Part 10

From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less, to Saturn in Rome, though how much of the resemblance is due to Roman varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February, nor March, but in July.[71] Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another hypothesis) were _originally_ in February or March, though of this we have no proof. Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at the winter solstice.

As proof that the Attic feast of Cronos (supposed to answer to the Saturnalia) was originally in spring, not in July, Mr. Frazer writes: 'A cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronos by the Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March, and there are traces of a licence accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine jars,' in the month of flowers preceding.[72] It was a proper season for licence.

The possible meaning of the cake does not go for much, and Cronos is not Dionysus. There was a spring festival of Cronos at Olympia, and Aug. Mommsen thinks that the Athenian Cronos feast was originally vernal, though Athenian tradition thought it was a harvest feast.[73]

The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos, who certainly received many such offerings.

We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally with the June-July date of the Persian Sacæa, as given by Mr. Frazer (and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74] But in his third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sacæa about Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]

How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of licence like the Sacæa usually occur just after harvest, the real time of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76] But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sacæa in June-July. On the other hand, the conjecture that the Sacæa were vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.

VII. THE SACÆA

We are still trying to find an historical case of a man who is sacrificed in the character of a god and a king. The argument next introduces us to the Sacæa at Babylon, when the mock-king was hanged, the Persian feast, which, as we saw, M. Parmentier, following Herr Meissner, is inclined to identify with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim.

This identification, this theory that Zakmuk, Sacæa, and the Jewish Purim are all the same feast, is essential to Mr. Frazer's theory. But, before his theory was published, Meyer, in the new volume of his 'History of Antiquity,' had declared that the identification is impossible, philologically and as a matter of fact (_Geschichte des Alterthums_). It would be interesting to know the meaning of the word Sacæa, or _Sacea_, or _Sakia_, which Hyde translates 'convivial drinking, drinking healths' (_compotatio, propinatio_).[77] We remember the Persian butler, called a _Sáki_, in Omar Khayyam:

The eternal _Sáki_ from the bowl has poured Myriads of other bubbles, and will pour.

If the wine-pourer, the _Sáki_, of Omar is etymologically connected with the Sakæa, or Sacæa, then the feast means a wine-party. The Greeks, however, connected the Sacæa with the Sacæ, an Oriental tribe of the great race stretching from the Black Sea to Dacia. Indeed, in Strabo's time, the feasters at the Sacæa dressed as Scythians (Sacæ) and drank, as Horace tells us that the Scythians were used to drink. This occurred at Zela, a town of Pontus, where a love goddess, in Persian Anaitis, of the type of the Babylonian Ishtar, was adored. Mr. Frazer even conjectures that her high priest, or a substitute, 'who played the King of the Sacæa,' was yearly sacrificed here, perhaps as Tammuz.[78] No record of the fact has reached us.

The interesting point about this derivation of Sacæa from the tribe of the Sacæ is that the festival was believed, says Strabo, to commemorate a great victory of the Persians over the Sacæ. In precisely the same way the Persian feast of the Magophonia was supposed to commemorate a victory over and massacre of the Magi.[79] Purim, again, was held to commemorate a triumph of the Jews over the Persians and a massacre of the Persians. In three cases, then, Sacæa, Magophonia, and Purim, a feast which was a secular drinking bout, preserve the memory of a bloody victory. I do not observe that Mr. Frazer notices this coincidence.

But manifestly this kind of feast is not a feast of the death of a mock-king, still less, if possible, a religious festival of the death and resurrection of a vernal god.[80] Yet there really was (if we accept rather poor evidence) _not_ a sacrifice but an execution of a mock-king, a criminal, at the Sacæa, as held in Babylon. I quote our authorities. First comes Athenæus, who is writing about feasts of unreason, at which, in various regions, the slaves are waited upon by their masters.[81] He says nothing of the execution of a mock-king. He remarks: 'Berosus, in the first book of his "History of Babylon," says that on the sixteenth day of the month Lous there is a great festival celebrated at Babylon, which is called _Sakeas_, and it lasts five days; and during these days it is the custom for the masters to be under the orders of their slaves, and one of the slaves puts on a robe like the king's, being called _Zoganes_, and is master of the house. And Ctesias also mentions this festival in the second book of his "History of Persia."' (Ctesias nourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is about 200 B.C.)

Thus Athenæus is silent about the execution of a mock-king, though doubtless he had the book of Berosus before him. And Dio Chrysostom, who does speak of the execution, and he alone does so, says nothing about Berosus, or any other authority. I cite the observations of Dio Chrysostom. He puts them into the mouth of the cynic, Diogenes, who is lecturing Alexander the Great, to tame his pride; and who tells illustrative anecdotes, some of them absurd, much as Mr. Barlow was used to instruct Masters Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. Dio, then, makes Diogenes say that at the Sacæa 'they take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat him upon the king's throne, and give him the king's raiment, and let him lord it and drink, and run riot and use the king's concubines during these days, and no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip, and scourge, and crucify (or hang, _ἐκρέμασαν_) him.'[82] He dies, not as a victim, by sacrifice, but as a criminal, by a cruel and degrading form of capital punishment.[83] According to Dio any condemned criminal would serve the turn. But Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the profession of victim was hereditary.[84]

Such is the story which Dio makes Diogenes tell Alexander, in a humorous apologue against royal pride. 'You will soon be growing a crest like a cock,' says Diogenes in Dio's essay. I cannot think that evidence found only in a literary _tour de force_, and put into the mouth of a professed humourist, proves historically that the mock-king was actually hanged once a year, at a feast described by Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius, who never mention so strange an affair as the hanging. The reader will not find that Mr. Frazer suggests all these doubts. Indeed, the student who avoids footnotes will believe that the tale of the hanging is 'according to the historian Berosus, who, as a Babylonian priest, spoke with ample knowledge.'[85]

Now, granting that there really was a yearly execution at Babylon of a criminal, a mock-king, why was he put to death? We know what Mr. Frazer's theory needs. It needs historical examples of men who, by being sacrificed as victims, obtain a divine character, as representing the god to whom they are sacrificed. The theory also demands that these victims shall be arrayed and crowned as kings. It is desirable, too, that they should perish about our Eastertide, and that they should be supposed to rise again. The solitary example of a Saturnalian victim in Mœsia did not fulfil these conditions. He was arrayed as a king, indeed, and was sacrificed, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius; but he was not stripped and scourged, and he died, not at Easter, but in November: if he had not refused the part thrust on him he would have died in December. There was no word about his resurrection. It was found necessary to suggest that originally the Saturnalian victim died in February-March, but this was not proved.

The other historical case, the mock-king of the Sacæa, also does not fulfil the conditions required. He is robed, and crowned, and scourged, but he is not sacrificed. We have no hint of a resurrection; none of a religious character attaching to the feast; none of a divine character attaching to the victim. The feast is traditionally a revel commemorative of a victory: the victim is a condemned criminal. As to the date of the death, Mr. Frazer has two contradictory theories. By the first (which is correct) the victim died probably in June-July (if not, certainly in September). By the second, the month date of the death is fixed (provisionally) in March-April. Let me add that, to suit Mr. Frazer's theory, the victim must not only have been divine at the origin of the institution, but must have been recognised as divine at the time of the Crucifixion of our Lord: otherwise our Lord's death, in the character of the victim, could lend him no 'halo of divinity.'

[1] Spencer and Gillen, _Natives of Central Australia_..

[2] _G. B_. i. 80, 81.

[3] _G. B_. ii. 81.

[4] _Etudes Traditionistes_. A. L.

[5] _G. B_. i. 157.

[6] _G. B_. ii. 1-5.

[7] _Modern Mythology_, 'Myths of the Origin of Death.'

[8] Spencer and Gillen, p. 476.

[9] Mariner, ii. 127.

[10] _Making of Religion_, chapters xi.-xiii.

[11] _G. B_. ii. 1.

[12] _Prim. Cult_. ii. 308, 1871; ii. 340, 1873. In the edition of 1891, Mr. Tylor, in accordance with his altered ideas, dropped his denial of borrowing, and said that Torngarsuk was later identified with the devil--a common result of missionary teaching, just as Saints under Protestantism became, or their statues became, 'idols.'

[13] _G. B_. ii. 1. Meiners, _Geschichte der Religionen_, Hanover, 1806, 1807, i. p. 48.

[14] E. I. Dodge, _Our Wild Indians_, p. 112.

[15] "Le Jeune", _Relations des Jésuites_, 1633, p. 16; 1634, p. 13.

[16] Callaway, _Religion of the Amazulu_, pp. 26, 27.

[17] Thevet, _Singularités de la France Antarctique_, ch. 77. Paris, 1855. Andouagni is a creator, not addressed in prayer. See 'Science and Superstition,' pp. 10, 11.

[18] Hymns in Maspero, _Music de Boulaq_, pp. 49, 50.

[19] _Religion of Babylon and Assyria_, p. 483.

[20] _G. B_. iii. 198.

[21] _G. B_. ii. 3, 4, citing L. W. King, _Babylonian Religion and Mythology,_ p. 8 (1899).

[22] _G. B_. iii. 154.

[23] Jastrow, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, p. 307. Boston, U.S., 1898.

[24] Jastrow, p. 311.

[25] _G. B_. ii. 2.

[26] _G. B_. i. 77.

[27] _G. B_. i. 77, 78.

[28] _G. B_. ii. 1.

[29] _G. B_. ii. 6.

[30] _G. B_. ii. 56; i. 151 _et. seq._

[31] _G. B_. i. 80-82.

[32] The mortals who incarnate gods are catalogued in _G. B_. vol. i. pp. 139-157. Not one is said to be put to death.

[33] _G. B_. i. 80, 81.

[34] _G. B_. ii. 6-8.

[35] _G. B_. ii. 8-57.

[36] _G. B_. i. 236.

[37] _G. B_. ii. 11.

[38] _Emin Pasha in Central Africa_, p. 91.

[39] _G. B_. i. 155; compare ii. 10.

[40] Callaway, _Religion of the Amazulu_, p. 122.

[41] Here the facts of Dos Santos are confused. In volume i. p. 155 we read: 'The King of Quiteva, in Eastern Africa, ranks with the deity;' 'indeed, the Caffres acknowledge no other gods than their monarch, and to him they address those prayers which other nations are wont to prefer to heaven' (Dos Santos, Pinkerton, xvi. 682, 687, _seq_.). If the Caffres have no gods, a god cannot be incarnate in their king. But, elsewhere in Dos Santos (ii. p. 10), there is no 'King of Quiteva' (as in i. p. 155). Quiteva is no longer a district, but we read 'contiguous to the domains of the Quiteva;' a title like 'the Inca,' in fact, as Dos Santos tells us the Quiteva is 'the King of Sofala.' Is Sofala also known as Quiteva, and the King of Sofala as 'the Quiteva'? The King of Quiteva 'ranks with the deity'--though the Caffres have no deity for him to rank with (ii. 155). But when the Quiteva becomes 'King of Sofala' (ii. 10), the neighbouring prince who kills himself is 'the Sedanda,' who is not said to 'rank with the deity.' And Dos Santos assures us that the Caffres _have_ a God, unworshipped!

[42] _Prophecies of the Brahan Seer_, Mackay, Stirling, 1900.

[43] _G. B_. ii. 18.

[44] _G. B_. ii. 18-24.

[45] _G. B_. i. 139-157.

[46] _G. B_. ii. 8-24.

[47] _G. B_. iii. 197.

[48] _G. B_. ii. 24, 26.

[49] _G. B_. iii. 194.

[50] Spencer and Gillen, Glossary, _s.v. Alatuja_ and pp. 9-11.

[51] _G. B_. iii. 178.

[52] _Ibid._

[53] _G. B_. ii. 26.

[54] _G. B_. ii. 26.

[55] _G. B_. ii. 30.

[56] _G. B_. ii. 24.

[57] Macrobius himself is an author of the fourth or fifth century of our era. Macrobius, i. x. 2; Livy, ii. xxi. 2.

[58] Cumont, _Revue de Philologie_, July 1897, vol. xxi. p. 149, citing Mommsen, C.I.L. I(2) p. 337, and Marquhardt, _Staatsverw_. iii.(2) 587.

[59] Lucian, _Saturnalia_, 2.

[60] Macrobius, i. vii. 31-33.

[61] The reason was probably a mere 'blind' for wife-murder.

[62] _G. B_. iii. p. 140.

[63] _Analecta Bollandiana_, xvi. pp. 5-16.

[64] _G. B._ iii. p. 143.

[65] _G. B_. iii. p. 144.

[66] _G. B_. iii. p. 142.

[67] _G. B_. ii. p. 144.

[68] Later (_Rev. de Philol._, xxi. 3, pp. 152, 153), M. Cumont dates the Greek at about 500-600 A.D., because there were then apprehensions, as in the MS., of the end of the world. But so there were in 1000 A.D.

[69] December 16-23. So also thinks M. Parmentier, _Rev. Phil_. xxi. p. 143, note 1. M. Parmentier says that we must either suppose the victim to have been selected by lot a whole month in advance (of which practice I think we have no evidence), or else cast doubt on the whole story, except the mere martyrdom of Dasius. But the latter measure M. Parmentier thinks too sceptical.

[70] Porphyry, _De Abstinentia_, ii. 56; Lactantius, i. 21.

[71] _G. B_. iii. 147.

[72] _G. B_. iii. 148.

[73] _G. B_. iii. 147, note 2; 148, note 2.

[74] _G. B_. ii. 253, 254.

[75] _G. B_. ii. 254.

[76] _G. B_. ii. 147.

[77] Hyde, _De Bel. Pers_. p. 267.

[78] _G. B_. iii. 163, 164.

[79] Strabo, p. 512.

[80] Herodotus, iii. 79.

[81] Athenæus, xiv. p. 639, c.

[82] Dio, _Oratio_ iv., vol. i. p. 76, Dindorf.

[83] Mr. Frazer, in his text, attributes the statement to Berosus, a Babylonian priest of about 200 B.C. In fact, we do not know Dio's authority for the tale (_G. B_. ii. 24, note I). Mr. Frazer admits this in his note. Ctesias may be Dio's source, or he may be inventing. On the other hand, Macrobius, a late Roman writer, says that the Persians used to regard 'as due to the gods the lives of consecrated men whom the Greeks call Zanas' (Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, iii. 7, 6). But what Zanæ are the learned do not know: whether the word means _ζωγανας_, or the Zanes at Olympia (Pausanias, v. xxi. 2; _G. B_. ii. 24, note I). Moreover, Macrobius may have drawn his facts from Dio. But Dio says nothing about 'consecrated men.'

[84] _G. B_. iii. 186.

[85] _G. B_. ii. 24.

VI

_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.