Pagan Christs, by John M. Robertson, [1911], at sacred-texts.com
Pagan Christs, by John M. Robertson, [1911], at sacred-texts.com
On the classic side there is thus abundant evidence as to the practice of human sacrifice, and some as to sacramental cannibalism, in the historic period; but what the theory finally requires is either the sacrifice of a victim who, as being specifically divine, is the subject of a eucharist, or the proof that such a eucharist could be combined with the sacrifice of a divine victim. Now, in the Khond cult, as we have seen, not only is the victim deified, but the propitiated Goddess figures in the myth as the original sacrifice. An ostensibly similar myth is found in ancient Babylon, in a creation story, where Marduk is actually decapitated in order that the first man may be made from his blood and "bone." 3 After such precedents, the deification of sacrificed victims could readily follow; though the probability is, of course, that the myth was framed to explain an already established usage of deification. Of this conception we have already seen a clear trace in the old Mediterranean world in the sacrifices of the Albanians to the Moon-Goddess; and for fuller light we turn first to the cult of Dionysos. Not only is there the story of the substitution of a goat for a boy in the sacrifice to Dionysos at Potniæ, 4 but there is the combined significance of (a) the myth of the rending of the divine boy Dionysos, in the form of a bull, by the Titans; 5 (b) the fact that in the ritual mystery the worshippers tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth; 6 (c) the peculiar Dionysiak ritual at Tenedos, where a gravid cow was treated as a woman in labour, and her calf, devoted to the God, was made to wear the tragic cothurni, while the slayer was formally pursued with stones and had to fly into the sea; 7 (d) the actual rending of men as Dionysiak sacrifices at Chios and Tenedos; 8 and (e) the peculiar procedure in the Athenian Bouphonia or religious "murder
of the ox," 1 where the ceremonial flight of the slayers, their repudiation of guilt, and the solemn trial and condemnation of the weapons used as being the guilty things, all go to show that the ox represented either a divinity or a human victim, or the former by development from the latter. 2 The theory of Robertson Smith, that the animal sacrifice is the earlier, need not be here considered. It rests on the assumption that the primordial communion-sacrifice was totemistic; and this has not been and cannot be proved. On the other hand we have many traces of the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice in historic times; and this is all that is required to solve the historic problem.
From another side we see the same principle at work in the old Theban sacrifice to Amun, 3 wherein the ram, the symbolic and sacred animal of the God, never otherwise sacrificed, was on the annual festival-day of the God offered up to him, the skin being placed on the God's statue. As Herodotus tells the story, there was then brought beside the image of Amun an image of "Herakles," presumably Khonsu, the Son of the God in the Theban Trinity; 4 whereafter "all who are in the temple beat themselves in mourning for the ram, and then bury him in a holy sepulchre." Whatever may have been the parts played by father and son respectively in this rite, it is clear that the slaying of the ram—presumptively a lamb—represented the death of the God, whose resurrection would necessarily follow, like that of Osiris. In the ritual worship of Herakles, the man burned alive represented the God, 5 who in the myth dies on the funeral pyre. Another rite practised in the worship of the Syrian Goddess indicates in a different way the original connection of an animal sacrifice with a human sacrifice and a sacrament. In the Syrian ritual, the stranger who came to sacrifice had to offer up a sheep, of which he partook, on whose skin he knelt, and whose head he placed on his in the act of supplication. 6 The symbolism is here fairly complete. And in yet another rite, that of the sacrifice and sacramental eating of a camel among the Sinaitic Arabs of the fourth century, 7 it was clearly avowed that the young white camel was a
substitute for a human sacrifice, young and beautiful captives being the preferred victims. In this case the blood of the wounded camel was drunk by the tribesmen, and the animal was cut to pieces and instantly devoured raw. That at a remote period the human victim was so eaten, it is difficult to doubt. 1
Proceeding on the maxim that the myth is always long posterior to the rite which it pretends to explain, we must suppose that before the composition of the legends concerning the Titans and the birth, death, and rebirth of Dionysos, such a primitive rite as the legend describes had actually been performed. Between a ritual in which the victim is torn to pieces for burial in the fields, and one in which the victim is eaten by the worshippers, there is a process of development to be accounted for. Two hypotheses are open. The Khond rite may be a modification of an original ritual of cannibalism; or the ancient Dionysiak rite may stand for a transformation of the typical rite, in which, an animal having been substituted for a human victim, the eating of it became a means to communion with the God whom the animal mystically represented. Broadly speaking, one process is as likely as the other; and both have evidently taken place. While the Khonds did not eat their human sacrifice, the Gonds, a kindred Dravidian race, by one account actually did; 2 and many medieval and modern instances of kin-eating and other ritual cannibalism are on record. 3 In one of the most recently noted instances of human sacrifice among contemporary savages, which is also the most primitive that has been observed—the cult of the Snake-God at Ebritum in Southern Nigeria—the annual victims seem to have been eaten regularly; and of the four hundred slain on the occasion of the death of a great chief, "all were killed at Ebritum as offerings to the God, and then eaten by the Aro people, the flesh being distributed through the late chief's country. These victims were looked upon as sacred, and those who ate their flesh ate Gods, and thus assimilated within themselves something of the divine attributes and power. The victims were not fattened before being killed." 4 In another tribe, the Ibo, the sacrifice and eating of a male or female slave is still a regular part of the "Okuku" or post-funeral ceremony for a chief; and in this case the victim is "bought with a price" after the chief's death, fattened, and treated
with particular kindness, in the Asiatic fashion. 1 Instances of ritual cannibalism may easily be multiplied. In the annual human holocaust at Whydah, a century ago, the sacrifice of one man thrown from a height with his hands tied, a muzzled crocodile, and a pair of pigeons with clipped wings, terminated the celebration; and the man in this case was devoured by the multitude. 2 And to this day, in the words of one observer, "no great human sacrifice offered for the purpose of appeasing the Gods and averting sickness or misfortune is considered to be complete unless either the priests or the people eat the bodies of the victims." 3 The same sacramental element is seen in the eating of parts of the sacrificed captives of war at Bonny. 4
In the Tonga Islands, again, the bodies of enemies slain in war were dedicated to the Gods, and a few sacramentally eaten: this at a stage of civilisation at which many of the community, and particularly the women, regarded the proceeding with disgust; 5 and similar survivals were noted in the Marquesas. 6 In Fiji 7 and Tahiti 8 dedication to the Gods was a preliminary to every act of public cannibalism. Among the Niam-Niams of Nubia, too, it appears to have been chiefly in times of war that cannibalism was resorted to; and though a white onlooker ascribed the act in such a case to sheer "blood-thirstiness and hatred," 9 it was doubtless a religious proceeding. The same inference arises in the cases in which Native Americans in modern times have been known to eat human flesh in time of war; since they did it "with repugnance," though they believed it to produce courage. 10 Even the infliction of torture may have a religious as distinct from a merely revengeful motive, 11 as in a sacrifice among the Native Americans in which the victim, a slave, was burned by a slow fire, with progressive mutilation and partial eating, followed by killing and the eating of the remains. Finally the partakers beat on their huts "to compel the soul of the defunct to abandon the village." 12 Here we have a systematic ritual. 13
We may therefore conclude that primordially the human sacrifice was normally eaten, as it was by the semi-civilised Mexicans at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is in fact certain that anthropophagy has been practised in all parts of the world in the savage and semi-civilised stages; 1 and it is no less certain that cannibalism had persisted long in its religious form after it had ceased to be a normal practice: the rationale of the act being, not that men to the last offered the Gods that which they commonly liked for themselves, but that they held it a sacred experience to continue to eat what they believed the God to eat. 2 On the other hand, the recoil from cannibalism which everywhere marks the rise of humanity would, in the more civilised Asiatic states, lead on one hand to the setting apart of criminals for the human sacrifices, and on the other to the substitution of an animal, which, partly in virtue of survivals of totemism and partly in virtue of the current conception of all sacrifice, 3 could pass as the representative and incarnation of the God, and would at the same time serve for the typical sacramental meal, but no longer in a totemistic sense. 4
A certain difficulty arises as to the use of criminals for sacrificial purposes. As we have seen, the Khonds vetoed it, and rejected
even prisoners of war. In view of the nearly universal principle 1 among the higher races of antiquity that the sacrifice must be pure and without blemish, a criminal would seem to be the last man to suit the part; and among the Mesopotamian Semites a genuine and precious sacrament was anciently insisted on. 2 This appears to have been the idea underlying the common rule that the victim should be a male, which prevailed among the peoples of Nigeria in recent times as regards both men and animals. 3 Yet these tribes, as we have seen, sacrifice indifferently a female or a male slave to-day; 4 and of the practice at Benin it is told that "the people who were kept for sacrifice were bad men or men with bad sickness—they were all slaves"; and that a slave who committed a murder was put apart as a fit victim for the common good. 5 A woman again, was the usual sacrifice to the Rain-God; 6 and women slaves were among those sacrificed to save the city. 7 So among the Egyptians, even in our era, there was a usage of sacrificing a virgin annually to the Nile. 8 The idea of fitness, in short, could easily and spontaneously vary. 9 So, among the Greeks, virgins are typical victims for human sacrifice; and the Goddess known simply as Parthenos, sometimes associated with Athênê, and by Herodotus identified with Iphigeneia, 10 is probably but an abstraction from a once annual virgin-sacrifice. But it is found that in primitive communities the act of execution "constantly assumes sacrificial forms"; 11 and it is told of the Bataks of Sumatra that they ate their executed criminals, without any other resort to cannibalism, the relatives of the executed man being entitled to the best pieces, 12 The same is told of the people of Francis Island in the South Pacific: "Thieves were killed and their bodies eaten: only in such cases was there cannibalism." 13 In the case of the Bataks at least
there would seem to be a clear survival of an anthropophagous sacrament, as it can hardly he supposed that people not otherwise cannibalistic would desire to devour an executed relative for the sheer pleasure of eating human flesh. And the accepted explanation of Batak practice is one which chimes with all we know of the motives to theophagy. "The cannibalism so common in Sumatra derives in any case originally from the desire to obtain, through the means of the eaten flesh of a newly-slain man, the enrichment of one's own life-stock by his tondi" 1—that is, the many specific spirits which animate his limbs and organs. The Bataks of to-day hardly realise the motive, though their licit cannibalism is now limited to the eating of brave warriors wounded and taken captive, and of certain criminals, as aforesaid. 2 But with other primitives there is no discrimination. An old Chinese description of Tibet preserves record of a Tibetan practice of sending criminals of certain kinds to be eaten by a tribe of savages north of Burma. 3 The latter may have proceeded on the Batak principle; but of this there is no trace, they being ostensibly ready to eat anybody's exiles. Among the Manyema of Uganda, till the other day or even now, it has been the rule that the dead are always eaten by their kindred in the nearest village 4—a limitation which suggests modification of an original kin-eating by the example of cannibalism after warfare.
The view that the criminal was a proper sacrifice, in fact, might readily grow out of the circumstance that the earlier victims had been normally captives; 5 and this collocation of ideas we actually find in the custom of Dahome, where human sacrifice was so recently and so systematically practised. The annual victims, as distinguished from the holocaust at the death of a king, were commonly captives and criminals, these being normally the king's perquisite. 6 As the death holocaust proceeded on the assumption that the king must enter the Death-land well attended, so the annual sacrifices, which might number about thirty, were contributions of filial piety to that retinue. The time of sacrifice was accordingly the only time of capital punishment in the year. 7 Here the process of reasoning is
sufficiently transparent. If an enemy of the tribe from without could suffice, so, it might be argued, would an enemy of the tribal law from within, he being, besides, one of the king's or God's own people. And among the Aztecs, accordingly, we find the law decreeing that thieves who had stolen gold and silver—thieves par excellence, so to speak—were annually sacrificed with the regular victims to the God Xipe, patron of the goldsmiths. Like many other victims, they were flayed, and the priest wore their skins, thus figuring as the God in their persons. 1
We have, again, the record of Caesar that in the wholesale human sacrifices of the Gauls the offering up of those who had committed thefts or other crimes was considered "more grateful to the immortal Gods"; but that "when the supply of that species fell short, they descended to sacrifices of the innocent." 2 And there is reason to think, with M. de Belloguet, 3 that the peculiar sacrifices in question (in which numbers of men were burned alive in large simulacra) were derived from some early Carthaginian or other Phœnician cult. Needless to say, the simple recoil in more civilised periods from the idea of a wilful sacrifice of the innocent—a recoil clearly seen in Greek and Semitic legends—would encourage the resort for victims to the unfortunates under sentence of death.
Finally, we have the express statement of Porphyry that in the annual sacrifice of a man to the ancient Semitic deity Kronos at Rhodes, a prisoner condemned to death was selected and kept till the Kronian festival, when he was led outside the city gates and, having been given wine to drink, put to death. 4 Here we have at length a close parallel in the Mediterranean world to what we have seen reason to regard as a typical detail in the gospel mystery-play. 5 The Kronian victim at Rhodes we know cannot have been originally a criminal; and it is much more likely than not that he originally personated either the God Kronos, 6 or, as seems most probable, the "only-begotten son" Ieoud, whom in a Phœnician myth 7 Kronos is said to have sacrificed after dressing him in royal robes. To this clue we shall return after a further survey. In the meantime, we may take it as established (1) that the giving of a narcotic to the
victim—which we have seen practised among the Khonds, and which we find transferred in India and elsewhere to animal victims 1 who are presumably surrogates—derives from ancient usage; and (2) that the original purpose of the rite was not held to be defeated by the selection for sacrifice of a prisoner sentenced to death.
In a community where social duty was deeply impressed on all, as in medieval Japan, it was possible to secure every year a victim who practised ascetic abstinence, and was finally put to death on behalf of the community, 2 and this may well have been the early ideal. 3 As the Japanese human scapegoat, though of course no longer sacrificed, is even now called the "one-year god-master," and was anciently called "the abstainer," it is not difficult to conceive that this may have been one of the ways in which kingship grew up. 4 But in more sophisticated societies, as we know, the extremer obligations of the kingship were overridden, and victims must in most States have been hard to procure. 5 It is true that in primitive communities the fear of death seems surprisingly slight among doomed victims; 6 and the known readiness of Chinamen to sell themselves as substitutes for condemned criminals points the same moral. But none the less there has been an evolution of the faculty of apprehension. An intermediate stage is seen in the medieval State of Malabar, where condemned men volunteered to immolate themselves in honour of a God, giving themselves twelve wounds with as many knives, and thereby winning funeral honours. 7 The tendency in less rigorously drilled communities than Japan would be, first, towards a general unwillingness which had to be met by the bribe of a year's licence, and, later, to a state of things in which nobody would volunteer, and the victim must be either bred and bought, as among the Khonds, or taken from among the condemned criminals. These, however, would include persons condemned for impiety, who even for the Christians were explicitly anathemata, that is, objects "devoted" to the Gods. 8 The same title of anathema
was given to the sacred objects hung up or deposited in the temples and to the man denounced for impiety. 1 So that, even if the widespread usage of granting abnormal privileges to the victim, whether human or animal, 2 were originally a way of asserting his divinity, a criminal was not ineligible.
Thus, though it does not seem to be clearly proved that the victims put to death in the Thargelia festival at Athens were latterly criminals, 3 it is highly probable that they were. Early religion looked to the physical side of sacrifice; and if the criminal were whole, no question of his fitness would arise for more primitive worshippers, save where, as among the Khonds, the practice of purchase set up a special credence. 4 In one Greek sacrifice, indeed, that performed at Leucadia, an "ugly or deformed person" seems to have been chosen as the victim. 5 When, again, the developing religious consciousness became capable of shrinking from the anomaly of calling a criminal "sacred," there was, as we shall see later, a symbolical way out of the difficulty.
Symbolism, too, would further the modification of the sacrificial meal. Long before the more civilised peoples revolted from the act of human sacrifice, they would recoil, we must suppose, from the act of anthropophagy; and in regard to many rites of human sacrifice we find stories of substitution of animals and of waxen and other images and cakes by order of humane kings. 6 The Roman devices of the kind are well known, and their resort to images of straw is paralleled among the Gonds of India in our own time; 7 while the modern Malays offer dough models of human beings, called "the substitute," 8 and the Bataks of Sumatra employ a number of symbolic sacrifices of images of human beings, some made of bananas, some of wood—all plainly suggestive of a process of substitution for former human sacrifices. 9 The same process of substitution may be confidently inferred in the case of the rite practised in the Chinese
[paragraph continues] Spring Festival, held annually on the fourth of February. The chief magistrate of each department, crowned with flowers, is carried in a chair in procession, surrounded by figures representing mythological personages; and before him is carried a huge decorated figure of a buffalo, in terra-cotta, with gilded horns, behind which goes a child, with one foot shod and the other naked, who constantly beats the buffalo. Behind him march labourers carrying their agricultural implements; and the procession goes out (and returns) by the eastern gate of the town, "to meet the spring." When it is over, the buffalo is broken up, and the pieces, with a vast number of small buffalo figures carried in the interior of the figure, are distributed to all the people; whereafter the governor delivers a discourse in praise of agriculture. 1 What has historically taken place, doubtless, is first a substitution of a buffalo, as among the Khonds, for the original human victim, of whom the flower-crowned governor is a surviving trace. Later, Chinese thrift and mandarin policy substituted an image for the buffalo, adding a multitude of small figures of it for distribution with the pieces of the image, as was once done in the case of the living victim.
For the rest, the turn of mind which made myths out of the misunderstood survivals of totemism would have no difficulty in finding reasons for eating any given animal in the worship of any given God, whether or not the primordial sacrifice had been that of an animal. Thus the worshippers of Dionysos could feel they were commemorating the dismemberment of the God when they ate the raw flesh of a bull or a kid; other devotees ate a young dog; 2 and further symbolic modification easily followed, on lines common to many pagan cults.
130:3 L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation, 1902, Introd. i, pp. l-lx, lxxxvii.
130:4 Pausanias, ix, 8.
130:5 Pausanias, viii, 37; Nonnus, Dionysiaca, vi, 205; Arnobius, Adv. gentes, v, 19.
130:6 Arnobius, as cited; Firmicus Maternus, De errore profan. relig. vii. Lactantius, Div. Inst. i, 21; Clemens Alexandr. Protrept. ii; Plutarch, De Ei, ix; Isis and Osiris, xxxv. See the whole mythology collected by Dr. Frazer, G. B. ii, 160 sq.
130:7 Aelian, De nat. animal. xii, 34. Cp. Robertson Smith, Relig. of the Semites, p. 451; 2nd ed. p. 300.
130:8 Porphyry, De Abstinentia, ii, 55.
131:1 Pausanias, i, 24, 28; Porphyry, De Abstin. ii, 29-30.
131:2 See the argument of Dr. Frazer, G. B. ii, 294-5; and the remarks of MM. Hubert et Mauss, Essai sur le sacrifice, in L’Année Sociologique, 2e Année, 1899, pp. 68-69.
131:3 Herodotus, ii, 42.
131:4 Cp. Wilkinson's note in Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, p. 78; and Wiedemann, Rel. of the Anc. Egyptians, Eng. tr. pp. 104, 124-5. The identification, however, is not certain. Osiris was "the child" at Thebes (Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 84); and Horus has Heraklean features (Tiele, Egypt. Rel. p. 42). But Khonsu at Thebes was Khonsu-Ra, and at Komombo was compounded with Horus. Wiedemann, as cited.
131:5 Tertullian, Apol. c. 15. Cp. Robertson Smith, Relig. of the Semites, p. 353, citing K. O. Müller, as to the burning of an effigy of the God on the pyre. See also Frazer, G. B. iii, 171.
131:6 Lucian, Dea Syria, lv. Cp. Robertson Smith, Rel. of the Semites, p. 455.
131:7 See the story of Nilus as given by Prof. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 263, 320, 342 sq.
132:1 The argument of Robertson Smith to the contrary (p. 345) is quite inconclusive. That the human sacrifice was not eaten by Arabs in the fourth century is no proof that in more savage times it was not eaten by that as by other races.
132:2 Frazer, G. B. ii, 241, citing Punjab Notes and Queries, ii, 127 sq., § 721.
132:3 Above, p. 128; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, ii, 245-6. and ch. 13.
132:4 C. Partridge, Cross River Natives, being some Notes on the Primitive Pagans of Obubura Hill District, Southern Nigeria, 1905, p. 59.
133:1 Major A. Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, p. 161. Cp. p. 160 as to the wholesale sacrifices of the past. Major Leonard mistakenly ascribes the good treatment of the victim to fear of driving him to suicide or to escape. It is to be understood in the light of Khond and other practices.
133:2 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890 p. 154.
133:3 Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 390. There follows an account of one such carnival sacrament by Consul Hutchinson, who witnessed it at Bonny
133:4 J. Smith, Trade and Travels in the Gulph of Guinea, 1851, p. 82.
133:5 Mariner, Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. 1827, i, 172-3.
133:6 Herman Melville, Typee, ch. xxxii.
133:7 T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, pp. 43, 177.
133:8 W Ellis, Polynesian Researches, ed. 1831, iv, 317, 358-9; J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprise, ed. 1838, pp. 472-3-4.
133:9 Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 285.
133:10 Admiral Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, p. 135.
133:12 Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724. ii, 277-9.
133:13 For another case of ritual sacrifice and sacrament see Lafitau, pp. 295-304.
134:1 Cp. Prof. Joly, Man before Metals, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 341-351; Letourneau, Sociology, Eng. tr. B. iii, ch. 12; Spencer, Principles of Sociology. 3rd ed. i, 265; A. Réville, Prolégomènes, p. 183; .7. G. Müller, La Terre et l’Homme, p. 629; Maury, La Terre et l’Homme. 4e éd. pp. 751-2; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 5th ed. p. 177; Peschel, The Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 161-4; Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 78.
134:2 J. G. Müller, as cited, p. 632. "Cannibalism as it now exists among them [the Nigerians] is purely a religious relic." "It is evident that cannibalism not only had. but still has, a spiritual or sacrificial significance" (Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 324, 403). Mr. Basil Thomson pronounces no less emphatically, as to the cannibalism of the Fijians, that "the tabus and ceremonies surrounding it clearly indicate its religious origin," giving many details in support (The Fijians: A Study in the Decay of Custom, 1908, p. 104). Similarly Major Mockler-Ferryman (British West Africa, as cited, p. 390) pronounces that the religious psychic idea of cannibalism, as being ordained by the Gods, "is the primary cause of West African cannibalism, and very possibly the origin of it among anthropophagous peoples." Among the Sese Islanders of the Victoria Nyanza, again, there is a secret society, the Bachichi, whose object is to continue the custom of eating the dead (Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, p. 73; Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 692-3; Liberia, 1906, ii, 1059). See below, p. 136. The cannibal Papuans of New Guinea, it is noted, "would not.....commit cannibalism in the presence of a white man or a native woman" (A. E. Pratt, Two Years among the Cannibals of New Guinea, 1906, p. 224). The same observation applies to the Fijians (Thomson, as above cited). See W. Schneider, Die Naturvölker, 1885, i, 195-200, for the theory that religious cannibalism began as an imitation of the supposed practice of the Gods. Cp. Thomson, as cited, p. 103; Rev. R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 191; and Peschel, as cited, p. 164. Prof, Robertson Smith similarly argues that Arab sacrifices were neither gifts to the Gods nor—even in the sacrifice of first-born sons—offerings of what was most precious to the sacrificer, but offerings of the most sacred kind of victim, as the sacred blood of the species there flows purest and strongest (Rel. of Semites, 2nd ed. note E, p. 465). This squares to some extent with the view ascribed to Varro (in Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii, 19) that the Phœnicians and the Gauls offered human sacrifices quia omnium seminum optimum est genus humanum.
134:3 MM. Hubert et Mauss, in their valuable Essai sur le sacrifice (L’Année Sociologique, 2e Année, 1899), seem to argue that sanctity was in all cases wholly conferred on the victim by the ritual. This was certainly the rule, but there were exceptions, notably in the case of human victims. The essential point is that every victim had something divine (Id. p. 127).
134:4 Cp. Frazer, G. B. ii, 438-9, as to the sacrament of the sacred ram among the Kalmucks.
135:1 The Spartans seem to have made a partial exception. Plato, Alcib. ii. Cp. as to the later attitude, Athenæus, viii, 67; Malachi, i, 7, 8, 13.
135:2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 78; Tiele, Hist. comparée, p. 247; Smith, Relig. of the Semites, p. 343; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, i, 337-341.
135:3 H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, p. 70; Major Glyn Leonard, Tribes of Lower Nigeria, 1906, p. 200.
135:5 Ling Roth, p. 70.
135:6 Id. pp. 54. 71.
135:7 Id. App. p. x.
135:8 Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, ed. 1871, ii, 229-230.
135:9 Evidently the female victim was selected with some idea of furnishing a bride to the Propitiated deity. Cp. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, p. 179 sq.
135:10 Newton, Essays in Art and Archæology, 1880, pp. 435-6. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 373, as to Helena Dendrites.
135:11 Robertson Smith. Religion of the Semites. p. 351, note. Cp. Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii, 7; Dionys. Halicarn. ii, 30; K. O. Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. i, 354-5, and Ramsay, Rom. Antiq. 1851, p. 309. It seems clear that the barbaric mind regarded the executed criminal very much as it did the enemy in battle; and the "devoting" of captured enemies as sacrifices is anciently common to Hebrews, Teutons (above, § 4), American indigenes (below, Part IV, § 5), Romans (Livy, viii, 10), and Greeks (Diodorus Siculus, xi, 65). As to the connection of sacrifice with execution see also Dennett, Nigerian Studies, 1910, pp. 193-4.
135:12 Maury, La Terre et l’Homme, 4e édit. pp. 751-2.
135:13 Turner, Samoa, p. 300.
136:1 Warneck, Die Religion der Batak, 1909, p. 9. Cp. Rev. R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, 1870, pp. 352-3.
136:2 Maury assumes that all Batak criminals are or formerly were eaten: Warneck limits the usage to "certain criminals—for example, adulterers." The selection is explained by the tondi motive, adulterers being instances of excessive sexual energy.
136:3 Klaproth, Description du Tibet (tr. from Chinese), 1831, pp. 72, 273.
136:4 J. F. Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, p. 318.
136:5 Cp. in this connection the Rouen legend discussed by Dr. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 186-192.
136:6 Cp. A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 229.
136:7 Burton. A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 19-20, 22, 28. Similarly Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the British Expedition to the River Niger, 1848, i, 249, note that among the Ibus the human beings sacrificed "are mostly slaves or persons convicted of great offences," But these offences, it should be remembered, may be purely ceremonial.
137:1 Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. vi, § 30 (i, 297).
137:2 De Bello Gallico, vi, 16.
137:3 Ethnogénie Gauloise, Ptie iii, Le Génie Gaulois, 1868, pp. 190, 203.
137:4 De Abstinentia, ii, 54. Dr. Frazer (G. B. iii, 149) reads made him drunk with wine," which goes somewhat beyond the Greek, οἴνου ποτίσαντες; but some degree of stupefaction may be inferred.
137:5 In the Arab sacrifice described by Kilns, the sacrificers drank wine with the victim (Smith, p. 344, note), but this act may have had another significance.
137:6 So Dr. Frazer, G. B. iii, 149-150.
137:7 Preserved by Eusebius from Philo of Byblos, Præparatio Evangelica, iv, 16,
138:1 Crooke, Popular Relig. and Folklore of N. India, 1896, i, 173; Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, pp. 368-9 (case of turkey sacrifice in Central America).
138:2 Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, p. 166.
138:3 At Benin in 1825 Fawckner "saw a man who had given himself as a sacrifice to the fetish," and the sacrificial procession in his case was immense. For some time before, he had had the free run of the market-place, on the usual principle; and before being drowned he was made drunk (Ling Roth, Great Benin, 1903, p. 84). In India, again, Brahmans committing suicide from ascetic motives have been frequently deified in modern times (Crooke, The Religion and Folklore of Northern India, as cited, i, 193). This squares with the deification of Amilcar by the Carthaginians on the score that he had sacrificed himself for his country (Herod. vii, 167). In Nigeria a mother could be deified for sacrificing her son. Dennett, Nigerian Studies. 1910, p. 23.
138:4 Cp, the theory of Jevons, Introd. to Hist. of Relig., p. 275 sq.
138:5 Cp. Jevons, p. 280.
138:6 Cp. Ling Roth, Great Benin, pp. 43, 64, 65, 66, 74, 82, 84; and ch. xiv of B. Thomson's The Fijians, on "The Insouciance of Native Races."
138:7 Marco Pole, Voyages and Travels, iii, 20 (Morley's ed. p. 151).
138:8 1 Cor, xvi, 22,
139:1 Cp. C. T. Newton, Essays in Art and Archæology, 1880, p. 193; also index, s.v., Dedications.
139:2 Above, pp. 111, 114; below, pp. 154, 183; and Part IV, § 3, 5.
139:3 Cp. Frazer, G. B. iii, 125, and art. Thargelia in Smith's Dict. of Antiq. The victim "cast out" at Massilia in a similar rite is expressly described as a poor man who sold himself for a year's keep (Petronius ap. Serv. in Virg. Æn., iii, 57); and as poor men can be thus bought to undergo the death penalty in China to day, they may have been so purchaseable at Athens.
139:4 Another exception will be found noted below, Part II, ch. ii, § 15.
139:5 Frazer, as last cited. Cp. Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, ii, 225, as to the resort to criminals for human sacrifices.
139:6 Porphyry, De Abstin. ii, 55. Above, p. 60.
139:7 Crooke, Religion and Folklore of N. India, ii, 176. See also p. 167. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 208, note, and below, Pt. IV, § 6, as to Mexico; and Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, iv, 58, as to the making of an earthen figure of a woman for a propitiatory sacrifice by the Koyis.
139:8 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 72
139:9 Warneck, Die Religion der Batak, 1909, pp. 95-98, 125,
140:1 Pauthier, Chine Moderne, 2e partie, 1853, pp. 649-650.
140:2 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxix, 14. Cp. Robertson Smith, Rel. of Semites, p. 273. In a dog-sacrifice by hill tribes in India, the victim is first drugged with spirits and hemp, then killed with sticks and stones. So elsewhere with a buffalo. (Crooke, Relig. and Folklore of N. India, i, 173.) In such cases, as we have seen, there is a strong presumption that the animal is a surrogate for a human being. Cp. Dennett, Nigerian Studies, p. 124.