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.