[224] Marsden, History of Sumatra, p. 240.
[225] Mason, in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xxxvii. pt. ii. 137.
[226] Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 208.
Thus, from the conception that sins and curses are contagious it follows that an innocent person may have to suffer for the sin of another. His suffering does not necessarily relieve the sinner from punishment; sin, like an infectious disease, may spread without vacating the seat of infection. But, as we have seen, it may also be transferred, and sin-transference involves vicarious suffering. At the same time, this kind of vicarious suffering must not be confounded with vicarious expiatory sacrifice. As a general rule, the scapegoat is driven or cast away, not killed. The exceptions to this rule seem to be due to two different causes. On the one hand, the scapegoat may be chased to death, or perhaps be pushed over a precipice,[227] for the sake of ridding the community as effectively as possible of the evils loaded on the victim. Thus the Bhotiyás of Juhár take a dog, make him drunk, “and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and stones, and believe that by so doing no disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year.”[228] On the other hand, the transference of evil may be combined with a sacrifice. But of such a combination only a few instances are recorded, and most of them are ambiguous. Considering further that in these cases, or at least in the best known of them, the act of transference takes place after the victim has been killed, it seems to me extremely probable that we have here to do with a fusion of two distinct rites into one, and that the victim is not offered up as a sacrifice in its capacity of a scapegoat, but, once sacrificed, has been made use of as a conductor for all the evils with which the people are beset.
[227] According to the Mishna, the Hebrew scapegoat was not allowed to go free in the wilderness, but was killed by being pushed over a precipice (Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 418). See also the ambiguous passage in Servius, In Virgilii Aeneidos, iii. 57.
[228] Atkinson, ‘Notes on the History of Religion in the Himálaya of the N.W. Provinces,’ in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, liii. pt. i. 62.
In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.[229] A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king’s house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, “Wickedness! wickedness!” so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice was to take away the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless manner “as if the weight of all their wickedness were thus carried away”; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. “Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God’s laws during the past year…. Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year—such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications, adulteries, witchcrafts, incests, slanders, &c.—were expected to pay in twenty-eight ngugus, or £2 0s. 7½d., as a fine; and this money was taken into the interior, to purchase two sickly persons, to be offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes—one for the land, and one for the river.”[230] As will be seen in a following chapter, human sacrifices to rivers are very common in the Niger country. In the cases mentioned by the English missionary, the idea of vicarious expiation is obvious. But I find no evidence of actual sin-transference.
[229] Frazer, op. cit. iii. 109 sq.
[230] Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, p. 344 sq.
Dr. Frazer further mentions a custom which, according to Strabo, prevailed among the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus.[231] In the temple of the Moon they kept a number of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man thrust a sacred spear into his side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which the victim fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.[232] Dr. Frazer maintains that “the last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hand on the animal’s head.”[233] So it may be, although, in my opinion, the purificatory ceremony described by Strabo also allows of another interpretation. The victim was evidently held to be saturated with magic energy; this is commonly the case with men, or animals, or even inanimate things, that are offered in sacrifice, and in the present instance the man was regarded as holy already, long before he was slain. To stand on the corpse, then, might have been regarded as purifying in consequence of the benign virtue inherent in it, just as, according to Muhammedan notions, contact with a saint cures disease, not by transferring it to the saint, but by annihilating it or expelling it from the body of the patient. But whether the ceremony in question involved the idea of sin-transference or not, there is no indication that the sacrifice of the slave was of an expiatory character. The same may be said both of the Egyptian sacrifice of a bull, mentioned by Herodotus, and of the white dog sacrifice performed by the Iroquois. The Egyptians first invoked the god and slew the bull. They then cut off his head and flayed the body. Next they took the head, and heaped imprecations on it, praying that, if any evil was impending either over those who sacrificed or over the land of Egypt, it might be made to fall upon that head. And finally, they either sold the head to Greek traders or threw it into the river[234]—which shows that the real scapegoat, the head, was not regarded as a sacrifice to the god. Among the Iroquois, also, the victims were slain before the sins of the people were transferred to them. According to Hale’s and Morgan’s accounts of this rite, which have reference to different tribes of the Iroquois, no mention of sin-transference is made in the hymn which accompanied the sacrifice.[235] Only blessings were invoked. This was the beginning of the chant:—“Now we are about to offer this victim adorned for the sacrifice, in hope that the act will be pleasing and acceptable to the All-Ruler, and that he will so adorn his children, the red men, with his blessings, when they appear before him.”[236] Mr. Morgan even denies that the burning of the dog had the slightest connection with the sins of the people, and states that “in the religious system of the Iroquois, there is no recognition of the doctrine of atonement for sin, or of the absolution or forgiveness of sins.”[237]