[16] Boas, in Fifth Report on the North-Western Tribes of Canada, p. 23. For some other instances see Frazer, Totemism, p. 19.
In certain cases divine animals are killed as a religious or magical ceremony. Several instances of this have been pointed out by Sir J. G. Frazer.[17] Sometimes, when the revered animal is habitually spared, it is nevertheless killed on rare and solemn occasions. In other cases, when the revered animal is habitually killed, there is a special annual atonement, at which a select individual of the species is slain with extraordinary marks of respect and devotion. Frazer has offered ingenious explanations of both customs. As regards the former one he argues that the savage apparently thinks that a species left to itself will grow old and die like an individual, and that the only means he can think of to avert the catastrophe is to kill a member of the species in whose veins the tide of life is still running strong and has not yet stagnated among the fens of old age; “the life thus diverted from one channel will flow, he fancies, more freshly and freely in a new one.”[18] The latter custom, again, is explained by Frazer as a kind of atonement; by showing marked deference to a few chosen individuals of a species the savage thinks himself entitled to exterminate with impunity all the remainder upon which he can lay hands.[19] These explanations, as Frazer himself is the first to admit, are only hypothetical, but, so far as I know, they are the only ones yet offered. However, it is worth noticing that certain acts accompanying the slaughter of divine animals sometimes clearly indicate a desire in the worshippers to transfer to themselves supernatural benefits—as when they eat the flesh of the animal, or sprinkle themselves with its blood, or by other means place themselves in contact with it; and it may be that in such cases the animal is killed for the express purpose of communicating to the people the sanctity, or beneficial magic energy, with which it is endowed. The Madi or Moru tribe of Central Africa furnish an instructive example. Once a year, as it seems, a very choice lamb is killed by a man belonging to a kind of priestly order, who sprinkles some of the blood four times over the assembled people and then smears each individual with the same fluid. But this ceremony is also observed on a small scale at other times—if a family is in any great trouble, through illness or bereavement, their friends and neighbours come together and a lamb is killed with a view to averting further evil.[20] Among the Arunta and some other tribes in Central Australia, as we have noticed above, at the time of Intichiuma, totemic animals are killed with the object of being eaten. But here the sacramental meal is a magical ceremony intended to multiply the species, so as to increase the food supply for other totemic groups; the fundamental idea being that the members of each totemic group are responsible for providing other individuals with a supply of their totem.[21]
[17] Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 366 sqq.
[18] Ibid. ii. 368.
[19] Ibid. ii. 435.
[20] Felkin, ‘Madi or Moru Tribe of Central Africa,’ in Proceed. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, xii. 336 sq.
[21] Supra, [ii. 210 sq.] Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, ch. vi. Iidem, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, ch. ix. sq.
Frazer has also called attention to various instances in which a man-god or divine king is put to death by his worshippers, and has suggested the following explanation of this custom:—Primitive people sometimes believe that their own safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. They therefore take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the divine king from growing old and feeble and at last dying. And in order to avert the catastrophes which may be expected from the enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death, they kill him as soon as he shows symptoms of weakness, and his soul is transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. But some peoples appear to have thought it unsafe to wait for even the slightest symptom of decay and have preferred to kill the divine king while he is still in the full vigour of life. Accordingly, they have fixed a term beyond which he may not reign, and at the close of which he must die, the term fixed upon being short enough to exclude the probability of his degenerating physically in the interval. Thus it appears that in some places the people could not trust the king to remain in full bodily and mental vigour for more than a year; whilst in Ngoio, a province of the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that the chief who assumes the cap of sovereignty one day shall be put to death on the next.[22]
[22] Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 5 sqq.
Every reader of The Golden Bough must admire the ingenuity, skill, and learning with which its author has worked out his theory, even though he may fail to find the argument in every point convincing. It is obvious that the supernatural power of divine kings is frequently supposed to be influenced by the condition of their bodies. In some cases it is also obvious that they are killed on account of some illness, corporal defect, or symptom of old age, and that the ultimate reason for this lies in the supposed connection between physical deterioration and waning divinity. But, as Frazer himself observes, in the chain of his evidence a link is wanting: he can produce no direct proof of the idea that the soul of the slain man-god is transmitted to his royal successor.[23] In the absence of such evidence I venture to suggest a some what different explanation, which seems to me more in accordance with known facts—to wit, that the new king is supposed to inherit, not the predecessor’s soul, but his divinity or holiness, which is looked upon in the light of a mysterious entity, temporarily seated in the ruling sovereign, but separable from him and transferable to another individual.