Magic and Religion

by Andrew Lang

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.