The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, had also to cut his throat in public after a twelve years’ reign. But towards the end of the seventeenth century, the rule was so far relaxed that the king was allowed to retain the throne, and probably the godship, if he could protect himself against all comers. As long as he was strong enough to guard his position, it was held that he was strong enough to retain the divine power unharmed. The King of the Wood at Aricia held his priesthood and ghostly kingship on the same condition; as long as he could hold his own against all comers, he might continue to be priest; but any runaway slave had the right of attacking the king; and if he could kill him, he became the King of the Wood till some other in turn slew him. This curious instance has been amply and learnedly discussed by Mr. Frazer, and forms the central subject of his admirable treatise.
More often still, however, the divine priesthood, kingship, or godhead was held for one year alone, for a reason which we shall more fully comprehend after we have considered the annual gods of cultivation. The most interesting example, and the most cognate to our present enquiry, is that of the Babylonian custom cited by Berosus. During the five days of the festival called the Sacæa, a prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to eat, drink, and order whatever he chose, and even permitted to sleep with the king’s concubines. But at the end of five days, he was stripped of his royal insignia, scourged, and crucified. I need hardly point out the crucial importance of this singular instance, occurring in a country within the Semitic circle. Mr. Frazer rightly concludes that the condemned man was meant to die in the king’s stead; was himself, in point of fact, a king substitute; and was therefore invested for the time being with the fullest prerogatives of royalty. Doubtless we have here to deal with a modification of an older and sterner rule, which compelled the king himself to be slain annually. “When the time drew near for the king to be put to death,” says Mr. Frazer, “he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may have been an innocent person, possibly a member of the king’s own family; but with the growth of civilisation, the sacrifice of an innocent person would be revolting to the public sentiment, and accordingly a condemned criminal would be invested with the brief and fatal sovereignty.... We shall find other examples of a criminal representing a dying god. For 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.” I need not point out the importance of such ideas as assisting in the formation of a groundwork for the doctrines of Christianity.
Other evidence on this point, of a more indirect nature, has been collected by Mr. Frazer; and still more will come out in subsequent chapters. For the present I will only add that the annual character of some such sacrifices seems to be derived from the analogy of the annually-slain gods of cultivation, whose origin and meaning we have yet to examine. These gods, being intimately connected with each year’s crop, especially with crops of cereals, pulses, and other annual grains, were naturally put to death at the beginning of each agricultural year, and as a rule about the period of the spring equinox,—say, at Easter. Starting from that analogy, as I believe, many races thought it fit that the other divine person, the man-god king, should also be put to death annually, often about the same period. And I will even venture to suggest the possibility that the institution of annual consuls, archons, etc., may have something to do with such annual sacrifices. Certainly the legend of Codrus at Athens and of the Regifugium at Rome seem to point to an ancient king-slaying custom.
At any rate, it is now certain that the putting to death of a public man-god was a common incident of many religions. And it is also clear that in many cases travellers and other observers have made serious mistakes by not understanding the inner nature of such god-slaying practices. For instance it is now pretty certain that Captain Cook was killed by the people of Tahiti just because he was a god, perhaps in order to keep his spirit among them. It is likewise clear that many rites, commonly interpreted as human sacrifices to a god, are really god-slayings; often the god in one of his human avatars seems to be offered to himself, in his more permanent embodiment as an idol or stone image. This idea of sacrificing a god, himself to himself, is one which will frequently meet us hereafter; and I need hardly point out that, as “the sacrifice of the mass,” it has even enshrined itself in the central sanctuary of the Christian religion.
Christianity apparently took its rise among a group of irregular northern Israelites, the Galilæans, separated from the mass of their coreligionists, the Jews, by the intervention of a heretical and doubtfully Israelitish wedge, the Samaritans. The earliest believers in Jesus were thus intermediate between Jews and Syrians. According to their own tradition, they were first described by the name of Christians at Antioch; and they appear on many grounds to have attracted attention first in Syria in general, and particularly at Damascus. We may be sure, therefore, that their tenets from the first would contain many elements more or less distinctly Syrian, and especially such elements as formed ideas held in common by almost all the surrounding peoples. As a matter of fact. Christianity, as we shall see hereafter, may be regarded historically as a magma of the most fundamental religious ideas of the Mediterranean basin, and especially of the eastern Mediterranean, grafted on to the Jewish cult and the Jewish scriptures, and clustering round the personality of the man-god, Jesus. It is interesting therefore to note that in Syria and the north Semitic area the principal cult was the cult of just such a slain man-god, Adonis,—originally, as Mr. Frazer shows, an annually slain man-god, afterwards put to death and bewailed in effigy, after a fashion of which we shall see not a few examples in the sequel, and of which the Mass itself is but an etherealised survival. Similarly in Phrygia, where Christianity early made a considerable impression, the most devoutly worshipped among the gods was Attis, who, as Professor Ramsay suggests, was almost certainly embodied in early times as an annually slain man-god, and whose cult was always carried on by means of a divine king-priest, bearing himself the name of Attis. Though in later days the priest did not actually immolate himself every year, yet on the yearly feast of the god, at the spring equinox (corresponding to the Christian Easter) he drew blood from his own arms, as a substitute no doubt for the earlier practice of self-slaughter. And I may add in this connexion (to anticipate once more) that in all such godslaughtering rites, immense importance was always attached to the blood of the man-god; just as in Christianity “the blood of Christ” remains to the end of most saving efficacy. Both Adonis and Attis were conceived as young men in the prime of life, like the victims chosen for other god-slaying rites.
I have dealt in this chapter only in very brief summary with this vast and interesting question of human deities. Mr. Frazer has devoted to it two large and fascinating volumes. His work is filled with endless facts as to such man-gods themselves, the mode of their vicarious or expiatory slaughter on behalf of the community, the gentler substitution of condemned criminals for the divine kings in more civilised countries, the occasional mitigation whereby the divine king merely draws his own blood instead of killing himself, or where an effigy is made to take the place of the actual victim, and so forth ad infinitum. All these valuable suggestions and ideas I could not reproduce here without transcribing in full many pages of The Golden Bough, where Mr. Frazer has marshalled the entire evidence on the point with surprising effectiveness. I will content myself therefore by merely referring readers to that most learned yet interesting and amusing book. I will only say in conclusion that what most concerns us here is Mr. Frazer’s ample and convincing proof of the large part played by such slain (and rerisen) man-gods in the religion of those self-same east-Mediterranean countries where Christianity was first evolved as a natural product of the popular imagination. The death and resurrection of the humanly-embodied god form indeed the keynote of the greatest and most sacred religions of western Asia and northeastern Africa.
CHAPTER XII.—THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS.
Normally and originally, I believe, all gods grow spontaneously. They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or chieftains. The household gods are the dead of the family; the greater gods are the dead chiefs of the state or town or village. But upon this earlier and spontaneous crop of gods there supervenes later an artificial crop, deliberately manufactured. The importance of this later artificial class is so great, especially in connexion with the gods of agriculture, and with the habit of eating the god’s body as corn and drinking his blood as wine, that it becomes necessary for us here to examine their nature in due order. We shall find that some knowledge of them is needed preliminary to the comprehension of the Christian system.