I propose to examine at some length the more important of these in the Mediterranean civilisations, where Christianity was first evolved. And I begin with Dionysus.
One of the notable features of the Potraj festival of southern India, which Sir Walter Elliot has minutely described for us, and of which I gave a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is its orgiastic character. As type of the orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with their five-day festival, it well deserves some fuller description. The feast takes place near the temple of the village goddess, who is worshipped in the form of an unshapely stone, stained red with vermillion, the probable representative of the first human foundation-victim. An altar was erected behind this temple to the god who bears the name of Potraj. He is a deity of cultivation. The festival itself was under the charge of the Pariahs, or aboriginal outcasts; it was attended by all the lowest classes, including the dancing girls of the temple and the shepherds or other “non-Aryan” castes. During the festival, these people took temporarily the first place in the village; they appeared to form the court of the temporary king, and to represent the early local worship, whose gods the conquering races are afraid of offending. For since the dead of the conquered race are in possession of the soil, immigrant conquerors everywhere have a superstitious dread of incurring their displeasure. On the first day of the orgy, the low-caste people chose one of themselves as priest or Potraj.
On the second day of the feast, the sacred buffalo, already described as having the character of a theanthropic victim, was thrown down before the goddess; its head was struck off at a single blow, and was placed in front of the shrine, with one leg in its mouth. The carcase, as we saw already, was then cut up, and delivered to the cultivators to bury in their fields. The blood and offal were afterwards collected into a large basket; and the officiating priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the god) the name of Potraj, taking a live kid, hewed it in pieces over the mess. The basket was then placed on the head of a naked man, of the leather-dresser class, who ran with it round the circuit of the village boundaries, scattering the fragments right and left as he went. The Potraj was armed with a sacred whip, like Osiris; and this whip was itself the object of profound veneration.
On the third and fourth days, many buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered; and on the fourth day, women walked naked to the temple, clad in boughs of trees alone; a common religious exercise of which I have only space here to suggest that St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the Godiva procession at Coventry are surviving relics. (These relations have well been elucidated by Mr. Sidney Hartland.)
On the fifth and last day, the whole community marched with music to the village temple, and offered a concluding sacrifice at the Potraj altar. A lamb was concealed close by. The Potraj, having found it after a pretended search, rendered it insensible by a blow of his whip, or by mesmeric passes—a survival of the idea of the voluntary victim. Then the assistants tied the Potraj’s hands behind his back, and the whole party began to dance round him with orgiastic joy. Potraj joined in the excitement, and soon came under the present influence of the deity. He was led up, bound, to the place where the lamb lay motionless. Carried away with divine frenzy, he rushed at it, seized it with his teeth, tore through the skin, and eat into its throat. When it was quite dead, he was lifted up; a dishful of the meat-offering was presented to him; he thrust his blood-stained face into it, and it was then buried with the remains of the lamb beside the altar. After that, his arms were untied, and he fled the place. I may add that as a rule the slaughterer of the god everywhere has to fly from the vengeance of his worshippers, who, after participating in the attack, pretend indignation as soon as the sacrifice is completed.
The rest of the party now adjourned to the front of the temple, where a heap of grain deposited on the first day was divided among all the cultivators, to be sown by each one in the field with his piece of flesh. After this, a distribution was made of the piled-up heads of the buffaloes and sheep slaughtered on the third and fourth days. These were evidently considered as sacred as divine heads generally in all countries and ages. About forty of the sheeps’ heads were divided among certain privileged persons; for the remainder, a general scramble took place, men of all castes soon rolling together on the ground in a mess of putrid gore. For the buffaloes’ heads, only the Pariahs contended. Whoever was fortunate enough to secure one of either kind carried it off and buried it in his field. Of the special importance of the head in all such sacrifices, Mr. Gomme has collected many apposite examples.
The proceedings were terminated by a procession round the boundaries; the burial of the head of the sacred buffalo close to the shrine of the village goddess; and the outbreak of a perfect orgy, a “rule of misrule,” during which the chief musician indulged in unbridled abuse of all the authorities, native or British.
I have given at such length an account of this singular festival, partly because it sheds light upon much that has gone before, but partly also because it helps to explain many elements in the worship of the great corn- and wine-gods. One point of cardinal importance to be noticed here is that the officiating priest, who was at one time also both god and victim, is called Potraj like the deity whom he represents. So, too, in Phrygia the combined Attis-victim and Attis-priest bore the name of Attis; and so in Egypt the annual Osiris-offering bore the name of Osiris, whom he represented.
If I am right, therefore, in the analogy of the two feasts Dionysus was in his origin a corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually slain and buried in order that his blood might fertilise the field or the vineyard. In the Homeric period, he was still a general god of cultivation: only later did he become distinctively the grape-god and wine-deity. There was originally, I believe, a Dionysus in every village; and this divine victim was annually offered, himself to himself, with orgiastic rites like those of Potraj. Mr. Laurence Gomme has already in part pointed out this equation of the Hellenic and the Indian custom. The earliest form of Dionysus-worship, on this hypothesis, would be the one which survived in Chios and Tenedos, where a living human being was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast of Dionysus. At Orchomenus, the human victim was by custom a woman of the family of the Oleiæ (so that there were women Dionysi): at the annual festival, the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn sword, and if he caught one, he had the right to slay her. (This is the sacred-chance victim.) In other places, the ceremony had been altered in historical times; thus at Potnice, in Boeotia, it was once the custom to slay a child as Dionysus; but later on, a goat, which was identified with the god, was substituted for the original human victim. The equivalence of the animal victim with the human god is shown by the fact that at Tenedos the newborn calf sacrificed to Dionysus—or as Dionysus—was shod in buskins, while the mother cow was tended like a woman in childbed.
Elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites still more closely resembling the Indian pattern. Among the Cretans, a Dionysus was sacrificed biennially under the form of a bull; and the worshippers tore the living animal to pieces wildly with their teeth. Indeed, says Mr. Frazer, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves seems to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. In some cities, again, the animal that took the place of the human victim was a kid. When the followers of Dionysus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its blood, they believed they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god. This eating and drinking the god is an important point, which will detain us again at a later stage of our enquiry.