Pagan Christs, by John M. Robertson, [1911], at sacred-texts.com
Pagan Christs, by John M. Robertson, [1911], at sacred-texts.com
Rejecting, then, as not merely unwarranted but excluded by the evidence, Dr. Frazer's assumption of the historicity of the crucifixion, we have to note carefully the inferences which his research really warrants. When these are drawn it will be found that his notable hypothesis does not fall to the ground in its essentials. He has really added signally to his former great services by bringing together the evidences for the existence of a mock-kingly sacrifice among the Semites before the Christian era, and by skilfully elucidating the whole primitive psychology of such rituals. It needs only that his procedure be freed, on the principles of scientific mythology, from the difficulty set up by accepting one set of palpable myths as history. When criticism has done its worst against his manipulation of the Sacæa, Zakmuk, and Purim, it will be found that there remains clearly open the inference that certain details of the crucifixion myth are drawn from some old Semitic rite resembling the Sacæa, not by way of Purim in its Evemerised Jewish form, but in a simpler form, in which there was no Ishtar or Merodach. 1
Precisely because the practice of human sacrifice to the Vegetation-God was so nearly universal as Dr. Frazer has shown it to be, it is unnecessary to assume that the Jews owed their variant of it solely to a late contact with another nation. The Athenians had in their Thargelia, which like the Passover was a feast of first fruits, 2 a usage of human sacrifice which as we have seen corresponded at points with the Babylonian, inasmuch as the victims were maintained in potentially riotous ease, and were latterly chosen from the criminal class, though they cannot originally have been so. The sacrifice, indeed, does not seem to have belonged to the earlier worship of Apollo at all, 3 and the calling of the victims pharmakoi, "medicine-men," suggests an adaptation of a West-Asiatic usage, the more so as quasi-Semitic sacrifices were in use among the Eretrians and Magnesians. 4 In all likelihood this was the very sacrifice of purification said to have been prescribed to the plague-stricken Athenians
by the Cretan Epimenides, 1 when two youths voluntarily gave themselves as victims. 2 But if the Athenians could take such a rite from Crete or Asia Minor, there is reason to conclude that it was known in Palestine, in a simpler form than the Babylonian, before the exile. That there were such forms is to be inferred from both early and late evidence.
Firstly, we have the whole tradition of the Passover, with which, and not with Purim, the crucifixion myth comes chronologically in touch on the face of the case. Among the aspects of the gospel myth which the analogy of the Sacæa leaves untouched are (1) the mourning for the victim; (2) his alleged divinity and his titles of Son of God and Son of Man; (3) his participation in a sacramental meal in which his flesh is mystically eaten; (4) his execution along with two criminals; (5) his resurrection; (6) his subsequent status as Messiah or Christos. Now, the first three of those characteristics are as cognate with the paschal rite as they are alien to Purim; the fourth can be shown historically to connect with paschal usage; and the others develop naturally from the preceding. That there is no need to go to Purim for an actual killing or sacrificing of quasi-royal victims or malefactors in connection with a sacrificial festival appears from the legend of the hanging of seven king's sons "before the Lord," an event which happens according to the narrative at the barley harvest, that is, at the time of the Passover. 3
In the face of this familiar record it is obliviously asserted by Mr. Lang that "sacrificed victims are not hanged." 4 He has given thirteen cases of human sacrifice in which victims were not hanged, but has apparently not consulted his Bible. Now, the expressions "before the Lord" and "unto the Lord" mean sacrifice or nothing; 5 and that the hanging of Saul's sons was by way of propitiation is clear from the remark in the context that "after that, God was intreated for the land." 6 Further, hanging is the mode not only in the sacrificing of Saul's sons but in the offering up "unto the Lord"
of the heads of the people as described in Numbers xxv, 4. Equally sacrificial, in spirit and in occasion, though the usual formula is not applied to it, is the hanging of the five kings by Joshua in the pseudo-history; and in the case of his hanging of the king of Ai, where the procedure is exactly the same, it is explicitly told, in the Hebrew, that he "devoted" all the people of Ai, as he had done those of Jericho. 1 As Ai is an imaginary city, 2 we must conclude that the legend points to a customary rite. Finally, a comparison of a passage in Deuteronomy in which every hanged man is declared to be "the curse of God," 3 with the passages cited from the book of Joshua, proves that "the curse of God" meant "devoted to God," 4 since in the former the course prescribed is precisely that followed in the pseudo-history, namely, the taking down and burying of the victim within the day. Thus all hanged men were in ancient Jewry sacrifices to the Sun-God or the Rain-God, 5 and the Pauline epistle unconsciously clinches the point in citing the misunderstood text. 6 It may in fact be taken as historically certain that human sacrifice in this aspect was a recognised part of Hebrew religion down till the Exile. 7
And here, as at so many other points, we find a specific parallel between Hebrew usage and that of the natives of Africa. At the death of a Nigerian chief or notable, the slaves slain to "raise him up by the head and feet" are buried with him; and others are "hung in the different compartments of the house" and in the street or roadway; the heads of these being afterwards cut off and regarded as conveying luck. 8 Again, near a certain Long Juju shrine in Southern Nigeria, where human sacrifice was regularly practised until its capture by the British troops, it was noted that beside a minor temple at Ibum were "trees on which murderers and thieves used to be hanged." 9 That the hanging had a religious significance is proved by the fact that when the capture took place there was
found "the last sacrifice, a white goat, trussed up in the branches of a palm-tree and starving to death." 1 And it is expressly explained concerning the sacrifice of a woman to the Rain-God at Benin that "a woman was taken, a prayer made over her, and a message saluting the Rain-God put in her mouth; then she was clubbed to death and put up in the execution-tree" [St. Andrew's-cross-wise] "so that the rain might see." 2
Semitic usage is all that need be proved in the present connection; but it may be further noted (1) that animal victims were hanged to a tree in the cult of the Syrian Goddess in the second century of our era; 3 (2) that human victims were bound or hanged to trees in the sacrificial rites of the pre-Christian Mexicans; 4 (3) that human victims were frequently if not habitually hanged in sacrifice to Odin, 5 as well as to other Teutonic deities; 6 (4) that in certain cases of human sacrifice in Tahiti the slain victim was "suspended from the sacred tree"; 7 (5) that the devoted bodies of slain enemies were hanged on a tree by the Tongans; 8 (6) that among Obubura natives a lamb in a propitiatory sacrifice was "fastened into the topmost prong of a pole" and set up, with a palm branch on which was impaled a yam, at the entrance of the compound; 9 (7) that some of the northern Native Americans hanged dogs to poles with running knots "in honour of their divinities"; that the nomads similarly attached skins of wild beasts to trees; and that the Floridans elevated other offerings. 10 It is significant that among the early Odin-worshippers, as among Greeks and Semites, king's sons were sacrificed in substitution for their fathers; and that latterly slaves and criminals were substituted in such rites. 11 From the nature of the case, too, it is probable that the victim was hanged not by the neck but by the hands. 12 In some of the Scandinavian cases the victim was wounded with a javelin as well as hanged; and one myth specifies a hanging which lasted nine nights. 13 In any
case, hanging by the wrists was the normal mode of ancient "crucifixion" so-called. 1
But, further, it is clear that the Passover rite, of which the narrative in Exodus is a fictitious account, was originally one of sacrifice of firstlings, 2 including the first-born sons; and the conflicting laws on the subject prove that only with difficulty was the substitution of lambs for children carried out. 3 To this day, at least among continental Jews, 4 the principle of "redemption" is ritually recognised, in the festival ceremony of Pidyen Haben. A month after the birth of a first son, a friendly Cohen is selected to officiate, who sacerdotally asks certain questions of the mother, one being, "Is this child the first fruit of your womb?" If he be poor, he receives a small fee; 5 if not, the mother throws a small gold chain round his neck; and he in return, during certain prayers, puts it round the neck of the child, who is thus "redeemed." And that the first-born were at one time set apart as a victim-class, 6 liable either to be sacrificed or to be employed as hierodouloi, appears from the announcement of Yahweh in the priestly code: "I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the first-born......and the Levites shall be mine; for all the first-born are mine." 7
As regards the private continuance of the practice after the Levites had been set apart as a specific tribe, we can only inferentially trace the evolution. Certainly the priesthood did not of itself set up the movement against child sacrifice: such reforms always begin through rulers or lay reformers, never through the priestly organisation, save when a new cult supersedes an old. 8 Circumcision,
a rite of sacrifice with the same significance, 1 seems to have been introduced, or at least stressed, comparatively late, 2 for the same purpose; and as an official Yahwistic feast the Passover seems also late; 3 though the manner of its enactment in the first redaction of the law indicates that it was in some form already a standing practice. 4 It doubtless needed the late myths of Abraham and Isaac 5 and of the Exodus to persuade even Yahwists to drop the child sacrifice; and in the rival cults the practice seems to have been common. 6 It is in this connection that there presumptively occurred the usage first of breaking the victims’ limbs, and later of drugging them, to prevent the struggles which were usually held to make a sacrifice inauspicious; 7 and the manner in which the caveat against breaking the bones of the paschal lamb is introduced—an apparent interpolation made at the close of the original narrative of the exodus 8—indicates it to be either a late provision against a practice which definitely recalled the rite of human sacrifice, or a specific assertion of the principle that the victim must be without blemish, as against the practice of a human sacrifice in which the victim had to be either maimed or drugged in order to make him seem willing. But, as in the practice of the Khonds, so in that of the Jews, the principle that the victim must be "bought with a price" is visibly a later development, grafted on the other. Originally the victim is voluntary; this is his special sacrificial virtue. When the voluntary victim can no longer be procured, one "bought with a price," being the property of the sacrificers, is the next best thing; and in his case "willingness" is ostensibly secured by trick, bribe, or brutality. The underlying reasoning is of a piece.
We are faced again, however, by the difficult problem of the historic transmission of such usages. On the whole the evidence from anthropology goes far to support the thesis, otherwise well made out, of the Asiatic derivation of the Oceanic peoples. 9 In certain South Sea Islands in modern times, when the practices of
human sacrifice and cannibalism had latterly dwindled, 1 the first missionaries found in use forms of animal sacrifice which seem to affiliate at many points to the ritual we have seen in operation among Khonds and westerly Semites. Thus the pigs set apart for sacrifice 2 at certain temples, "when presented alive, received the sacred mark, and ranged the district at liberty; when slain, they were exceedingly anxious to avoid breaking a bone, or disfiguring the animal. One method of killing them was by holding the pig upright on its legs, placing a strong stick horizontally under its throat, and another across upon its neck, and then pressing them together until the animal was strangled." 3 Here we have (1) the common Asiatic and American usage of leaving the doomed victim for a time at liberty; 4 (2) the avoidance of bone-breaking, 5 as in the case of the paschal lamb; (3) the preservation of the cross-figure as seen in the Khond sacrifice; and (4) the evident imitation of human sacrifice in the posture of the victim. 6 Seeing, further, that only a portion of the pig thus sacrificed was eaten, and that only by "the priests and other sacred persons who were privileged to eat of the sacrifices," the remainder being left on the God's altar till it decomposed, we may fairly surmise that it was a surrogate for a sacrificed human being, formerly eaten as a sacrament in the Aztec fashion.
Among the natives of South Nigeria who practised human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism down till the beginning of the twentieth century, we again find the use of the cross-figure. The victims sacrificed for rain were stretched on a rude scaffolding in the form of the St. Andrew's cross; and goats, as we have seen, were similarly "trussed." "Crucifixion" of a kind, as we have seen, was practised at Benin: and the term is frequently used by eye-witnesses in describing the treatment of victims." 7 The usual form of sacrifice," says Gallwey, "is crucifixion." 8 Yet again, some of the women-slaves sacrificed, at the approach of the punitive expedition
to Benin, had the "abdominal wall cut in the form of a cross." There are traces, too, of leg-breaking, one goat being found by the punitive expedition at Benin with its legs broken, as a native explained, "to prevent white man coming"; 1 and Burton tells of a victim whose legs "had been broken at mid-shin with awful violence." 2 He also records that "a slave bound for the other world is always plied with a bottle of rum before the fatal cord is made fast." 3 In Uganda the usage of limb-breaking is found to have been common. The God Kitimba or Kitinda of Damba and elsewhere was represented by a crocodile, his "priest," and to appease him men were sacrificed to the crocodiles in the lake. The victim was taken to the brink, "where his knees and elbows were broken, so that he could not crawl away," 4 whereafter the crocodiles came and devoured him. 5 Here the primary motive is unusually clear; and it is noted that in the case of the victims thrown alive into the pit-grave of the chief among some tribes there is no limb-breaking, they being unable to escape. 6 It is not impossible that limb-breaking originated in this simple fashion, and later became a ritual usage with an ethical connotation. But among the Manyema of the same African region, on the other hand, we find that at the burial of a chief ten women victims had their legs and arms broken at the knees and elbows and were thrown into the grave; the king's dead body, wrapped in bark-cloth, was laid upon theirs; and then ten men victims were similarly treated, and their bodies laid over the king's. 7 Thus the idea of simulated "willingness" cannot be confidently excluded from even the most primitive phenomena. The main reason for doubt is the fact that in ordinary burial the limbs of the dead are by the same peoples broken at the elbows and knees to admit of their being placed in the sitting posture 8—a practice which, however, is ascribed to certain of the North American Indian tribes 9 without any mention of limb-breaking being resorted to. And in the sacrifices of slaves at the death of chiefs, as practised
in the Sandwich Islands when they were visited by Captain Cook, the victims were clubbed suddenly, having "not the most distant intimation of their fate." 1 Here the exclusion of willingness is so complete that we are led to infer a late and, so to speak, debased form of the rite.
Yet again, there is a solitary testimony that in the human sacrifices offered by the Algonkins at the beginning of the hunting season it was a rule that not a bone of the victim must be broken. 2 Seeing that other Native Americans observed the principle of the Semites, that at the sacrificial feast the victim "must be all eaten, and nothing left," 3 there would thus seem to be not merely an ancient racial affinity between the aborigines of America and some race or races of Asia, but a direct heredity in the matter of special primitive rites. But even if we waive the latter presumption, we can infer the probable line of movement all round in the matter of the usages under notice. As thus:—
1. Originally a "willing" victim is desiderated; and willingness is secured by the bribe of a period of ease and licence.
2. This kind of victim becoming hard to procure, one "bought with a price" was substituted, as representing a voluntary offering by his owner or owners.
3. Still seeking the semblance of a "willing" sacrifice, the sacrificers first broke the limbs of the human victim.
4. Feeling (on some reformer's urging) that such a mangled victim was an unseemly sacrifice, they resorted to narcotics.
5. At a higher stage of social evolution, recoiling from the sacrifice of an innocent victim, men fall back upon condemned criminals, and these in turn are stupefied, from humane or other motives.
6. Being next persuaded that the stupefied victim was either an unseemly or an inefficacious because non-suffering sacrifice, or being on other grounds inclined to abandon human sacrifice, they substituted the old sacrifice of an animal, giving it in certain cases human attributes, and in others some of the privileges formerly accorded to the taboo human victim. In the case of the animal it was not as a rule felt necessary either to break bones or to use narcotics, though either plan might be used. But reformers would stress the avoidance of bone-breaking by way of showing the
superiority of the new sacrifice; hence the need for a veto on imitations of the old practice. 1
Such an evolution might conceivably take place independently in different communities. It is true indeed that in the redemptory sacrifices offered by modern Semites for boys, care is taken not to break a bone, "because they fear that if a bone of the sacrifice should be broken, the child's bones would be broken too"; 2 but that appears to be a theory framed subsequent to and not antecedent to a reform.
It is of the nature of such reforms, however, to be introduced with difficulty and to be rebelled against and reverted from; and even without the above-cited evidence of a slowly-wrought transformation in Hebrew usage, it is certain, from the whole drift of religious history, that the practice of child-slaying, which was systematically legislated against only after the exile, would be revived in times of trouble by Jews, as we know it to have been by Carthaginians. It is through reversions of this kind to old and terrible rites, then, that we must suppose the ancient mode of sacrifice to have been kept in men's knowledge. Such a doctrine rested on the most obvious and therefore the most fully developed side of the conception of sacrifice—the offering to the God of a peculiarly precious gift, representing a maximum of self-deprivation in the sacrificers.
Meanwhile, though it is not certain that the mode of "hanging before the Lord" by the wrists ever placed the victim in the form of a cross, as has been done in our own time at Benin, it would appear that the rite of the Passover was closely associated with the cross sign. 3 That is the "mark" specified in Ezekiel 4 for the saving of the elect from a general massacre; and the blood mark placed on the doorposts and lintels at the Passover 5 is inferentially the same, 6 as is the "seal" on the foreheads of the saved in the Apocalypse. To this day, the Arabs make the tau-mark with sacrificial blood on at least one Moslem shrine. 7 In any case, the pre-Christian use of the
[paragraph continues] Cross as a symbol of the Sun-God and as a sign of "immortal life" is undisputed, and we shall see reason to infer that the form of slaying represented in the Christian crucifix—which does not appear in Christian art till about the seventh century 1—was conceived from certain rites in which the initiate extended his arms upon a tree or cross, 2 probably in reminiscence of some such mode of treating the sacrificed victim as we have seen described in the case of the Khonds.
148:1 Much of Mr. Lang's criticism of Dr. Frazer's theory turns on the fact that it seeks to combine a great many disparate sacrificial motives. This is not absolutely an effective objection, inasmuch as religion is full of inconsistencies; but Dr. Frazer imputes too much power of combination to a given cult. Popular sacrifice must clearly subsist on a simple basis. And there may have been forced changes, as the Sacæa is said by Strabo to as have name of a Persian Goddess (Strabo, xi, 8, § 5). Cp. Selden, De Diis Syris, ed. 1680, pp. 269-270.
148:2 Preller, Griech. Mythol. 2nd ed. i, 202, note; Frazer, iii, 127, and refs.; Meyer. Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, § 74.
148:3 K. F. Hermann, Gottesdienst. Alterth. § 60; Culturgesch. der Griechen and Römer. 1857, i. 54.
148:4 Plutarch, De Pyth. Orac. xvi.
149:1 Diogenes Laërtius, i, 110 (I, x, 4); Athenæus, xiii, 78.
149:2 As no mention is made either of any later voluntary sacrifice or of any selection of innocent victims, the inference seems clear that they were latterly bought, or condemned criminals." See above, p. 138.
149:3 Cp. 2 Sam. xxi, 6-9, with Deut. xvi, 9; Lev. xxiii, 10-14; and see Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 398. Cp. Ghillany, p. 544, and Tract Sanhedrin, f. 89, 1, there cited, as to the custom of executing criminals during the festival. The barley harvest, it should be noted, began in the Jericho plain and Jordan valley at passover time, and became general in the uplands in the next month, wheat ripening later. In Egypt the harvests are still earlier, flax and barley being harvested in March, and wheat in April. Mr. Lang (Magic and Religion, p. 116-117) has overlooked the fact that a feast could thus be at once a harvest feast and "vernal." The Thargelia in May was in similar case.
149:4 Magic and Religion, pp. 131, 132, 174.
149:5 Cp. the admission of the Rev. Edward Day, The Social Life of the Hebrews, New York, 1900, p. 213; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, f, 391-2.
149:6 2 Sam. xxi, 14. In the same way the stoning and burning of Achan and his family and cattle is clearly a sacrificial act. Josh. vii, 24-26.
150:1 Josh. viii, 24-29; x, 15-26.
150:2 Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 110.
150:3 Deut. xxi, 23, margin.
150:4 The double meaning is found also in the Greek term anathema = devoted, and accursed.
150:5 Cp. Robertson Smith, Rel. of the Semites, p. 264, as to the principle that the sacrifice should be seen only by the God or planet propitiated. In the old sacrifices to the sun among the Samoans, "the body was laid out on a pandanus tree, and there the sun devoured it." Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 201. On p. 342 (2nd ed. p. 3611 Smith argues that early executions for infamous crimes were not sacrifices; but as already noted he says later (p. 351, note) that all executions became sacrificial.
150:6 Gal. iii, 13.
150:7 Cp. Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer, 1842; Daumer, Der Feuer and Molochdienst der alten Hebräer, 1842, passim; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, i, 381-416; Dar. The Social Life of the Hebrews, 1901, p. 212. A selection from the epithets bestowed upon Ghillany, who first laid stress on the facts, will be found in Kalisch (i, 404-5, note), who zealously balances between avowal and repudiation.
150:8 Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 444-5.
150:9 C. Partridge, Cross River Natives, 1905, p. 60.
151:1 Id. p. 55. "Everything which is sacrificed, such as cattle, goats, fowls, &c., must be white." Id. p. 56. Cp. A. B. Ellis. Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 85.
151:2 H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, 1903, p. 71. See the photographs reproduced on the cover and at pp. 52, 54; and compare the frontispiece of Burton's Mission to Gelele, where some victims are crucified head downwards, in the St. Andrew mode. The St. Andrew-cross Position, again, is found in the tortures of the Native Americans. Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, ii, 261, 292.
151:3 Lucian, De Dea Syria, xlix.
151:4 See below, Part IV, § 8.
151:5 See H. M. Chadwick, The Cult of Othin, 1899, pp. 15-20, 32, 37, 53, 73-74.
151:7 W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. ii, 129.
151:8 Mariner, Tonga Islands, ed. 1827, i, 272.
151:9 Partridge, Cross River Natives, 1905, p. 296.
151:10 Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, i, 180.
151:11 Chadwick, p. 27. The Teutons also "devoted" whole armies of their enemies to the God.
151:12 Tal. Jer. Sanhedrin, Schwab's French tr. ch. vi, 7 (9), vol. x, p. 282; Tal. Bab. fol. 46, col. 1, Eng. tr. by Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, p. 436, n. 6.
151:13 This has been regarded as an echo of Christian doctrine. But even if it were, the fact of sacrificial hanging would remain certain.
152:1 See H. Fulda, Das Kreuz and die Kreuzigung, Breslau, 1878, §§ 34-36 and Tab. 1; and cp. Ghillany, as cited. pp. 531-2. note.
152:2 Cp. Robertson Smith, Relig. of the Semites, p. 445; Wellhausen, as there cited; and Ghillany. pp. 518-552.
152:3 Compare Ex. xiii, 2; xxii, 29; xxxiv, 20; Lev. xxvii, 28, 29; Num. xviii, 15; Micah vi, 7. Mr. Lang (Magic and Religion, p. 53) will not admit that any people ever practised such a yearly massacre of first-born children as Dr. Frazer infers. But Mr. Lang pays no heed to the conflicting laws here specified, some of which insist on the "devoting" of all first-born males, human as well as animals, while the others prescribe that the human males shall be "redeemed." Both sets of laws are utterly inexplicable save on the theory of an original practice of child-sacrifice. Cp. the admissions of A. Réville, Prolégomènes, p. 185; and Kuenen, ii, 30, 90-94. As to child-sacrifice in other races, see Dennett, Nigerian Studies, p. 70; Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 277; J. M. R., Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 209-10; and below, Pt. iv, §§ 3, 4, 5.
152:4 A number keep up the practice after coming to England. Cp. J. Low, Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur, 1875, pp. 110-118, cited by Frazer, G. B. ii, 50.
152:5 Generally 15s., I am privately informed.
152:6 It is noteworthy that among the Tahitians, when a victim was taken from any family, the rest were held to be "devoted"—a conception partly analogous to that of the Khonds. J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 1837, p. 554. Cp. W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 347. The same principle was noted among the Native Americans (Lafitau, ii, 307). In Mangaia there was a series of tribes "devoted to furnish human sacrifices" (Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, pp. 24, 36-38, 290, 300, 302). And the story of the Messenian and Achæan sacrifices in Pausanias (iv, 9) and Herodotus (vii, 197) specify a particular family which must supply the victim.
152:7 Num. iii, 12. There are, however, some grounds for supposing that the first Levites were members of a conquered race.
152:8 See above, p. 60, and below, Part IV, § 5.
153:1 The assertion of Kalisch (Comm. on Levit., i, 409) that circumcision "bore nowhere the remotest relation to human sacrifices" is mere declamation. No other explanation of the rite is valid.
153:2 Gen. xvii is part of the late priestly code. E. J. Fripp, Composition of the Book of Genesis, 1893, p. 164.
153:3 2 Kings xxiii, 23.
153:4 Deut. xvi, 2.
153:5 Gen. xxii, 1-13.
153:6 Cp. 2 Kings xvi, 3; 2 Chron. xxviii, 3; Ps. cvi, 37, 38.
153:7 The Greek and Roman device of putting barley or water in the ear of the sacrificial ox at the altar, to make him bow his head as if signifying willingness to be slain, is found to be closely paralleled in recent times in the sacrifices of the Aryan Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, who were particularly solicitous on the point. So also the Hindu Thugs. See Sir G. S. Robertson's Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, p. 423.
153:8 Ex. xii, 42-51. The clause in v. 46 may even be an addition to the interpolation.
153:9 See the Rev. D. Macdonald's Asiatic Origin of the Oceanic Languages, Luzac and Co. 1894; and Oceania: Linguistic and Anthropological, 1889, pp. 15, 17, 19, etc.; and Keane, Ethnology. 1909, p. 288. Cp. the Nubische Grammatik of Lepsius, 1880, for the thesis that the Egyptian, Libyan, and Kushitic languages are of Asiatic origin.
154:1 W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 357.
154:2 Dr. Jevons argues (p. 161) that human sacrifice arose in Polynesia because of lack of domestic animals, there being only pigs and rats. But the pigs could have sufficed in early times as well as late; and the negroes of Africa have freely offered both kinds. And why did not Australians, lacking domestic animals, set up or continue human sacrifices 2 Because men were scarce, probably.
154:3 W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 345.
154:4 Above, pp. 111-114; below, § 13; and Part IV, §§ 3, 5.
154:5 In the Tonga Islands, the occasional child-sacrifices were also by strangulation. (Mariner's Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. i, 190, 300). See also Ellis, iv, 151, as to other cases of avoidance of mangling; and cp. Moerenhaut, Voyage aux Iles du Grand Ocean, 1837, i, 508.
154:6 Long pig, it will be remembered, was a name among Polynesian cannibals for their human victims.
154:7 H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, 1903, pp. 51, 54, 64, 66, 69, 86, 173; and App. p. ix. Cp. Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, p. 73, as to cases of crucifixion noted by him.
154:8 Id. p. 66.
155:1 H. Ling Roth, Great Benin, 1903, pp. 52, 54, 64, 68, 69, 161; and App. x. Cp. citation from Commander Bacon, p. 175, as to the "crucifixion tree."
155:2 Id. p. 65.
155:3 Again: "The African rarely......sacrifices men without stupefying them with drink or drugs." Roth notes that "the descriptions of human sacrifices given by Landolphe and Beauvais do not leave the impression that the victims were intoxicated before being killed" (p. 64, note). At Benin, as elsewhere, the drugging was apparently a late device. Latterly it was common. Id. p. 84.
155:4 J. F. Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, pp. 88-89. Cp. pp. 188, 217-218, 318. Sometimes 200 or 300 men were sacrificed at a time. On the occasion of the finishing of a king's palace, as many as 700 were at times slaughtered to the leopard-demon.
155:5 In this connection it is significant that in the time of Herodotus anyone seized and killed by a crocodile was treated as a divine victim, and buried with special reverence as something more than human" (ii, 90)—evidently a survival from the ancient rite of human sacrifice.
155:6 Cunningham, p. 56.
155:7 Id. p. 318.
155:8 Id. p. 10.
155:9 Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 340.
156:1 Cook's Voyages to the Pacific, iii (by King), 162.
156:2 Tanner's Narrative, cited by Lubbock, Origin of Civ. 5th ed. p. 367.
156:3 Lubbock, last cit. quoting Schoolcraft. Cp. H. Youle Hind, Explorations in the Labrador Peninsula, 1863, ii, 17-18.
157:1 What looks like a reminiscence of the old sacrificial practice is described by W. Ellis (i, 310) as occurring after battles, when the legs and arms of the dead bodies of defeated warriors were broken and the bodies hung by the neck, and moved up and down "for the amusement of the spectators."
157:2 Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, 1902, pp. 177-8.
157:3 There is a passage in Justin Martyr (Dial. with Trypho, xl) which seems to assert that the paschal lamb was "roasted and dressed in the form of the cross"; whence it would follow that the original human victim had been crucified, or bound somewhat in the manner of the Khond sacrifice. It is not known, however, whether roasted lambs in general may not have been dressed in the same fashion.
157:4 Ezek. ix, 4, 6. Cp. Heb. and Varior. Bible.
157:5 Exod. xii, 7, 13, 29.
157:6 Cp. Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng. tr. i. 371, note, where also is noted the tradition that the "two sticks" of the widow of Zarepta were a cross. The prophet's miracle implies the same figure (1 Kings, xvii, 12, 22).
157:7 Curtiss, as cited, pp. 192-3. Different forms of the cross are made by Hindus on the p. 158 shrines of Ganesa. See the photograph in Crooke's Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, ed. 1896, i, 105, 110.
158:1 Rev. St. John Tyrwhitt, Art Teaching of the Primitive Church, S. P. C. K., pp. 232, 234.
158:2 See below. § 15.