607. Beast sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice. In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the former was "tried" by God, apparently meaning that he underwent some doubt whether he ought not to sacrifice his son as other west Semites did theirs, and whether a beast would not suffice (Gen. xxii. 7). For his descendants the legend fixed the usage and doctrine (verse 13), different from that of the other west Semites, that a beast was a due substitute. The Chaldees followed the same reasoning.[1961] According to the mythology of the Egyptians there was a great destruction of men in the reign of the god Ra, but when he mounted to the sky he replaced the sacrifice of men by that of beasts.[1962] In the tragedy of Iphigenia, Iphigenia is not slain. Artemis snatches her away and puts a hind in her place. Robertson Smith[1963] thinks that the notion of the ancients that the sacrifice of human beings was anterior to that of beasts, and that the latter were substitutes, was a "false inference from traditional forms of ritual that had ceased to be understood." At Hierapolis sacrificed children were called oxen.[1964] All the Baals demanded human sacrifices.[1965] In every case in which the mores had overcome the terror which made human sacrifices, the mythology invented explanations. It was forbidden to the Jews to make their children "pass through the fire" to Molech.[1966] They often did it. This shows that their mores had not yet outgrown it, but that religious teachers were trying to forbid it.[1967] They held the same doctrine as the neighboring nations, that the firstborn belonged to God.[1968] The firstborn must be sacrificed or redeemed.[1969] They had doctrines of ransom by beasts, as above, or by money,[1970] or by circumcision, if the incoherent text is rightly interpreted.[1971] Nevertheless, they never were sure enough of their position before the captivity to hold to it against the faith and usage of neighboring nations.[1972] The doctrine in Micah vi. 6-8, as early as the end of the eighth century B.C., raised the real issue about the sense and utility of all sacrifices in its widest form, but that doctrine was much too far beyond the mores of the time to have any effect.
608. Mexican doctrine of greater power through death. Preuss says: "In the ancient Mexican cultus I recognized, to my astonishment, that really spirits were killed in the sacrificed men, in order that they [the spirits] might thus be rendered capable of being born again, and rendering greater services to men."[1973] Death was believed to enhance the power of the spirits who ruled meteorological phenomena. The notion was that insects caused meteorological phenomena; then they were gods; the insects and beasts gave to the gods the magic power which they (insects and beasts) once had over rainfall, etc. The humming bird which hibernates and wakes again in spring was thought to cause the heat of summer. Therefore it was taken to be an envelope of the war god. Free flow of blood lets loose magic power. Hence the great bloodshedding in the Mexican cultus. "Human sacrifice is in Mexico the same in sense as beast sacrifice. In both cases, magic powers, magic beasts and spirits, are killed." By death new birth with greater magic power becomes possible.[1974]
609. Motives of child sacrifice. The Semites adopted the world philosophy which lies back of human sacrifice and incorporated it with their religion, which thereby became gloomy and ferocious. What a man must sacrifice was what he loved most, and that was his firstborn child. It was rationalizing to argue that a beast could be substituted with equal effect, and we often find that people who had advanced to that point of philosophy, when face to face with a great calamity showed that they did not believe that the effect was equal. They went back to child sacrifice.[1975] The Hebrews in the seventh century thought that they felt the wrath of God and they tried to avert it in this way.[1976] Tiele thinks that there is no evidence of child sacrifice or of the temple consecration of women in the Euphrates valley in historical times, but in Syria and Arabia child sacrifice lasted on in spite of the culture of the Aramæans and Phœnicians. In old Arabia fathers burned their little daughters as sacrifices to the goddess.[1977] Human sacrifices were used for auguries before any important enterprise, and as thank offerings for victory or success. Every year a number of children of the foremost families were sacrificed as an expiation for the sins of the nation, "while fiendish music drowned their cries and the lamentations of their mothers."[1978] The Carthaginians kept up the custom. The leading families were bound to furnish the sacrifice as representatives of the commonwealth. The children to be sacrificed were selected by lot from those who were liable. Children were exchanged in order to be saved. The parents might not lament, for to do so would deprive the sacrifice of its efficacy.[1979] The custom was an abomination to the Romans, but it was so firmly fixed in the mores of the Carthaginians that the conquerors could not stop it. The proconsul Tiberius put an end to it by hanging the priests of the cult to the trees of their own temple grove.[1980] As Tertullian says that soldiers who executed this order were still living when he wrote, the order of Tiberius must have been issued about the middle of the second century A.D. or a little later.
610. Dedication by vows. The connection between child sacrifice and the temple consecration of girls is in the substitution of the latter for the former, as a ransom. The girl devoted to death belonged to the goddess in one way, if not in the other. Vows made in illness sometimes included such substitution. In the historic period, after child sacrifice had ceased in the Euphrates valley, many variations occurred. Barren women made vows. Children were vowed to the goddess for life or for a time. They were redeemed by money which they earned in the temple life. The accumulation of a dowry was only a variation.[1981] In later times (second century A.D.) we find the sacrifice of a woman's hair as a substitute for herself.[1982] Men were also dedicated in sex perversion.
611. Degeneration of the customs of consecrating women. Evidently vicarious sacrifice and expiatory sacrifice are very ancient heathen ideas. They contain deductions and assumptions about the nature of the deity which are of the first theological importance. The cases of custom which have been described also show the power and persistency of theological dogma to override for centuries the strongest interests and sentiments. Evidently the variations in the custom marked the breaking down of the boundaries which held it firm in the religious mores. The Babylonian custom described by Herodotus seems to be a variation by which every woman was held bound to the goddess. Then sensuality, priestcraft, greed, and frivolity easily used such a custom until it became a root of corruption. This is what happened, and forms of the custom which had no sense but the gratification of licentiousness spread around the Mediterranean. The old female sex mores were very simple and austere, but they were corrupted after the middle of the second century B.C. Those of Roman Carthage, if we can trust Salvianus, became more corrupt than those of Punic Carthage ever had been. They were less ferocious and more frankly voluptuous. Salvianus's description of southern Gaul makes it as bad as Africa. According to him the Vandals were pure-minded, and their mores were so pure and firm that they successfully resisted the Roman corruption and put the sex relation back again on the basis of the "law of God."[1983]
612. Our traditions from Israel. If now we turn back to the Israelites we can see the stream by which our own mores have come down to us. There arose amongst the Israelites, in the tenth century B.C., an opposition to the religion which was common to the west Semites. It was like the reform of the Iranian religion by the magi, who produced a religion which was too severe and exacting for any but priests to live by it. There have also been many attempts to reform Islam from within. They have taken the form of throwing off later additions and returning to primitive purity, that is, to the mode of life of Arabs in Mohammed's time. In some cases (e.g. the Wahabees of the nineteenth century) the reforms have originated with people who were on a lower grade of life than the mass of Moslems. Present-day scholars find the origin of the resistance of Israelitish prophets to the prevailing religion of western Asia in the hostility of a rustic population, with a primitive mode of life and archaic mores, to the luxury of Tyre and Sidon, wealthy cities of commerce and industry.[1984] The conflict was between two sets of mores. The biblical scholars now tell us that Jahveh was a Baal amongst other Palestinian Baals until this antagonism arose. Then he was made the god in whose name the ancient mores of Israel were defended against the introduction of luxury and licentiousness. The antagonism was between simple, rustic, largely pastoral modes of life and the ways of cities with wealth, culture, and luxury. This is a permanent social antagonism, but it carried with it the antagonism of simplicity to sensuality, materialism, formal manners, and luxury. For four or five centuries a succession of "prophets" developed the antagonism between the Jahveh religion and heathenism. They maintained that Jahveh was not only the single god of the Hebrews but the sole God of all the earth. Other gods were nullities. The prophets condemned idolatry, and all sensuality, licentiousness, and bestiality, with which they connected all sorcery and divination. They insisted on a broad and firm sex taboo and denounced sacral harlotry and child sacrifice together. It must be remembered that the peoples of that age generally regarded sex usages which seem to us the most abominable as trivial, unworthy of notice, matters of personal liberty and choice. Brahmins, a century ago, held that view of pederasty.[1985] The prophets also set in opposition to their own traditional ritual religion a doctrine of righteousness, by which religion was made ethical. It was a marvelous product for an insignificant hill people. It is, however, to be noticed that in the Zend-Avesta there was also a great revolt against sex vice.[1986]
613. How the Jewish view of sensuality came to prevail. The religious system of the Jewish prophets never has become the actual popular religion of any people. The Old Testament contains the story of the protests and failures of the prophets. Their work did not issue from the mores of the Jewish nation, and did not influence the mores before the captivity. The prophets were trying to introduce a new world philosophy by virtue of its ethical value and by interpretations of current political history. In Jer. xliv we see the latter argument turned against the prophet. The people cite their own experience. When they served the Queen of Heaven they fared well. In the rabbinical period the Jews emphasized everything which could differentiate them from heathen, and in the New Testament we find that idolatry and sensuality are presented as the two great heathen characteristics which Christians are to avoid. It is impossible for us to know to what extent the mores of the masses, in the western Roman empire, were marked by the ancient Roman austerity in the sex mores. It is, however, reasonable to believe that the ancient mores prevailed most in the class amongst whom Christian converts were found. Salvianus also gives to the German nations very remarkable testimony as to their freedom from sensuality and sex vice. The experience of societies also went to prove that such vice can corrupt the finest brain and the most cultivated character; also that, if it becomes current in a society, as pederasty and prostitution did in the Greco-Roman world, it will eat out all manly virtues, all coöperative devotion, the love of children, the energy of invention and production, of an entire population. Thus by the syncretism of the mores of the nations, and by experience, the conviction was produced that the view of sensuality and sex vice which the Jewish prophets taught was true, and that that view was the most important part of the mores and of religion for the welfare of mankind.
[1885] Snouck-Hurgronje, De Atjehers, I, 64-66; Bur. Eth., XVIII, 285; Amer. Anthrop., XI, 56; Codrington, Melanesians, 102, 299; Serpa Pinto, Como eu Atravassei Africa, I, 82; Kubary, Karolinenarchipel., 47, 226, 244; Powers, Calif. Indians, 24.
[1886] Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 141.
[1887] Barton, Semitic Origins, 78.