II. STAGES IN MR. FRAZER'S THEORY
Let us now trace the stages of Mr. Frazer's theory that the Sacæan victim is both god and king.
1. First in order of statement comes the description of the Sacæa, combined from Athenæus, who mentions no victim, and Dio Chrysostom, who does. We learn (from Mr. Frazer, not from Dio)[16] that the victim 'dies in the king's stead.' But 'we must not forget that the king is slain in his character of a god, his death and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people and the world.'
That is Mr. Frazer's theory: we have seen no proof of it, we have remarked that sacrificed victims are not hanged; that kings are not scourged; that there is no evidence beyond conjecture for an earlier Babylonian process of burning; while conjecture also explains whipping and hanging as a 'mitigation,' or alleges that possibly the victim was hanged first and burned afterwards.
Here the king is certainly not,[17] on the face of it, a god of vegetation: if anything, he is more like the Chitome in Congo, who was a 'pontiff.' His credulous people believed that the world would end if the Chitome died a natural death, 'so when he seemed likely to die' he was clubbed or strangled. He was sacrificed to no god whom he incarnated.[18] He was not clubbed once a year (like the Babylonian king of Mr. Frazer's theory); he was given a rude euthanasia 'when he seemed likely to die.' Does science ask us to believe that each Babylonian king had the cosmic rapport of a Congo savage pontiff, and was sacrificed after a year's reign, because a savage pontiff in Congo is put to death, not annually, but 'when he seems likely to die'?
Here, whatever science may expect us to believe, we are told by Mr. Frazer that the king in Babylon was annually sacrificed, as a god, indeed, but not explicitly as a god of vegetation, who has a resurrection.
2. A Babylonian god of vegetation, and a known god, appears in ii. 123, 124. This god is Tammuz. We hear that 'water was thrown over him at a great mourning ceremony, at which men and women stood round the funeral pyre of Tammuz lamenting.... The dead Tammuz was probably represented in effigy, water was poured over him, and he came to life again.' Mr. Frazer does not here plead for a human victim. The festival 'doubtless took place in the month Tammuz (June-July),' or in different places, at different times, from midsummer to autumn, or from June to September, as the late Mr. Robertson Smith calculated. Tammuz, so Mr. Sayce is cited, 'is originally the spring vegetation, which dies in his month, Tammuz or Du'ûzu' (June-July).
Here, then, we have a death and resurrection of Tammuz. It occurs in June-July, or June-September, and Tammuz is undoubtedly the god of spring vegetation. But Mr. Frazer does not here tell us that the king of Babylon is also Tammuz. Tammuz is not whipped and hanged at the Tammuz feast in July. His dead body is 'probably' a dummy.
In vol. ii. 253 Mr. Frazer returns to the victim, the mock-king, of the Sacæa. But he says nothing here about the real king of Babylon. He wishes to show how and why the victim is divine. Now, in ii. 26, we were told that the victim is divine because he 'represents a dying god.' 'For we must not forget that the king dies in his character of a god.'...
Was Mr. Frazer satisfied with this explanation given in ii. 26? Apparently not; for[19] he gives a new explanation and a different one. 'It seems worth suggesting that the mock-king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' Here the Tammuz dummy or effigy of ii. 123, 124, is, perhaps, discarded. Still, if a real live Tammuz was burned on a funeral pyre[20] his ashes might well be represented by a dummy. It has not yet occurred to Mr. Frazer, as it does later, to have the re-arisen god personated by a living human counterpart (Mordecai in a later page) of the dead Tammuz (Haman). The festival of the Sacæa is now a Tammuz festival, a religious feast, and, indeed, is identical with that of ii. 123, 124, for it occurs in the month Lous. Now Lous, says Mr. Robertson Smith, 'answered to the lunar month Tammuz,'[21] and the month of Tammuz[22] was June-July, or June-September.