A curious custom which occurs in many churches of Sicily at Easter still further enforces this unity of Christ with the cult of earlier corn and wine gods, like Adonis and Osiris. The women sow wheat, lentils, and canary-seed in plates, which are kept in the dark and watered every second day. The plants soon shoot up; they are then tied together with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the sepulchres which, with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in Roman Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, “just as the gardens of Adonis,” says Mr. Frazer, “were placed on the grave of the dead Adonis.” In this curious ceremony we get a survival from the very lowest stratum of corn-god worship; the stratum where an actual human victim is killed, and corn and other crops are sown above his body. Even where the sowing itself no longer survives, the sepulchre remains as a relic of the same antique ritual. Such sepulchres are everywhere common at Easter, as are the cradles of the child-god at the feast of the winter solstice. The Pietà is the final form of this mourning of the corn-god by the holy women.
Passing on to the other aspects of Christ as corn-god and divine-human victim, we see that he is doubly recognised as god and man, like all the similar gods of early races. In the speeches put into his mouth by his biographers, he constantly claims the Jewish god as his father. Moreover, he is a king; and his kingly descent from his ancestor David is insisted upon in the genealogies with some little persistence. He is God incarnate; but also he is the King of the Jews, and the King of Glory. Wise men come from the east to worship him, and bring gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense to the infant God in his manger cradle. But he is further the Christ, the anointed of God; and, as we saw, anointment is a common element with numerous other divine-human victims.
Once more, he is the King’s son; and he is the only begotten son, the dearly beloved son, who is slain as an expiation for the sins of the people. The heavens open, and a voice from them declares, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” He is affiliated, like all other such victims, on the older and earlier ethnical god, Jah-weh; and though he is himself God, and one with the Father, he is offered up, himself to himself, in expiation of the sin committed by men against divine justice. All this would be familiar theology indeed to the worshipper of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis.
The common Hebrew offering was the paschal lamb; therefore Christ is envisaged as the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. In the paintings of the catacombs, it is as a lamb that the Saviour of the world is oftenest represented. As a lamb he raises another lamb, Lazarus; as a lamb he turns the water into wine; as a lamb he strikes the living springs from the rock on the spandrils of the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus. But his birth in a manger is also significant: and his vine and his dove are almost as frequent as his lamb in the catacombs.
The Gospel history represents the passion of Christ essentially as the sacrifice of a temporary king, invested with all the familiar elements of that early ritual. Christ enters Jerusalem in royal state, among popular plaudits, like those which always accompany the temporary king, and the Attis or Adonis. He is mounted on an ass, the royal beast of the Semites. The people fling down branches of trees in his path, as they always fling down parts of green trees before the gods of vegetation. On Palm Sunday his churches are still decked with palm-branches or with sprays of willow-catkin. Such rites with green things form an integral part of all the old rituals of the tree-god or the corn-god, and of all the modern European survivals in folk-lore—they are equally found in the Dionysiac festival, and in the Jack-in-the-Green revels on English fair-days. The connexion with trees is also well marked throughout the Gospels; and the miracle of the barren fig-tree is specially mentioned in close connexion with the entry into Jerusalem. The people as he entered cried “Hosanna” to the son of David and the prophetic words were supposed to be fulfilled, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee, meek, sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.”
The Christ goes as a willing victim to the cross; he does not seriously ask that the cup should pass from him. He foretells his own death, and voluntarily submits to it But he is also bought with a price—the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Of all this, we had forecasts in the Khond, the Mexican, and various other rituals.
Furthermore, there is a trial—a double trial, before the high priest, and before Pilate. Such trials, we have seen, are common elements of the mock-king’s degradation. Like all other similar victims, the Christ, after being treated like a monarch, is reviled and spat upon, buffeted and insulted. He is bound with cords, and carried before Pilate. The procurator asks him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” and the Christ by implication admits the justice of the title. All the subsequent episodes of the painful drama are already familiar to us. The sacred victim is cruelly scourged that his tears may flow. As in other cases he is crowned with flowers or with bark, in order to mark his position as king of vegetation, so here he is crowned with a chaplet of thorns that adds to his ignominy. The sacred blood must flow from the sacred head. But still, he is clothed with purple and saluted with the words, “Hail, King of the Jews!” in solemn irony. He is struck on the head with a reed by the soldiers: yet even as they strike, they bow their knees and worship him. They give him to drink wine, mingled with myrrh; “but he received it not.” Then he is crucified at Golgotha, the place of a skull, * on a cross, the old sacred emblem of so many religions; it bears the inscription, “The King of the Jews,” by order of the Procurator. After the death of the Christ he is mourned over, like Adonis and Osiris, by the holy women, including his mother. I do not think I need point out in detail the many close resemblances which exist between the Mother of the Gods and the Mother of God—the Theotokos.
* According to mediaeval legend, the skull was Adam’s, and
the sacred blood which fell upon it revived it. In
crucifixions, a skull is generally represented at the foot
of the cross.
The thieves crucified with the Saviour have their legs broken, like many other sacred victims; but the Christ himself has not a bone broken, like the paschal lamb which was the Jewish substitute for the primitive human victim. Thus both ideas on this subject, the earlier and the later, seem to find an appropriate place in the history. Instead of having his legs broken, however, the Christ has his side pierced; and from it flows the mystic blood of the atonement, in which all Christians are theoretically washed; this baptism of blood (a literal reality in older cults) being already a familiar image at the date of the Apocalypse, where the robes of the elect are washed white in the blood of the lamb that was slain.
After the crucifixion, the Christ is taken down and buried. But, like all other corn and wine gods, he rises again from the dead on the third day—this very period of three days being already a conventional one in similar cases. Every one of the surroundings recalls Osiris and Attis. It is the women once more who see him first; and afterwards the men. Finally, he ascends into heaven, to his Father, before the wondering eyes of his disciples and his mother. In each item of this, there is nothing with which we are not already familiar elsewhere.