CHAPTER XVI.—THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT.
ONE more element of some importance yet remains in the complex conception of the human or animal victim, or slain god, which we must briefly examine before we can proceed with advantage to the evolution of Christianity; I mean the doctrine of piacular sacrifice—or, in other words, of the atonement.
“Without shedding of blood,” says the author of one of the earliest Christian tractates, “there is no remission of sin.” This is a common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is regarded, not merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or incarnate god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed. “Behold the Lamb of God,” says the Baptist in the legend, “which taketh away the sins of the world.”
This idea, I take it, is not primitive. Sin must be regarded as a late ethical intruder into the domain of religion. Early man for the most part takes his gods joyously. He is on the best of terms with them. He eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. They join in his phallic and bacchanalian orgies. They are not great moral censors, like the noble creation of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” They are creatures of like passions and failings with himself,—dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen. Angry they may be at times, no doubt; but their anger as a rule can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered goats and bulls. Under normal circumstances, they are familiar housemates. Their skulls or images adorn the hearth. They assist at the family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or wine made to them with a smiling countenance. In short, they are average members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and merry-makings of their relatives.
Thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most primitive religions. It is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the gods, makes itself slowly visible. In many cases, later glosses seem to put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. But in more consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of communion or feasting together. Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in many works of Hellenic and Semitic literature.
In particular, the piacular sacrifice seems to have crystallised and solidified round the sacred person of the artificial deity. “The accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people,” says Mr. Frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.” “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” says one of the Hebrew poets, whose verses are conjecturally attributed to Isaiah, about one such divine scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes are we healed. Jahweh hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”
The ideas here expressed in such noble language were common to all the later man-gods of the more advanced and ethical religions.
Mr. Frazer is probably right in connecting the notion of the scapegoat, human or animal, with the popular barbaric idea of the transference of evils. Thus, in popular magic of all nations, diseases of every sort, from serious fevers and plagues, down to headache, toothache, warts, and sores, are transferred by some simple ceremony of witchcraft to animals, rags, or other people. I will quote examples but briefly. Epilepsy is made over to leaves and thrown away in the Malay Archipelago. Toothache is put into a stone in Australia. A Bechuana king gave his illness to an ox, which was drowned in his stead, to secure his recovery. Mr. Gomme quotes a terrible story of a Scotch nobleman who transferred his mortal disease to his brother by a magical ceremony. “Charms” for fever or for warts generally contain some such amiable element of transferring the trouble to a string, a rag, or a piece of paper, which is flung away to carry the evil with it to the person who next touches it. Numerous cases of like implication may be found in the works of Mr. Gomme and Mr. Hartland, to which I would refer enquirers after further evidence.
Closely connected with these notions of transference are also the occasional or periodical ceremonies undertaken for the expulsion of evils from a village or a community. Devils, demons, hostile spirits, diseases, and other misfortunes of every sort are frequently thus expelled with gongs, drums, and other magical instruments. Often the boundaries of the tribe or parish are gone over, a perlustration is performed, and the evil influences are washed out of the territory or forcibly ejected. Our own rite of Beating the Bounds represents on one of its many sides this primitive ceremony. Washings and dippings are frequent accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in Peru, it was also bound up with that common feature of the corn-god sacrament—a cake kneaded with the blood of living children. The periodical exorcism generally takes place once a year, but is sometimes biennial: it has obvious relations with the sacrifice of the human or animal victim. In Europe, it still survives in many places as the yearly expulsion of witches. The whole subject has been so admirably treated by Mr. Frazer that I have nothing to add to his excellent exposition.