‘the human goddess who shares his bed, and transmits his beneficent energies to the rest of nature, ‘ and who is sacrificed annually? Does this divine voluptuary also keep a royal harem, or is that essential and more or less attested part of the Sacæa a later excrescence?

Without some historical evidence for such a strange array of facts, including the yearly sacrifice of the monarch, I must hesitate to think that Mr. Frazer’s theory of a king who is both king and Tammuz, and has, later, a substitute who is both Tammuz and king, is a practical hypothesis explanatory of ‘the halo of divinity which was shed around the cross of Calvary.’ I cannot accept as evidence for a combination of facts separately so extraordinary, a series of inferences and presumptions from rural or barbaric revels in spring or at harvest. The existence of a King or Queen of the May, or of the Bean on Twelfth Night, with occasional or even frequent mock destructions of the monarch of a playful day, cannot be used as proof that early Babylonian kings consorted for a year with a human goddess, and then were burned to death as gods of vegetable produce; especially when there is no historical testimony, and only inference from myth, in favour of any human goddess or of a burned king.

We have not, meanwhile, even any testimony to show that, in any time, in any place, any human victim was ever slain, let alone a king (and a king annually), as Tammuz. We have only a guess, founded on the weakest possible basis, that of analogy, ‘The analogy, ‘ says Mr. Frazer, ‘of Lityerses and of folk-custom, both European and savage, suggests that in Phœnicia the corn-spirit--the dead Adonis--may formerly have been represented by a human victim.’[5] ... This can hardly persuade me that the kings of Babylon were annually sacrificed as Tammuz or as Adonis.

While admitting that Mr. Frazer may really mean to combine his two theories (the victim as king, the victim as Tammuz), and while he certainly makes his victim both a king and a god, I shall take the freedom to examine his theory in the sequence of the passages wherein it is proposed, and request the reader to decide whether there be one theory or two theories.

But first, have we any examples of a sacrifice by hanging, not by burning, the human victim? For the Sacæan victim, though confessedly hanged, is said, by Mr. Frazer, to be ‘sacrificed.’

I. SACRIFICE BY HANGING. DOES IT EXIST?

Let us look at actual human victims, actually known to have been slain in the interests of agriculture. Are, or were, these human victims put to the infamous death of malefactors, like the mock-king of the Sacæa? They were not. Cases are given in vol. ii. p. 238 et seq.

1. The Indians of Guyaquar used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields.[6]

2. In the Aztec harvest festival a victim was crushed between two great stones (perhaps to represent the grinding of the maize?).

3. The Mexicans sacrificed young children, older children, and old men for each stage of the maize’s growth. We are not told how they were sacrificed.[7]

4. The Egyptians burned red-haired men, and scattered their ashes with winnowing fans. This burning is a usual feature of sacrifice, and is not hanging or crucifying.

5. The Skidi, or Wolf Pawnees, burned a victim to Ti-ra-wá, ‘the power above that moves the universe, and controls all things, ‘ but the victim was a deer or a buffalo. There were also occasional human sacrifices before sowing; the victim had his head cleft with a tomahawk, and was then riddled with arrows, and afterwards burned.[8] In some cases he was tied to a cross, before being slain with an axe.[9]

6. A Sioux girl was burned over a slow fire, and then shot with arrows. Her flesh, for magical purposes, was squeezed over the newly sown fields.

7. West African victims were killed with spades and hoes, and burned in newly tilled fields.

8. At Lagos a girl was impaled among sacrificed sheep, goats, yams, heads of maize, and plantains hung on stakes. Though impalement is a form of capital punishment, probably the girl’s blood was expected to fertilise the earth. We have no proof that crucifixion was used in Babylon, or the same motive might be alleged for the mock-king at the Sacæa. ‘It may be doubted whether crucifixion was an Oriental mode of punishment, ‘ says Mr. Frazer. He does not say that it was an Oriental form of sacrifice.[10]

9. The Marimos kill and burn a human victim, and scatter the ashes on the ground to fertilise it.

10. The Bagolos hew a slave to pieces.

11. Some tribes in India chop victims up.

12. The Kudulu allow to a victim all the revels, women and all, of the Sacæan mock-king, and then cut a hole in him, and smear his blood over an idol. This is sacrifice, not capital punishment.

13. The Khonds slew their revered and god-like victim in a variety of ways, strangling him in a tree, burning, and chopping up, that his flesh might be sown on the fields. The head, bowels, and bones were burned.

Such are the examples of a real human victim slain for the good of the crops. In six out of fourteen cases the victim’s ashes, blood, or flesh is used magically to fertilise the fields, and probably this is done in several other instances. In seven cases burning occurs. In two sacrifice to a god or idol occurs. In one only is the mode of death a recognised form of capital punishment.

Therefore Mr. Frazer does not seem to me to be justified in taking for and describing as ‘sacrifice’ the capital punishment inflicted at the Sacæa on a mock-king who notoriously was a criminal condemned to death, and who was hanged, not sacrificed.

To be sure Mr. Frazer tries to turn this point, and how? Perhaps ancient kings of Lydia were once burned alive on pyres, ‘as living embodiments of their god.’ For the Lydian, like the Macedonian and many other royal houses, claimed descent from Heracles, who, being on fire already under the shirt of Nessus, homeopathically burned himself. Crœsus, defeated, was about to die by fire, but not out of his own head. Cyrus was going to burn him alive, like Jeanne d’Arc, Cranmer, Wishart, and others. This cruel infliction by a foreign enemy hardly proves a Lydian custom, nor are Lydians exactly Babylonians. Again, if an old Prussian king ‘wished to leave a good name behind him, ‘ he burned himself before a holy oak. ‘Crummies is not a Prussian, ‘ nor were the kings of Babylon. Once more Movers thought that the ‘divine pair who figured by deputy’ at the Sacæa were Semiramis and Sandan or Sardanapalus. (Which divine pair, the king’s proxy and one of the king’s concubines, or the Tammuz man and the sacred harlot?) Sandan was thought to be Heracles by the Greeks, and his effigy was perhaps burned on a pyre at his festival in Tarsus. Now the Persians, according to Agathias, worshipped Sandes (Sandan), and perhaps the Babylonians did so also, though really that agreeable Byzantine minor poet, Agathias, cannot be called a good witness. Next, K. O. Müller thinks that Sandan (Sandes) may have been burned in a mystery play in Nineveh, Müller giving free licence to his fancy, as he admits. Movers, too, thought that ‘at the Sacæa the Zoganes represented a god, and paired with a woman who personated a goddess.’[11] And Movers thinks that the Sacæan victim was originally burned.[12]

For these ‘exquisite reasons, ‘ that the Lydian monarchs claimed descent from Heracles, who was burned, that Cyrus wanted to burn Crœsus alive, that old Prussian kings who wished to leave a good name burned themselves, that Movers thought that Sandan or Sardanapalus might have figured at the Sacæa as Zoganes, that Agathias mentioned Sandes as a Babylonian deity, and that Movers thinks that the man who acted the god was burned, Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the mock-king of the Sacæa was burned, once upon a time.[13] But we only know that he was scourged and hanged. So perhaps, Mr. Frazer suggests, he was both scourged, hanged, and burned afterwards, or perhaps hanging or crucifixion ‘may have been a later mitigation of his sufferings’--a pretty mitigation! And why was flogging added?[14] One had liefer be burned, like a god and a king, than be first whipped and then crucified, as a malefactor of the lowest and most servile kind, losing, too, the necessary suggestion of sacrifice and divinity implied in being burned. Besides, apart from this theory of a cruel and debasing ‘mitigation, ‘ there is no evidence at all except what proves that the mock-king at the Sacæa was first stripped of his royal robes, then whipped, then hanged. If he dies as god or king, why is he stripped of his royal robes? The man was hanged, was capitally punished (which as a condemned criminal he richly deserved), and ‘there is an end on’t, ‘ as Dr. Johnson rudely remarked. Now ‘we must not forget’ that Mr. Frazer has announced this I sacrifice ‘of a divine king as his theory, but we need not, I may even say must not, accept the theory. Because, first, Mr. Frazer gives many examples of persons believed each to contain a god, either temporarily or permanently.[15] But in not one single case is the person said to be killed for the benefit of the god whom he contains.

Secondly, there was historically no sacrifice in the case of the Sacæan mock-king.

The mock-king, then, if he has any divinity, has it not as a sacrifice, for he is not sacrificed; nor as representing a king who incarnates a god, for no kings or others thought to incarnate gods, whether temporarily or permanently, are proved to be slain for the benefit of that god. Nor are any kings who are actually slain, slain by hanging. The death of a man, as a god, belongs, if to anything, to quite another festival, that of Tammuz or Adonis, and to quite another set of ideas. We have no proof indeed that a man was ever hanged or sacrificed as an embodiment of Adonis or Tammuz. But Mr. Frazer’s theory of the reason for the Crucifixion on Calvary demands the sacrifice of a human victim, who is, ex officio, a god, is sacrificed in that character, and is feigned to rise again. He must also be royal, to account for the scarlet robe and crown of thorns of the great victim.