In rejecting the idea that this hideous wretch did duty as a god, Adonis, so fair that he won and so cold that he rejected the love of the golden Aphrodite, I may justify myself by Mr. Frazer's example. I argue that the deformed victim was, if anything, used in magic, not in religion—not as embodying a god. In the same way Mr. Frazer himself says of the rites of the dying god of vegetation, all over Western Asia, that the ritual was 'fundamentally a religious, or rather a magical, ceremony.'[15] So was the beating and death of the ugly deformed man (as to whom no evidence hints that he did duty for a god) a merely magical ceremony.
Now let us see where we are. Mr. Frazer's point was to prove that a man, whom he regarded as a proxy of a god-king, was put to death, at a period of chartered licence, to save the divine life. But people also had human scapegoats. So they perhaps argued (this is my own suggestion): 'As the proxy of the man-god (himself ex officio a man-god) has to be killed at any rate, and as a scapegoat has to be thumped, why not thump the man-god who has to die at any rate? Let him double the part, nay, as we are economising, let him treble the part, let him be beaten as a scapegoat, be hanged as a proxy for the divine life of the king, and also be hanged as Tammuz.'
But to prove that all this was deliberately thought out, where have we a case of a scapegoat god-man who is put to death? We have none, unless we let Mr. Frazer persuade us that his ugly deformed person, I a degraded and useless being,' 'must be recognised as a representative of the creative and fertilising god of vegetation, whose reproductive powers are stimulated that these might be transmitted in full activity to his successor, the new god or new embodiment of the old god, who was doubtless supposed immediately to take the place of the one slain.'[16] I must decline to obey Mr. Frazer's 'must,' and to recognise an Adonis in the ugly deformed person. Next, I demur to the idea that 'doubtless' the dying deformed one handed over his powers to a new god. Thirdly, if all this is meant to show that the Sacæan criminal was not only (1) a proxy, saving the royal divine life, and enjoying the royal harem; and (2) was a representative of Tammuz, enjoying a sacred harlot; but (3) was, moreover, a human scapegoat, scourged as such, and to stimulate his reproductive powers, and to expel evil influences, then I really cannot accept the portentous hypothesis. No attested examples of human scapegoats at Babylon are offered, but that is a trifle.
If Mr. Frazer really means to add the duties of a scapegoat, and the consequent beating,[17] to the duties of proxy king and Tammuz man in his chapter on the Saturnalia, he does not say so. It does not appear, then, that he wishes to explain the scourging of the mock-king at the Sacæa by his theory of a human scapegoat, and it does not appear that he ever explains the stripping of the royal robes from the unlucky man. Yet if the man really died as a mock-king, there must have been some reason for stripping him of his royal raiment. We never hear that the representative of King Saturnus was either stripped or whipped before being sacrificed. Nor do I remark that, in Anahuac, the human victim who personated a god was stripped of the god's robes and ornaments. Why then was the Sacæan victim, and he alone (as far as we know), reduced from his royalty by being stripped before execution, and also brought down to the estate of a slave by being scourged?
III. MORE PERIODS OF LICENCE
I am going with more than diffidence to offer a guess at the reasons, asking it to be remembered that I do so merely because the case is isolated, and cannot at present be illustrated by parallel ceremonies. But first, returning to the periods of licence, I must show that they are not peculiar to agricultural races, nor, therefore, necessarily instituted to aid the farmer. This in itself is a great comfort, for one wearies of being told that the crops are so eternally the cause of custom and rite. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many ways a backward race and not agricultural, 'considerable licence is allowed on certain occasions, when a large number of men and women are gathered together to perform certain corroborees' (or sacred dances). So say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.
The laws of marriage are then turned upside down. A man is ordered to have relations with the woman who is his 'Mura—that is, one to whom he may not, under ordinary circumstances, even speak, or go near, much less have anything like marital relations with.' Every man is expected to send his wife to these dances, for the express purpose of violating, in this period of licence, the most sacred laws of the tribe.[18] These backward persons, the Arunta, have no native strong drink, and cannot get intoxicated, but what they can they do in the way of licence, like more civilised races, and necessarily not for agricultural reasons, as they have no agriculture. They break their most sacred law, just as the Jews, at Purim, deliberately broke the law of Moses.[19] Conceivably, then, even stripping, scourging, and hanging a mock-king at the Sacæa may also have been done for some reason not agricultural.
What view did the Persians themselves take of their festival? I do not think that Mr. Frazer insists enough on this point. The Persians regard the Sacæa as commemorative of a great massacre of the Sacæ near the Euxine. In both forms of the Persian legend, in Strabo, their ancestors fell on the Sacæ when that tribe was hopelessly intoxicated: 'drunk and frantic, drowsy and asleep, or dancing and maddened with wine.' The Sacæ were massacred, and the Sacæa, a feast of licence, was dedicated to the Persian goddess Anaitis; obviously in memory of the intoxicated revels of the Sacæ,[20] or so tradition averred.
The Persians thus, by dint of a popular etymology (Sacæa from Sacæ), accounted to themselves for the origin of a period of chartered licence, in which, says Strabo, 'both men and women, dressed in the Scythian habit, drink and sport wantonly by night and day.' As in many other cases, collected by Athenæus, the lawless revel had its kings of unreason: slaves acting as masters and kings. Just one of these kings, the Zoganes in the royal household, was afterwards stripped, scourged, and hanged. What could the reason be? We have seen that in Tonquin all crimes committed in the period of licence are overlooked, except treason and murder.[21] We have been told that in the Roman Saturnalia a slave might do, unreproved, what at any other time would be punished 'with stripes, imprisonment, or death.'[22] We have read that, at the Pondo period of licence, nobody was later made responsible for his actions, though at Tonquin murder and treason were excepted.[23] The same irresponsibility pervades the Zulu period of licence.[24]
To reinforce this fact, that the most sacred laws are purposefully broken at some periods of licence, I cite the Nanga orgies in old Fiji. 'The Nanga is frequently spoken of as the Mbaki, or harvest;' people being 'full of devilry and food' at harvest, which, perhaps, they need not be in March-April. All distinctions of property were suspended at the Nanga. Men and women, in fantastic dresses, publicly 'practised unmentionable abominations.' Even the relationship of brother and sister 'seemed to be no bar to the general licence.' But after the Nanga, as before the Nanga, brothers and sisters might not even speak to each other. This precisely answers to the Australian incest with the Mura. Brothers and sisters at the Nanga were 'intentionally coupled.' The ceremonies included initiatory mysteries, like the Bora of the Australian blacks. As at the Arunta corroborees, the great point was to break the most sacred laws: those of incest.[25] This peculiar 'burst' then is in Australia pre-agricultural, though, as in Fiji, it survives among an agricultural people.