ANDREW LANG (continued 2)

To please and surprise the whites the natives concealed their adaptations of Christian ideas in the mysteries, to which white men are very seldom, or were very seldom, admitted! Is this likely? I believe that the exclusive rule is now relaxed where the natives are practically paid to exhibit.[14] One Bora was under European patronage, and the old men and children were fed on European supplies. But when Mr. Howitt was initiated by the Kurnai, and so first learned the secret of their religion,' the old men.... desired to be satisfied that I had in very deed been fully initiated by the Brajerak black fellows in their Kuringal.' He therefore retired to a lonely spot, 'far from the possibility of a woman's presence,' and exhibited the token of his previous initiation by the Murrings. Hitherto 'long as the Kurnai had known me, these special secrets of the tribe had been kept carefully from me by all but two,' one of whom was now dead. The inmost secret was the belief in Mungan-ngaur, 'the Great Father of the tribe, who was once on earth, and now lives in the sky, [he] is rather the beneficent father, and the kindly though severe headman of the whole tribe, than the malevolent wizard, such as are other of the supernatural beings believed in by the Australian blacks.'[15]

Mr. Frazer cites Mr. Howitt thus: 'Some tribes in this south-eastern region are further reported to believe in a supreme spirit, who is regarded sometimes as a benevolent but more frequently as a malevolent being.'[16] What has become of Mr. Howitt's evidence after initiation by the Kurnai, evidence published in 1885? How can the blacks invent beliefs to please the whites when they only reveal them to Mr. Howitt, after he has produced a bull roarer as a token of initiation? Mr. Frazer then writes: 'Brewin, the supreme being of the Kurnai, was at first identified by two intelligent members of the tribe with Jesus Christ, but on further reflection they thought he must be the devil.' This is cited from a work of 1881, Messrs. Fison and Howitt's 'Kamilaroi and Kurnai' (p. 255). It must have escaped even Mr. Frazer's erudition that Mr. Howitt says: 'When I wrote of Brewin in my paper on "Some Australian Beliefs" I was not aware of the doctrines as to Mungan-ngaur. These the Kurnai carefully concealed from me until I learned them at the Jeraeil, or mysteries.'[17]

Had Mr. Frazer observed this remark of Mr. Howitt's, he could not have cited, without comment or correction, Mr. Howitt's earlier and confessedly erroneous opinion that 'Brewin' is 'the supreme being of the Kurnai.'[18] To Mr. Howitt's correction in 1885 of his mistake of 1881 Mr. Frazer, as far as I observe, makes no allusion.

Mr. Frazer must either have overlooked all the evidence for an Australian belief ruinous to his theory of the origin of religion (ruinous if Australia represents the earliest known stages of religion), or he must have reasons, not produced, for thinking all that evidence too worthless to deserve confutation or even mention. We are anxious to know his reasons, for, on other matters, he freely quotes our witnesses. Yet I cannot think Mr. Frazer consistently so severe as to Australian evidence. He has a picturesque theory that the origin of the Passover was a rite in which masked men ran about through Hebrew towns in the night, butchering all the first born of Israel.[19] No people, we exclaim, ever did such a thing! In proof of the existence of the custom Mr. Frazer adduces an Australian parallel: 'In some tribes of New South Wales the first-born child of every woman was eaten by the tribe as part of a religious ceremony.'[20] Mr. Frazer's authority is a communication by Mr. John Moore Davis, and was published in 1878, twenty-three years ago, by Mr. Brough Smyth. Here is what Mr. Davis says: 'In parts of N. S. W., such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan, or Macquarie, it was customary long ago for the first-born of every lubra to be eaten by the tribe, as part of a religious ceremony, and I recollect a black fellow who had, in compliance with the custom, been thrown when an infant on the fire, but was rescued and brought up by some stock-keepers who happened accidentally to be passing at the time. The marks of the burns were distinctly visible on the man when I saw him....'

The evidence is what the Society for Psychical Research calls 'remote.' In 1878 the event was already 'long ago.' The testimony is from we know not how remote a hand. The black sufferer, as a baby at the time, could not remember the facts. The stock-keepers who were present are not named, nor do we even know whether Mr. Davis was informed by them, or heard their story at third or fourth hand. We do not know whether they correctly interpreted the alleged sacrifice, in a religious ceremony (by a people said to be almost or quite irreligious), of all the first-born children of women. Mr. Frazer has circulated inquiries as to Australian customs, and has published the results in the 'Journal of the Anthropological Institute.'[21] He does not appeal to the answers in corroboration of Mr. Davis's remarkable story.[22]

Imbued with the superstition of psychical research, I once investigated the famous Australian tale of Fisher's ghost (1826). I sent for the Court archives (the ghost led to a trial for murder), and I received these and a contemporary plan of the scene of the murder and the apparition. These documents left me doubtful about the ghost of Fisher.[23] May I not say that similar researches and good corroborative evidence are needed before we accept a settler's tale of an Australian sacrifice, 'long ago,' as confirming a theory of a Hebrew yearly massacre of all the first-born? Moreover, if Mr. Moore's evidence is good as to a sacrifice, why is the latest evidence of Mr. Howitt and all my other witnesses as to Australian religion not worth mentioning? Why is it so bad that Mr. Frazer goes back to Mr. Howitt's evidence of 1881, before he knew the secret, and is silent about Mr. Howitt's evidence of 1885?

We may quote Sir Alfred Lyall: 'One effect of the accumulation of materials has been to encourage speculative generalisations, because it has provided a repertory out of which one may make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any theory.' Has Mr. Frazer escaped this error?

I cannot think that he has escaped, and the error is fatal. He cites Mr. Howitt, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Oldfield, Mr. Dawson, and Mr. Cameron (whom I am about to quote), all of whom speak to a native religion of the kind for which I contend. Their witness is enough for him in other matters, but as to this matter these witnesses, for some reason, are absolutely ignored. I myself have omitted the affirmative evidence of Mr. Oldfield and Mr. Foelsche as to religion, because I think it contaminated, although in part corroborated. But my witnesses, all cited for other points by Mr. Frazer, are not even mentioned on the point where, if their reports be correct, they seem rather to invalidate his central theory—that religion was invented in the despair of magic.

As to that despair, it does not exist. The religions of Babylon, Greece, and Egypt lived side by side with superabundant magic. The Australians, when their magic fails, merely say that some other black fellow is working stronger counter-magic.[24]

However, that is a different question. The question at present is, Why does Mr. Frazer not cite and confute the evidence of witnesses, whom he quotes on other points, evidence fatal to his theory? Why does he ignore it? Among so many witnesses, distrustful of facts that surprise them, anxious to explain by borrowing, all cannot be biassed. If they were, why is not the testimony of witnesses with the opposite bias also discredited or ignored? Why is it welcomed? Mr. Frazer prefers the opinion of Mr. Siebert, a German missionary, that the Dieri propitiate ancestral spirits, to the opinion of Mr. Gason, that the being of their belief is a good spirit who made them. I do not know which of these gentlemen is right; possibly both views are held by different native informants. But Mr. Siebert's ancestral spirits come through Mr. Fison, who says: 'The more I learn about savage tribes, the more I am convinced that among them ancestors grow into Gods '—so natural a process where the names of the dead are tabooed!

'Oh no, we never mention them, Their names are never heard.'

So they grow into gods! Mr. Fison is a Spencerian; so, for all that I know, may Mr. Siebert be. If so, both have a theory and a bias, yet they are cited. It is only witnesses who hold that the Australians, certainly not, as a rule, ancestor worshippers, believe in a kind of god, who are not deemed worthy of mention on this point, though quite trustworthy on other points.

I cannot understand this method. The historian has a theory. He searches for contradictory facts. The chemist or biologist does not fail to mention facts hostile to his theory.

We are not asking Mr. Frazer to accept the testimony of Mr. Howitt, Mr. Cameron, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Greenway, Mr. Gason, Mr. Hale, Archdeacon Günther, the Benedictines of Nursia, Mr. Dawson, Mr. Eyre, Mr. Roth, Mrs. Langloh Parker; or to accept the opinion of Waitz, Mr. Howitt, and others as to unborrowed Australian religion. Their testimony may be erroneous; when it is proved erroneous I shall abandon it. But perhaps anthropologists may be allowed to be curious as to the reasons for which this and similar testimony is ignored. The reason cannot be that there is contradictory evidence, for some observers deny magic to the tribes whom they know.[25] Yet Mr. Frazer has no doubt as to the prevalence of magic, though one of his witnesses, Mr. Foelsche, gives no magic, but gives religion. 'Whether viewed as gods or devils,' Mr. Frazer says of South-East Australian beings, 'it does not seem that these spirits were ever worshipped.' He has ignored the evidence that they are worshipped (if the rights of the Bora are worship), but, if they are not worshipped, so much the worse for his theory. Gods, in his theory, were invented just to be worshipped. 'To these mighty beings.... man now addressed himself.... beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things....'[26]

As against the correctness of my witnesses I only know the mass of evidence by white observers who have detected no religion among these savages. But I do not necessarily accept the negative evidence, because the beliefs are reported, by the affirmative witnesses, to be guarded with the utmost secrecy.[27] It is not every inquirer who has the power of eliciting beliefs which, for many reasons, are jealously guarded. Many Englishmen or Lowlanders are unable to extract legends of fairies, ghosts, and second-sight from Gaelic Highlanders. On the other hand, they are kind enough to communicate to me plenty of their folk-lore. 'The Urkus were very shy and frightened when asked about their religion,' says Mr. Pope Hennessy in his 'Notes on the Jukos and other Tribes of the Middle Benæ' (1898).[28]

Thus I prefer the affirmative evidence of Europeans who have won the confidence of the Australians, and have been initiated, to the denials of observers less fortunate. As for their theory that the religious practices, if they exist, are borrowed from Christians, I have stated my case in the preceding essay. There could be no stronger evidence than the absence of prayer that the Australian religion is not borrowed.

This argument ought especially to appeal to Mr. Frazer. His definition of religion is that of Euthyphro, in the Platonic Dialogue of that name.

Socrates. Sacrificing is giving to the Gods, and piety is asking from them?

Euthyphro. Yes, Socrates.

Socrates. Upon this view, then, piety is a science of asking and giving?

Euthyphro. You understand me capitally, Socrates.

Mr. Frazer agrees with Euthyphro. But if we find that the most backward race known to us believes in a power, yet propitiates him neither by prayer nor sacrifice, and if we find, as we do, that in many more advanced races in Africa and America it is precisely the highest power which is left impropriated, then we really cannot argue that gods were first invented as powers who could give good things, on receipt of other good things, sacrifice and prayer.

Sir Alfred Lyall here agrees with Mr. Frazer. 'The foundation of natural religion is.... the principle of Do ut des' ('I give that you may give'), 'and the most ingenious researches into the evolution of primitive ideas will hardly take us beyond or behind it.'[29] My 'researches' do not pretend to be I ingenious.' It is a mere question of facts. Have Mr. Howitt's tribes the idea of a power, a very great power, which is interested in conduct, sanctions conduct, but is not asked for material benefits? Have, or had, all the American and African peoples whom I have cited a highest power often unconciliated? If so, why did they invent these beings? Certainly not to play with them at the game of Do ut des. Yet that game was the origin of religion, according to Sir Alfred and Mr. Frazer. The facts must be mentioned, must be disproved, before the theory of Do ut des can be established.

Even if we accepted the theory of Euthyphro and of Mr. Frazer it is beset by difficulties. Religion is the despair of magic, says the theory. Magic is found by the higher minds to be a failure. Rain is not produced, nor sunshine, nor food, as a result of magic. Consequently invisible powers, 'like himself, but far stronger,' are invented by man. They are immortal, and are asked to take man's immortal spirit home to them.[30] Yet they are mortal themselves.[31] They are so dependent on man, these beings which are far stronger, that man actually has to sacrifice his kings to them annually to keep these far stronger beings in vigour.[32] I am willing to suppose, with Mr. Frazer, a very gradual process of evolution in religious thought. Man began by thinking his own magic all powerful. He found that a failure, 'and came to rest, as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and practice.... a substitute, however precarious, for that' (magical) 'sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated.' To be sure he had not abdicated, Greek and Babylonic magic are especially notorious. But let us fancy that man at large but gradually reached the conception of powers far higher than himself. They were very limited powers at first: they helped him, but he had to help them, to the extent, sometimes, of killing his kings annually to keep them in health. This is Mr. Frazer's position.[33] But if our Australian evidence is correct, this theory is baseless. That is why our evidence cannot be neglected.

It is another difficulty that the more man ought to be finding out the fallacy of magic, the less does he find it out. Mr. Frazer chooses the Arunta of Central Australia as a people wholly without religion, but universally magicians. I have frequently read the account of Arunta magic by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, but I never found that it included a belief like this: 'A man god.... draws his extraordinary power from a certain sympathy with nature.' He is defined not as an incarnation of a god 'of an order different from and superior to man,' but as only a superior sorcerer where most men are sorcerers. 'He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit.' We have just been told that he is not the receptacle of a divine spirit at all, and we shall take it to be so. 'His whole being, body and soul, is so attuned to the harmony of the world, that a touch of his hand or a turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through the universal framework of things.[34]....'

But you will look in vain for this portentous belief among the Arunta, who, not having found out the fallacy of magic, have not invented beings superior to man. For this sorcerer of the very highest magic you have to go to the civilisation of Japan, or to the peoples on the Congo, much more civilised than the Arunta.[35]These peoples, by Mr. Frazer's theory, had experience and intelligence enough to find out the fallacy of magic, and had gods in great plenty. But they have carried the belief in magic, in a magician much superior to his neighbours, to a pitch infinitely beyond the Arunta. Yet the Arunta have no gods with whom to draw comparisons invidious and unfavourable to magicians; they have, it is said, no gods at all.

Just as magic thus reaches its highest power, according to Mr. Frazer, where there is most religious competition (while the reverse should be the case by his theory), so religion flourishes most in Australia, exactly where, by Mr. Frazer's theory, the circumstances are most unfavourable to religion and most favourable to magic. Magic, by the hypothesis, must prosper most, its fallacy must be latest discovered, it must latest give place to religion, where it appears to be most successful, and vice versâ. Yet Mr. Frazer assures us that in Australia magic flourishes alone, where every circumstance demonstrates its failure; and religion begins to blossom precisely where magic must seem to its devotees a relative success.

Before examining this apparent inconsistency, let us note Mr. Frazer's inadvertent proof that his irreligious Australians are religious. One part of the business of magic is to produce rain in season, sun in season, and consequently an abundant food supply.[36] The Dieri of Central Australia need especially excellent magic. 'In a dry season their lot is a hard one.' Having no religion, they ought, of course, to work by mere materialistic magic, like the Arunta.[37] But they, oddly enough, 'call upon the spirits of their remote ancestors, which they call Mura Mura, to grant them power to make a heavy rain,' and then men inspired by the Mura Mura work magic, or pray in sign-language, as you please.[38] Now the Mura Mura, the rain-givers, by evidence which Mr. Frazer himself has published, is 'a Good Spirit,' not a set of remote ancestral spirits. The witness is Mr. Gason, 'than whom' (says Mr. Frazer's authority, Dr. Stirling) 'no man living has been more among blacks or knows more of their ways.' If on this excellent evidence the Australian Dieri call for rain to a good spirit, then they have religion, which Mr. Frazer denies. But if Mr. Siebert, a German missionary, is right (and Mr. Frazer, as we saw, prefers his view to that of Mr. Gason), then the Mura Mura are only ancestral spirits.

Yet to demand the aid of remote ancestral spirits by prayer is religion. In fact Mr. Frazer had said of the powerful beings of the Southern Australians 'it does not seem that these spirits are ever worshipped.'[39] But prayer is worship, and the Dieri pray, whether to a good spirit or to ancestral spirits, potent over the sky, and dwelling therein. If this is not religion, by Mr. Frazer's own definition, namely 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature,' what is religion?[40] Yet in Australia 'nobody dreams of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice,' says our author.[41] None the less they 'call upon the spirits of their remote ancestors, which they call Mura Mura, to grant them power to make a heavy rain.' After ceremonies magical, or more prayers in sign-language, the Mura Mura 'at once cause clouds to appear in the sky.'[42] They see the signs which their worshippers are making. Here then we have prayer to 'powers superior to man' (whether to the Good Spirit or to ancestral spirits), and that, on evidence collected by Mr. Frazer, occurs in a country where, fourteen pages earlier, he had assured us that 'nobody thinks of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice.' Sacrifice, happily, there is none; the Dieri have not degenerated to sacrificing human victims like the Greeks.

The scene is Central Australia, where 'the pitiless sun beats down for months together out of a blue and cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth.' Consequently rain-making magic must perpetually prove a failure. Therefore, I presume, the Dieri have been driven into religion by discovering the fallacy of magic. This would be a logical argument, but Mr. Frazer's argument is the converse of what I suggest and contradicts his theory. He dubiously grants the existence of possible faint 'germs of religion' 'in the south-eastern parts of Australia, where the conditions of life in respect of climate, water, and vegetation are more favourable than elsewhere.... It is worth observing that in the same regions which thus exhibit the germs of religion, the organisation of society and the family has also made the greatest advance. The cause is probably the same in both cases—namely, a more plentiful supply of food due to the greater fertility of the soil.'[43] Now, according to Mr. Frazer's whole argument, the confessed failure of magic is the origin of religion.[44] But in Central Australia, where magic notoriously fails most conspicuously to supply water and vegetation, magic flourishes to the entire exclusion of religion, except among the Dieri. On the other hand, in South-Eastern Australia, where magic, if practised, is abundantly rewarded by more water and more vegetation, there these proofs of the success of magic are 'probably the cause' of the germs of religion. But, by Mr. Frazer's hypothesis, what must be the apparent success of magic in securing 'a more plentiful supply of food' ought to encourage the belief in magic, and prevent religion from even germinating. On the other hand, the successful result of magic (for to what else can a people of sorcerers attribute the better food supply?) has been 'probably the cause' of the first germs of religion. How can these things be?

All this time one tribe of Central Australia, the Arunta, remains resolutely godless 'in spite of all temptations to join denominations' of a religious character. For the Arunta live in the worst country, the most rainless, and therefore their magic is most manifestly a failure. Yet, unlike the natives of South-Eastern Australia (where magic is most successful), the Arunta cling to magic, and have developed no religion. If so, as of all rain-making magic theirs is about the most unsuccessful, they must be very stupid, or they would detect the failure, and fly to religion, 'a quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage.' The Arunta are very far from stupid; they have the most complete and adequate of savage metaphysics. If, then, they have not approached superior powers, in face of the failure of their magic, it may be that they have tried and discarded religion. 'Religion for the women and the children, magic for men' appears to be the Arunta motto: not so very uncivilised! This I suggest because Mr. Frazer tells us that at the initiatory rites of the Arunta 'the women and children believe that the roaring noise' of the wooden slat, tied to a string and swung about, is 'the voice of the great spirit Twanyirika.'[45] A great spirit (above all if spelled with capital letters) is rather a religious conception. 'This spirit, the women are told, lives in wild and inaccessible regions.... Both uninitiated youths and women are taught to believe in the existence of Twanyirika.' So write Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, our only sources.[46]

A brief note is all that these inquirers give in their copious book to the great spirit. 'This belief,' they say, 'is fundamentally the same as that found in all Australian tribes.' Now in the tribes reported on by Mr. Howitt, the spirit whose voice is the sound of the slat or bull roarer called the tundun, and by other names, is the son or other deputy of Baiame, or some such powerful good being, Mungan-ngaur, Pirnmeheal, Bunjil, Noorele, or by whatever style he may be called. One of his duties is to superintend the Bora, or mysteries of the tribes. The Wiraijuri believe that their type of Twanyirika was destroyed, for misconduct, by his superior, Baiame. This sinful great spirit was called Daramulun, but in other tribes Daramulun is apparently the superior, and goes on existing. He is, says Mr. Howitt, 'the Great Master,' 'the Father,' the sky dweller, the institutor of society, the power whose voice 'calls to the rain to fall and make the grass green.' He is the moral being for whom 'the boys are made so that Daramulun likes them'—a process involving cries of nga ('good'), so says Mr. Howitt. His attributes and powers (where he is supreme) 'are precisely those of Baiame,' who, by Mr. Ridley and many others, is spoken of as a maker, if I may not say creator. It was in 1854, two years before publishing his 'Gurre Kamilaroi' (in which 'Baiame' was used for 'God'), that Mr. Ridley asked a Kamilaroi man, 'Do you know Baiame?' He said, Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda ('I have not seen Baiame; I have heard, or perceived him. They hear him in the thunder'). Among this tribe Daramulun was not the superior; he was 'author of disease and medical skill, of mischief and wisdom also; he appears in the form of a serpent at their assemblies,' like Asclepius and the American Hobamok.[47] Though Mr. Ridley is a missionary, I venture to cite him, because his evidence goes back nearly fifty years, to a time when the blacks had less contact with Europeans. Moreover, Mr. Ridley is corroborated by Mr. Howitt and other laymen, while Mr. Frazer even prefers the evidence of a German missionary to that of Mr. Gason, a lay Englishman of the greatest experience. Mr. Howitt finds, among the Kurnai, Tundun as the patron of the mysteries and the bull roarer, like Twanyirika. In Mr. Manning's tribe[48] the same rôle is taken by Moodgeegally, under the control of Boyma.

We have thus five or six parallels to the Twanyirika of the godless Arunta, and all are subordinate to a higher power. If then, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen tell us, the belief in the Arunta Twanyirika, the great spirit, 'is fundamentally the same as that found in all the Australian tribes,' Twanyirika ought to have a much more powerful benevolent superior. In that case the Arunta would

Incline to think there is a god, Or something very like one,

as Clough says. If so, as they do not propitiate him, they did not conceive him as a partner in the game of Do ut des. But our only witnesses, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, are extremely reticent about Twanyirika. Nothing is said about his having a superior, and I assume that he has none. It seems to follow that he is a mere Mumbo Jumbo, or bogle, devised by the men to keep the women and children in order.

But in South-Eastern Australia (if I may trust Mr. Howitt's evidence, to which Mr. Frazer does not here allude) the counterpart of Twanyirika is a mere servant of a much higher being, everywhere called by names meaning 'our father.' Therefore either 'our father' Baiame, Mungan-ngaur, and the rest, have been developed out of a sportive bugbear like Twanyirika, or Twanyirika (if he really has no superior) is a rudimentary survival of a belief like that in Mungan-ngaur, and his subordinate, Tundun. In the former case Twanyirika, a germ of the more advanced religion of South-Eastern Australia, was not invented as a power behind nature, who might be useful if propitiated, as in Mr. Frazer's theory. In the latter case the Arunta do not represent man prior to religion (as Mr. Frazer holds), but man who has cast off religion. But Mr. Frazer does not seem to notice this dilemma.

The evidence for what most people call 'religion' among the Australian natives is so far from scanty that one finds it when looking for other matters, as I am going to show. True, in the following report the religion does not answer to Mr. Frazer's definition, no powerful being is here said to be conciliated or propitiated: he is only said to exist and favour morality. But Mr. Frazer's definition, if pressed, produces the effect of arguing in a vicious circle. His theory asserts that powerful beings are only invented by man, in view of man's tardy discovery that his own magic is powerless. The invented beings are then propitiated, for selfish ends, and that, by the definition, is religion.

If we produce, as we do, evidence that the belief in powerful beings has been evolved, and yet that these beings are certainly not propitiated by sacrifice, and seldom if ever by prayer, that they are only won by conduct, and by rites not involving sacrifice, Mr. Frazer can reply, 'Perhaps; but by my definition that kind of belief is not religion.' Then what is it? 'What else can you call it?' Its existence, if proved, is fatal to Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of religion in the despair of magic, because the faithful of the belief of which I speak do not usually implore the god to do for them what magic has failed to do. Their belief satisfies their speculative and moral needs: it does not exist to supply their temporal wants. Yet it is none the less, but much the more, a religion on that account, except by Mr. Frazer's definition. If religion is to be defined as he defines it, 'a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man,' and so on, religion can only have arisen as it does in his theory, setting aside a supernormal revelation. But if we do not deny the name of religion to the speculative belief in a power superior to man, and to the moral belief that he lends a supernormal sanction to conduct, and to the emotional belief that he loves his children, then the belief is religion, but something other than religion as defined by Mr. Frazer. Nobody will deny the name of religion to such a belief. Mr. Frazer says: 'I would ask those who dissent from my conclusions to make sure that they mean the same thing by religion that I do; for otherwise the difference between us may be more apparent than real.'[49]

I mean by religion what Mr. Frazer means—and more. The conciliation of higher powers by prayer and sacrifice is religion, but it need not be the whole of religion. The belief in a higher power who sanctions conduct, and is a father and a loving one to mankind, is also religion; few, if any, will dispute the fact. But this belief, if unaccompanied, as in Australia, by prayer and sacrifice, cannot be accounted for on Mr. Frazer's theory: that religion was invented, for worldly ends, after the recognised failure of magic, which aimed at the same ends fruitlessly. It is only by limiting his definition of religion, as he does, that he can establish his theory of the origin of religion. It is only by omitting mention of the evidence for what nobody else can deny to be religion, that he can secure his theory.

I return to my additional evidence for Australian religion. As will be seen, it does not come within Mr. Frazer's definition, but will anybody deny that the belief is religious? The evidence is that of Mr. A. L. P. Cameron,[50] and contains a brief comparative glossary of words used by different tribes of New South Wales to indicate the same objects. Mr. Cameron had been interested in the black fellows since 1868 at least, when their numbers were much larger than at present. He had seen gatherings of from 800 to 1,000. The tribes chiefly in question dwelt along the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers, and do not include the Kamilaroi, the Kurnai, and Coast Murring of whom Mr. Howitt speaks.

As to religion, ghosts of the dead are believed to visit the earth, and to be frequently seen. The blacks 'will often resort to peculiar devices to avoid mentioning the names of the dead,' a practice hostile to the development of ancestor worship. No ghost of a man can grow into a god if his name is tabooed and therefore forgotten. 'The people of all these tribes appear to have a belief in a Deity, and in a future state of some kind.' The Wathi Wathi call this being Tha-tha-pali; the Ta-ta-thi call him Tulong. Mr. Cameron could not obtain translations of these names, any more than we know the meaning of the names Apollo or Artemis. The being 'is regarded as a powerful spirit, or perhaps a supreme supernatural being. They say that he came from the far north, and now lives in the sky. He told each tribe what language they were to speak. He made men, women, and dogs, and the latter used to talk, but he took the power of speech from them. The Ta-ta-thi do not care to speak much of Tulong, and say that he does not often come to the earth. Although it seems that in many of the Australian tribes there is only a very dim idea as to the attributes of the Supreme Being and of a future state, yet in the Ta-ta-thi and its allied tribes there is certainly a belief not only in a future state of existence, but also in a system of rewards and punishments. My Ta-ta-thi informant stated that one of the doctors ascended long ago through the sky, and there saw a place where wicked men were roasted.'

Mr. Cameron, of course, had the strongest suspicions of a 'place' so ostensibly Christian. To this we return.[51]

These tribes practise the Bora rites or initiatory mysteries. If women witness them 'the penalty is death. The penalty for revealing the secrets is probably the same.' Mr. Cameron, unlike Mr. Howitt, has not been initiated, and does not know the full secret. The presiding being (like the Twanyirika of the Arunta) is called Thuremlin, who, I conjecture, is Daramulun in his subordinate capacity. 'Their belief in the power of Thuremlin is undoubted, whereas the Arunta adults do not appear to believe in Twanyirika, a mere bugbear of the women and children. The bull roarer is Kalari, or among the Ta-ta-thi Kalk [or Kallak]—that is to say, "word."' Concerning the instruction given to the boys, and described by Mr. Howitt, Mr. Cameron, not being initiated, gives no information.

As to the future life, Mr. Cameron received his account from a tribesman named Makogo, 'an intelligent member of the Wathi Wathi tribe.' The belief was that current 'before his people came into contact with Europeans, and Makogo expressed an opinion that, whether right or wrong, they would have been better off now had their beliefs never been disturbed.' Probably Makogo was right. The beliefs were in a future state of reward or punishment. European contact does not import but destroy the native form of this creed.

The Wathi Wathi belief answers in character to the creeds expressed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Fijian hymns, the famous Orphic gold talisman of Petilia, the Red Indian belief published by Kohl, and to many other examples.[52] The Way of Souls, as in these ancient or savage beliefs, is beset by dangers and temptations, to which the Egyptian Book of the Dead is a guide-book. If any one desires to maintain that this Australian idea, held before contact with Europeans, and now to some extent abandoned after that contact, is of Christian origin (we know this argument), he must suppose that the Wathi Wathi adapted the idea from our old 'Lyke Wake Dirge:'

When Brig o' Dread is over and past, Every night and all, To Whinny Muir thou comest at last, And Christ receive thy saul.

A weak point there is. The soul of the Wathi Wathi, after death, is met by another soul, 'who directs him to the road for good men.'

But the natives had no roads, the opponent will reply. They have trade routes and markets, however, and barter of articles made in special localities goes on across hundreds of miles of country.[53] Let us allow that the Wathi Wathi may know a clean path or track from a dirty one.

The soul meets a dirty and a clean path. The good soul, being instructed, chooses the dirty path: the other path is kept clean by bad spirits 'in order to induce the unthinking to follow it,' as Bunyan's Mr. Ignorance unwarily chose a by-path into hell. The soul next meets a woman who tries to seduce him. He escapes her lures, and comes to two women who try to trip him by whirling a rope. One of them is blind, and the soul evades her. Next comes a deep narrow gap, in which flames rise and fall. The good soul watches the fall of the flames, and leaps across; there is no Brig o' Dread. Bed Indian souls cross by a log which nearly spans the abyss. Two old women meet the good soul, and take him 'to the Deity, Tha-Tha-Puli.' He tests the soul's strength and skill by making him throw a nulla-nulla. 'When the Wathi Wathi see a shooting star, they believe it to be the passage of such a nulla-nulla through space, and say: "Tha-Tha-Puli is trying the strength of some new spirit." The soul of a bad man, if it escapes the traps set for it, is sure to fall into the hell of fire. Many of the natives have had their beliefs modified by contact with the whites,' and I 'feel doubtful,' says Mr. Cameron, 'whether the pit of fire was not of this kind, and questioned my informant very closely on the subject, but he assured me that there was no doubt whatever that the above was the exact belief before the settlement of the country by the white men.'

It is the standing reply of believers in the borrowing theory that a native, cross-examined, will always agree with whatever the European inquirer wishes him to say. The natives examined by Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Langloh Parker, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Manning, and others were exceptions. They would not allow that their beliefs were borrowed.

This particular form of native belief is exactly analogous to that of ancient Egypt, of Greece, of Fiji, and so on: not to the doctrine of our missionaries. The believers in borrowing must therefore say that the Wathi Wathi stole heaven, hell, and the ways thither from missionaries, and adapted them, accidentally coinciding with Egyptians, Greeks, Red Indians, Fijians, Aztecs, and the rest, as to a gulf to be crossed, and temptations on the way to the abode of the powerful being and the souls of the good. The native proverbial explanation of a shooting star establishes, as historical fact, their belief in Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good spirits. Mr. Frazer has six pages on beliefs about shooting stars.[54] One case is to our point. The Yerrunthally of Queensland think that the souls of the dead climb to a place among the stars by a rope; when they let the rope fall, it 'appeared to people on earth as a shooting star.'[55]

Now if the evidence of Mr. Palmer, in the 'Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' is good evidence for this Australian belief, why is the evidence of Mr. Howitt and Mr. Cameron, in the same serial, to an unborrowed Australian religion (in this case with Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good souls) unworthy even of mention?

We fall back on Sir Alfred Lyall: 'I think that one effect of the accumulation of materials has been to encourage speculative generalisation, because it has provided a repertory out of which one may make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any theory.'[56] Here I have the pleasure of agreeing with this great authority. Mr. Frazer has chosen Australia as the home of magic, as a land where magic is, but religion has not yet been evolved. As I have shown, in this and the preceding paper, there is abundance of evidence for an unborrowed Australian religion. I shall abandon the evidence so soon as it is confuted, but I cannot reject it while the witnesses are treated as good on many other points, but are unmentioned just when their testimony, if true, seems inconsistent with a theory of the priority of magic to religion.

By the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers,' writes Mr. Tylor, 'it is known that the natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have ever since remained, a race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities.'[57] What can a young student commencing anthropologist think, when he compares Mr. Tylor's 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers' of Australian religion with Mr. Frazer's remark that there are 'some faint beginnings of religion' in Southern Australia, but that 'traces of a higher faith, where they occur, are probably sometimes due to European influence,' though the people, Mr. Tylor says, were in all things so 'saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities'—'at their discovery'? There is no use in building a theory of the origin of religion on the case of Australia till we are at least told about the 'concurring testimony of a crowd of observers.' That Mr. Frazer has some reason for disregarding the testimonies which I have cited, that he must have grounds for doubting their validity, I feel assured. But the grounds for the doubt are not apparent, and to state them would make Mr. Frazer's abstention intelligible.

IV

THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

Among the many recent theories concerning the origin of religion, certainly the most impressive is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ. Unlike several modern speculations, Mr. Frazer's is based on an extraordinary mass of erudition. We are not put off with vague and unvouched-for statements, or with familiar facts extracted from the collections of Mr. Tylor, Lord Avebury, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Frazer does not collect knowledge, as his Babylonian kings are supposed by him to have been sacrificed—by proxy. No writer is so erudite, and few are so exact in their references. While venturing to differ from Mr. Frazer, I must often, as it were, make use of his own ammunition in this war. Let me say sincerely that I am not pitting my knowledge or industry against his. I rather represent the student who has an interest in these subjects, and peruses 'The Golden Bough,' not as 'the general reader' does, but with some care, and with some verification of the citations and sources.

It is first necessary to state, as briefly as possible, Mr. Frazer's hypothesis as to the origin of the belief in the Divinity of our Lord, or, at least, as to what he thinks a very powerful factor in the evolution of that creed.

The Babylonians, he holds, and their Persian conquerors were wont yearly, at a vernal feast, to dress a condemned criminal in the royal robes, to enthrone him, to obey him, to grant him access to the ladies of the royal harem, and then, at the end of five days, to strip, whip, and hang him. The reason why they acted thus, Mr. Frazer guesses, was that the condemned man acted as proxy for the divine King of Babylon, who, in an age less civilised, had been sacrificed annually: so Mr. Frazer conjectures. The King was thus sacrificed as a being of divine or magical nature, a man-god, and the object, according to Mr. Frazer, was to keep providing the god or magical influence resident in him with a series of fresh human vehicles. It appears, or may appear, to be Mr. Frazer's opinion, though the point is stated rather casually and late in the long argument, that the King himself was believed to incarnate a known and recognised god of vegetation, a personal principle of vegetable life. The King's proxy, therefore, the condemned criminal, is sacrificed (by hanging) in a character at once royal (as representing the King) and divine (since the King incarnates a god). All this occurs, by one of the theories advanced, at about the time of year in which our Easter falls, at a feast called Zakmuk in Babylonian, in Persian (by the theory) Sacæa: a period of hard drinking and singular licence.

The Jews, by the theory, or by one of the theories, had probably no such feast or custom before they were carried into exile in Babylonia. But from the Babylonians and Persians Mr. Frazer holds that they probably borrowed the festival, which they styled Purim, and also borrowed the custom (historically unheard of among them) of crowning, stripping, flogging, and hanging a mock-king, a condemned criminal, in March. It does not appear that this man, in Judæa, was allowed to invade the harem, for example, of Herod, as in the case of the Persian royal harem. The Jews also are conjectured to have borrowed a practice, presumed by Mr. Frazer to have perhaps prevailed at Babylon, of keeping a pair of condemned criminals. One of them was hanged; the other was set free for the year. The first died as an incarnation of the god of vegetable life. The second, set free, represented in a pseudo-resurrection the first, and also represented, I understand, the revival of the god of vegetable life. The first man was called Haman, probably in origin Humman, a deity of the vanquished foes of Babylon, the Elamites. The second man, in Hebrew Mordecai, probably represented Merodach, or Marduk, the supreme god of the victorious Babylonians. Each man had a female consort, probably in Babylon a sacred harlot: Haman had Vashti, probably an Elamite goddess; Mordecai had Esther, doubtless Ishtar, the Venus of the Babylonian creed. These ladies do not occur in any account of the Babylonian or Persian feasts, nor in the Gospels: their existence is a conjecture.

The victims, as descending from the Babylonian and Persian criminals, who stood both for the king and also, at least in some parts of the theory, for a god of vegetation, were conceived of as divine. Since Christ, by what looks like a chapter of accidents, was put to death as one of these mock-kings, He inherited their recognised divinity, and His mission, which had been mainly that of a moral lecturer, at once was surrounded by a halo of divinity.

Such, in brief, if I follow Mr. Frazer, is the contention, which, I must repeat, is presented as the combination of many hypotheses into a single theory, offered for criticism.

To myself, after studying Mr. Frazer's theory with such care as it deserves, an hypothesis of its evolution presents itself. Before writing the first edition of 'The Golden Bough' (1890), Mr. Frazer had become acquainted with a statement which Dio Chrysostom, a Greek rhetorician of the first century, puts into the mouth of Diogenes the Cynic, in an imaginary dialogue with Alexander the Great. In this essay Diogenes is made to tell Alexander about the Persian custom of yearly dressing up a condemned criminal in royal robes, at the feast called Sacæa, allowing him to live 'like a king' for five days, giving him the entrée of the royal harem, and then stripping, scourging, and hanging or crucifying him. The resemblance of Dio's words to the account of the Mockery of Christ is very remarkable.

Mr. Frazer tells us that he saw this resemblance in 1890, but could not explain it. In 1897 he became acquainted with a legend, written in Greek, of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, a Roman Christian soldier, in Mœsia (303 A.D.). According to this legend, Dasius was drawn by lot as the yearly victim who, the story says, was made to represent King Saturnus, for a month of military revelry, and then was sacrificed, or obliged to slay himself, beside Saturn's altar, at the close of the Saturnalia. Dasius declined the part, and was put to death.

Here, then, in Mœsia, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius, was a mock-king, personating a god, sacrificed to a god, and therefore himself, it may be, regarded as divine. At the other extreme, in Jerusalem, was Christ, who, after mock royal honours, was scourged, crucified, and acquired a halo of divinity. The middle term was the criminal, who, in the character of a mock-king, was stripped, scourged, and hanged in the Persian feast. There was no trace in Persia of sacrifice, of a victim in the technical sense, or of any halo of divinity. But Mr. Frazer was familiar with barbaric kings who are or were put to death, to save them from dying naturally, or after a fixed term of years. In his opinion they are killed to provide the god whom they incarnate with a fresh vehicle. Combining all these facts, and strongly drawn by the resemblance of Dio's anecdote to the narratives of the Crucifixion, Mr. Frazer adopted the argument that the criminal executed at the Sacæa, in Babylon, had once been, like the Saturn sufferer in Mœsia, a divine victim, not at first hanged, but sacrificed yearly, to redeem the life of the Persian king, who in earlier ages must himself have been a yearly sacrifice. The divinity inherited by the criminal from that divine King was transmitted by a succession of executed malefactors to the victim of Calvary.

The ingenuity of the idea is undeniable. But it appears to me that the author's mind was throughout unconsciously drawn to the Crucifixion. This attraction became a 'mental prepossession.' In a recent work, 'Fact and Fable in Psychology' (Boston, U.S., 1900), Professor Jastrow has illustrated 'mental prepossession' by a common and trivial experience. A beginner in the art of bicycling is unconsciously drawn into collision with every obstacle on the road which his conscious self is doing its best to avoid.

In the same way, I fancy, our author's mind was led straight to an explanation of the halo of divinity round the Cross, instead of to what was needed first, an explanation of the Persian custom, isolated, and examined only in the light of its attendant circumstances, as described in our very scanty information. Had our author examined the circumstances of the Persian custom with an intellect unattracted by the hope of throwing new light on the Crucifixion, and uninfluenced by a tendency to find gods of vegetation almost every where, he would have found, I think, that they admit of being accounted for in a simple manner, granting that our information is true. There was, as far as we are informed, no sacrifice at the Sacæa, and in that Persian festival nothing religious. The religious element has to be imported by aid of remote inference, daring conjecture, and even, I venture to say, some disregard of documentary history.

The consequence, as I shall try to show, is that the theory has, in the Regent Moray's words, 'to pass over the bellies' of innumerable obstacles, by aid of a series of conjectures increasing in difficulty. Thus the reader's powers of acquiescence are strained afresh at the introduction of each new trial of his faith. If one stage out of so many stages of remote inference and bold presumption is unstable, the whole edifice falls to the ground. Meanwhile we shall have to offer a simple explanation of the circumstances of the Sacæan victim, only in a single instance demanding the use of one of Mr. Frazer's own conjectures, itself a legitimate hypothesis. The remainder of this essay is concerned with an examination of the difficulties of his theory, and of the 'bridges of hypothesis,' by which the 'yawning chasms' are to be crossed.

V

THE APPROACHES TO MR. FRAZER'S THEORY

I. THE EVOLUTION OF GODS

Rites so remarkable as those of the pair of criminals, supposed to have played their parts in Babylon and Jerusalem, each with his female mate, are not historically known, but are part of Mr. Frazer's theory, and have analogies in folklore. Institutions so unparalleled as a whole, in our knowledge of human religion, cannot have been evolved except through a long series of grades of development. Mr. Frazer traces these grades throughout the 1,500 pages of his book. There are, in accordance with the method, large sections of the work devoted to illustrative examples of matters which do not bear directly on the main stream of the argument, and these are apt, by the very abundance of their erudition, to distract attention from the central hypothesis. To that I try to adhere through its numerous ramifications.

To account, then, for these hypothetical rites of the double pairs of divinised human beings, we are to suppose that, before attaining the earliest germs of religion, men were addicted to magic, a theory which we have already examined in the essay 'Magic and Religion.' They believed that by imitating the cosmic processes, they could control or assist them. Thus the Arunta of Central Australia have magical rites, by which they assist the development of larvæ into grubs, increase and improve the breed and reproductive energies of kangaroos, foster the growth of edible tubers, and bring down rain. These rites are harmless, and involve no sacrifices, human or animal, for the Arunta, we are to believe, have no god to accept offerings.[1] But as men advanced from almost the lowest savagery, they gradually attained to higher material culture, developing the hitherto unknown arts of agriculture, developing also religion, in the despair of magic, developing gods, and evolving social and political rank, with kings at the head of society. In disgust with their old original magic (by which they had supposed that they controlled cosmic forces and animal and vegetable life), they invented gods and spirits who, as they fancied, did really exercise cosmic control. These gods they propitiated by prayer and sacrifice. But though it was in the despair of magic that men invented gods and religion, yet, as men will, they continued to exercise the magic of which they despaired. They persisted, like the godless Arunta, in imitating the processes of nature, in the belief (which, after all, they had not abandoned) that such imitation magically aided the efforts of nature or of the gods of nature.

Men now evolved three species of god, from one or other of which descends the godhead of the Persian criminal, whipped and hanged, and the Divinity of Christ. First, there were gods 'of an order different from and superior to man.' Second, there were men in whom these superior gods became incarnate. Third, there were men who were merely better magicians than their neighbours, 'sensitives' who trembled at a touch of nature, and at whose touch nature trembled.[2] It is not, in thought, difficult to draw a firm line between these two kinds of man-gods, though magic and religion overlap and shade into each other. The distinction of the two types, the man incarnating god, and the sorcerer with no god to incarnate, is absolutely essential, and must be kept firmly in mind. Mr. Frazer says 'In what follows I shall not insist on it,' on this essential distinction.[3] Essential it is: for the second sort, the magical sort, of man-god, may, by Mr. Frazer's theory, be prior to all religion. He is only a high kind of sorcerer, 'a dealer in magic and spells.' The other kind of man-god comes in after magic is despaired of and gods are invented. I shall insist on the distinction.

The growth of society was advancing and developing at the same time as religion and agriculture. The original sorcerer or medicine-man, or magic-worker, through his influence on his neighbours, was apt to acquire leadership, and to accumulate property, as, indeed, I myself remarked long ago in an essay on the 'Origin of Rank.'[4] In Mr. Frazer's theory these magic-men finally develop into both kings or chiefs and man-gods. I have observed that there is often a lay or secular king or chief, a war-leader, beside them. His position, if it becomes hereditary, is apt to end in leaving the man-god-king on one side in a partly magical, partly religious, but not secular kingship, whence it may evolve into a priesthood, carrying the royal title. The man is more or less a man-god, more or less a priest, more or less a controller of cosmic processes, but is still a titular king. Of course all sorts of varieties occur in these institutions. The general result is the divinity of kings, and their responsibility for the luck of the state, and for the weather and crops. If the luck, the weather, and the crops are bad, the public asks 'Who is to be punished for this?' Under a constitution such as our own, the public notoriously makes the Government responsible for the luck; a general election dismisses the representatives of the party in power. But, four hundred years ago, and previously, executions took the place of mere loss of office: the heads of the Boyds, of Morton, or of Gowrie fell when these nobles lost office.

In the earlier society with which we are dealing, the king, as responsible for the weather and crops, is sometimes punished in bad times. The Banjars 'beat the king till the weather changes,' elsewhere the king is imprisoned, or, in a more constitutional manner, merely deposed.[5] There are traces of actually killing the unlucky and responsible monarch. In Sweden he is said, in a time of public distress, to have been not only killed, but sacrificed to Odin. This is not, however, an historical statement.

II. THE ALLEGED MORTALITY OF GODS

There were other magico-religious reasons for killing kings. Mr. Frazer writes:[6] 'Lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself.'

Here is, I venture to think, a notable fault in the argument. Early men, contrary to Mr. Frazer's account, suppose themselves to be naturally immortal. The myths of perhaps all races tell of a time when death had not yet entered the world. Man was born deathless. Death came in by an accident, or in consequence of an error, or an infraction of a divine command. To this effect we have Zulu, Australian, Maori, Melanesian, Central African, Vedic Aryan, Kamschadal, and countless other myths; not to speak of the first chapters of Genesis.[7] 'In the thought of immortality' early man is cradled. His divine beings are usually regarded as prior to and unaffected by the coming of death, which invades men, but not these beings, or not most of them.

Indeed, some low savages have not yet persuaded themselves that death is natural. 'Amongst the Central Australian natives,' say Spencer and Gillen, 'there is no such thing as belief in natural death; however old or decrepit a man or woman may be when this takes place, it is at once supposed that it has been brought about by the magic influence of some enemy,' and it is avenged on the enemy, as in the blood-feud.[8] These Australians in Mr. Frazer's opinion (though not in mine) are 'primitive.'

Thus, far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, 'primitive man' has no other idea. Not that he formulates his idea in such a term as 'eternal.' Mariner says, indeed, concerning the Tongan supreme being Ta-li-y-Tooboo, 'Of his origin they had no idea, rather supposing him to be eternal.' But, in Tongan, the metaphysical idea of eternity is only expressed in the meaning of the god's name, 'wait-there-Tooboo.' This god occasionally inspires the How, or elective king, but the How was never sacrificed to provide the god with a sturdier incarnation, a process which Mr. Frazer's theory of the Divinity of Christ demands as customary. Being 'eternal' Tá-li-y-Tooboo was independent of a human vehicle.[9]

These facts must be remembered, for it is indispensable to Mr. Frazer's theory to prove that the immortals are believed, to a sufficient extent, to be mortal. Hence the supposed need of killing divine kings, their vehicles. Primitive man, according to Mr. Frazer, thinks his gods mortal. But primitive man by his initial hypothesis had no gods at all. Mr. Frazer clearly means that when man was no longer primitive, he conceived the gods to be mortal like himself. I have elsewhere given many examples of the opposite belief among races of many grades of culture, from the Australian blacks to the immortal gods of Homer.[10] The point will be found to be important later, and I must firmly express my opinion that, so long as people believe their gods to be alive, and testify that belief by prayers, hymns, and sacrifices, it is impossible to argue from a few local, and contradictory, and easily explicable myths, that these peoples believe their gods to be dead, or in danger of dying. Here, I think, the common sense of students will agree with me.

However, as this general and pervading belief in the mortality of the gods is absolutely essential to Mr. Frazer's argument, perhaps the point had better be settled. As examples of belief in the fact that the god is dead, we have the Greenlanders.[11]

The Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he touched a dog. Mr. Tylor, on the other hand, tells us that to I the summerland' of the Greenland deity, 'beneath the sea, Greenland souls hope to descend at death.' Let us trust that 'No Dogs are Admitted.' This Greenland divine being, Torngarsuk, I so clearly held his place as supreme deity in the native mind that,' as Cranz the missionary relates, 'many Greenlanders hearing of God and His almighty power were apt to fall on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who was meant.' The Greenland deity was unborrowed; he 'seems no figure derived from the religion of Scandinavian colonists, ancient or modern.'[12]

From Cranz's evidence (and much more might be cited) the most powerful god of the Greenlanders was not dead, nor likely to die, in spite of the apprehensions of certain Greenlanders, communicated to a person not named by Mr. Frazer, but quoted in a work of 1806.[13] At the best the Greenland evidence is contradictory; all Greenlanders did not agree with Mr. Frazer's Greenland authority. Nor was the Accuser of the Brethren currently believed to be deceased, when the ancient folk-song assures us that

Some say the Deil's deid, The Deil's deid, the Deil's deid, Some say the Deil's deid, And buried in Kirkcaldy: Some say he's risen again, Risen again, risen again, Some say he's risen again, To dance the Hieland Laddie.

'Risen again' he was, and did dance the Hieland Laddie at Gledsmuir and Falkirk. The 'Volkslied' scientifically represents the conflict of opinion as unsettled, despite the testimony of the grave of Satan at the lang toun of Kirkcaldy; like the grave of Zeus in Crete.

Mr. Frazer, then, ought not, I think, to assume a general belief in the mortality of Greenland gods in face of contradictory but uncited evidence.

1. A North American Indian told Colonel Dodge that 'the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have lived so long as this.'[14] Now this was the ipse dixit and personal inference of a vague modern 'North American Indian,' living in an age which, as Mr. Frazer remarks, must 'breach those venerable walls' of belief. To prove his case, Mr. Frazer needs to find examples of the opinion that the 'Great Spirit' was believed to be dead (if he grants that there ever existed an American belief in a Great Spirit) among the American Indians as first studied by Europeans. I have elsewhere argued that the supreme being of most barbaric races is regarded as otiose, inactive, and so may come to be a mere name and by-word, like the Huron Atahocan,[15] 'who made everything,' and the Unkulunkulu of the Zulus, who has been so thrust into the background by the competition of ancestral spirits that his very existence is doubted. 'In process of time we have come to worship the spirits only, because we know not what to say about Unkulunkulu.' 'We seek out for ourselves the spirits that we may not always be thinking about Unkulunkulu.'[16] In the same way, throughout the beliefs of barbaric races, the competition of friendly and helpful spirits pushes back such beings as the Australian Baiame and Mungan-ngaur, who exist where sacrifice to ancestral spirits has not yet been developed; and the Canadian Andouagni of 1558.[17] Thus a modern North American Indian may infer, and may tell Colonel Dodge, that the creator is dead, because he is not in receipt of sacrifice or prayer. But the cult of such high beings, where it existed and still exists, in North America, the cult of Ti-ra-wá with whom the Pawnees expect to live after death, of the Blackfoot Ná-pi of Ahone, Okeus, Kiehtan, and the rest, proves belief in gods who are alive, and who are not said to be in any danger of death.

2. A tribe of Philippine Islanders told the Spanish conquerors that the grave of the Creator was on the top of Mount Cabunian. So the Philippine Islanders did believe in a Creator. The grave may have been the result of the usual neglect of the supreme being already explained, or may have meant no more than the grave of Zeus in Crete, while Zeus was being worshipped all over the Greek world.

3. Heitsi Eibib, of the Hottentots, had a number of graves, accounted for by the theory of successive lives and deaths. But so had Tammuz and Adonis yearly lives and deaths, yet the god was en permanence.

The graves of Greek gods maybe due to Euhemerism, a theory much more ancient than Euhemerus. People who worship ancestral spirits sometimes argue, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, that the gods were once spirits of living men, and show the men's graves as proofs; 'the bricks are alive to testify to it.' But that the Greeks regarded their gods as mortal cannot be seriously argued, while they are always styled 'the immortals' in contrast to mortal men; and while Apollo (who had a grave) daily inspired the Pythia. Her death did not hurt Apollo. She was not sacrificed for the benefit of Apollo. The grave of Zeus 'was shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era.' But was it shown as early as the time of Homer? Euhemerus was prior to our era.

4. The Egyptian gods were kings over death and the dead, with tombs and mummies in every province. But they were also deathless rulers of the world and of men.

'If Ra rises in the heavens it is by the will of Osiris; if he sets it is at the sight of his glory.' 'King of eternity, great god ... whoso knoweth humility and reckoneth deeds of righteousness, thereby knows he Osiris.'[18]

This is a living god, and Seb and Nut can scarcely die. Despite myth and ritual the gods of Egypt lived till they 'fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.'

5. As to the legend of 'great Pan is dead,' in the reign of Tiberius, Mr. Frazer mentions a theory that not Pan, but Adonis or Tammuz was dead; he was always dying. The story is pretty, but is not evidence.

6. About 1064 A.D. there was a Turkish story of the death of the King of the Jinn. The Jinn are not gods but fairies, and we have heard of fairy funerals.

7. Concerning 'the high gods of Babylon' it is especially needful for Mr. Frazer to prove that they were believed to be mortal and in danger of death, for Dr. Jastrow denies that they are mortal. 'The privilege of the gods' is 'immortality.'[19] But Mr. Frazer's hypothesis derives the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ from the opinion that he represented, in death, a long line of victims to a barbarous superstition.[20] And that superstition was, in Mr. Frazer's conjecture, that a substitute died for the King of Babylon, and that the King of Babylon died to reinforce the vitality of a mortal god of Babylon, whose life required a fresh human incarnation annually.

To prove the Babylonian belief in the mortality of the deities, Mr. Frazer writes: 'The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for like men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and fought and even died.'[21] How many of them died? If they were dead in religious belief, how did they manage to attend 'the great assembly of the gods which, as we have seen, formed a chief feature of the feast of Zakmuk, and was held annually in the temple of Marduk at Babylon?'[22] Did Marduk die? If so, why is he addressed as

O merciful one who lovest to give life to the dead! Marduk, King of heaven and earth, The spell affording life is thine, The breath of life is thine. Thou restorest the dead to life, thou bringest things to completeness (?)[23]

Supposing, again, that the King was really sacrificed to keep a god in good condition—why only one sacrifice? There were at least scores of gods, all of them, if I understand Mr. Frazer, in the same precarious condition of health. They appear, he might argue, to have been especially subject to hepatic diseases.

O supreme mistress of heaven, may thy liver be pacified,

says a hymn to Ishtar.[24]

Of course every one sees that 'thy liver' is only a phrase for 'thy wrath;' the liver (as in our phrases 'pluck' and 'lily-livered') being taken for the seat of the 'pluck' of men. It is manifest that the Babylonian gods are not dead but living, otherwise they could not attend the yearly divine assembly, nor could they be addressed in prayer. Moreover, if they could only be kept alive by yearly sacrificing their human vehicles, great holocausts of human vehicles would have been needed every year: one man for one god, and their name was legion.

Once more, if men believed that gods could die, unless kept alive by sacrifices of their human vehicles, we must say of the Greeks that they

did not strive Officiously to keep alive

their deities. Had the Greeks known that this was in their power to do, then Apollo, Dionysus, Cronos, Zeus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares had not died. Yet die they did, if the graves of each of these mortals prove the prevailing belief in their decease.[25] Mankind, according to Mr. Frazer, believed in 'mighty beings,' 'who breathed into man's nostrils and made him live.' He implored them 'to bring his immortal spirit ... to some happier world ... where he might rest with them,' and so on.[26] Yet, 'lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposed the gods to be mortal like himself.' Mr. Frazer has, we see, also told us that they did not believe their gods to be mortal. Probably, then, the belief in their immortality was a late stage in a gradual process.[27] Yet it had not prevailed when the grave of Zeus was shown 'about the beginning of our era.'[28] Man, then, believed that he could keep one out of the crowd of gods alive (though he implored them to keep him alive) by sacrificing his rightful king once a year, thereby overthrowing dynasty after dynasty, and upsetting the whole organisation of the state. All this we must steadfastly believe, before we can accept Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the Nicene Creed. It is a large preliminary demand.

The gods keep on being 'immortals,' and this we must insist on, in view of Mr. Frazer's theory that man-gods who are slain are slain to keep alive the god who is incarnate in them, of which he does not give one example. His instances of beliefs that the high gods are dead notoriously contradict the prevalent belief that they are deathless. And the prevalent belief regulates religion.

However, man-gods certainly die, and some South Sea Islanders—by a scientific experiment—demonstrated that Captain Cook was no god, because he died when stabbed, which a genuine god would not have done. This, of course, proves that these benighted heathen knew the difference between an immortal god and a deathly man as well as did Anchises in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite.

III. RELIGIOUS REGICIDE

Peoples who think that all the luck depends on their king-man-god (the second sort, the superior sorcerer, with no god in him) hold, we are to believe, that his luck and cosmic influence wane with his waning forces. Therefore they kill him, and get a more vigorous recipient of his soul (not of a god) and of his luck.[29] Of king-killing for this reason Mr. Eraser gives, I think, one adequate example. Of the transmission of the soul of the slain divinity to his successor he 'has no direct proof,' though souls of incarnating gods are transmitted after natural deaths.[30]

Now this is a very important part of the long-drawn argument which is to suggest that Christ died as a mock-king, who also represented a god. First, we have seen that there are two kinds of man-god. In one kind a real god, 'of an order different from and superior to man,' is supposed to become incarnate. The other kind of man-god is only a superior 'sensitive' and sorcerer.[31]

Now Jesus, by Mr. Frazer's theory, died as representative of a god, therefore as one of the first two kinds of man-gods. But Mr. Frazer does not here, as I said, produce one solitary example of a man-god proved to be of the first class—a king in whom an acknowledged god is incarnate—being slain to prevent his inspiring god from waning with the man's waning energies.[32] Many examples of that practice are needed by the argument. I repeat that not one example is produced in this place. Mr. Frazer's entire argument depends on his announced failure to 'insist on' the distinction between two sorts of man-gods which he himself has drawn.[33] So I keep on insisting.

Again, it can hardly be said that any examples are produced of a king of the second sort (a man-god who is really no god at all, but a 'sensitive,' sorcerer, or magic-man) being slain to preserve the vigour of his magic. The examples to be cited all but universally give no proof of the idea of preserving man's magical vigour from the decay of old age.

The cases given, as a rule, are mere instances of superannuation. It is possible (would that it were easy) to pension off aged professors in the Scottish Universities. But to pension off a king merely means a series of civil wars. The early middle ages 'tonsured' weak kings. How tempting to represent this dedication of them to God as a mitigation of sacrifice! Kings, in fact, among some barbaric races, are slain merely by way of superannuation. Nay, the practice is not confined to kings. It is usual among elderly subjects.[34]

Let us take Mr. Frazer's examples.[35]

1. A Congo people believe that the world would perish if their chitome, or pontiff, died a natural death. So he was clubbed or strangled by his successor. But what god is incarnate in the chitome? None is mentioned.[36] The king himself 'is regarded as a god in earth, and all powerful in heaven.'

2. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods, but were ordered to die by the priests, on the authority of an alleged oracle of the gods, 'whenever the priests chose.' That they first showed any signs of decay 'we may conjecture.'[37] We have no evidence except that the priests put an end to the king 'whenever they chose.' And, far from alleging the king's decay or bad crops as the regular recognised reason, they alleged a special oracle of the gods.

3. When the King of Unyoro, in Central Africa, is old, or very ill, his wives kill him (an obvious reason readily occurs: it is the wives, not a god, who need a more spirited person), alleging an old prophecy that the throne will pass from the dynasty if the king dies a natural death. But it is not here shown that this king is a man-god of either species; and the prophecy does not concern injury to a god, or to magical rapport.[38]

4. The King of Kibanga, on the upper Congo, is killed by sorcerers when he 'seems near his end.' So are old dogs and cats and horses in this country, and peasants are even thought to provide euthanasia for kinsfolk 'near their end.' If the King of Kibanga is a man-god, Mr. Frazer does not say so.

5. If wounded in war the King of Gingero is killed by his comrades or kinsfolk, even if he be reluctant. The reason alleged is 'that he may not die by the hands of his enemies.' Did Saul, Brutus, and many other warriors who refuse to survive wounds and defeat die as man-gods? Is the King of Gingero a man-god?

6. Chaka, King of the Zulus, used hair-dye, having a great aversion to grey hairs. The Zulus, a warlike people, would not elect, or accept, a greyhaired king, and, though I know no instance of slaying a Zulu king because he was old, Mr. Isaacs (1836) says that grey hair is 'always followed by the death of the monarch.' Even if an historical example were given, a warlike race merely superannuates a disabled war-leader in the only safe way.

7. At last we reach a king-man-god in Sofala, who, according to Dos Santos, was the only god of the Caffres, and was implored to give good weather.[39] A modern Zulu told Dr. Callaway that 'when people say the heaven is the chief's they do not believe what they say.'[40] The Sofalese, or rather their neighbours, were perhaps more credulous; and it appears to have been a custom or law among them that a blemished king should kill himself, though a reforming prince denounced this as insanity, and altered the law. We are told that the king-god of the Sofalese was under this law, and a neighbouring king (who is nowhere said to have been a man-god) was. But what god, if any, was incarnate in this man-god, if he was a man-god, like his neighbour?[41]

8. The Spartans were warned by an oracle against a lame king, as the Mackenzies were warned by the Brahan seer against a set of physically blemished lairds. The seer's prophecy was fulfilled.[42] We do not hear that the Spartans Killed any lame king.

9. The King of the Eyeos is warned to kill himself, warned by a gift of parrot's eggs, 'when the people have conceived an opinion of his ill-government.' His wives strangle him, and his son succeeds, or did so before 1774, when the King refused to die at the request of his ministers. To make a case, it must be shown that the king was a man-god of one or other variety. He is, in fact, merely king while popular, 'holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he merits the approval of his people.'

10. The old Prussians were governed by a king called God's Mouth. 'If he wanted to leave a good name behind,' when weak and ill he burned himself to death, in front of a holy oak.

11. In Quilacare, in Southern India, the king cut himself to pieces, before an idol, after a twelve years' reign. We are not told that he was an incarnation of the god, if any, incorporated in, or represented by, the idol.

12. The King of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, used to cut his throat in public after a twelve years' reign. About 1680-1700 this was commuted. If any man could cut his way through 30,000 or 40,000 guardsmen, to kill the king, he succeeded. Three men tried, but numbers over-powered them. Other examples are given in which every regicide might become king, if he could, like Macbeth. It was held, at Passier, that God would not allow the king to be killed if he did not richly deserve it. These kings are not said to incarnate gods.

13. Ibn Batuta once saw a man throw a rope into the air, and climb up it. Another man followed and cut the first to pieces, which fell on the ground, were reunited, and no harm done. This veracious traveller also saw a man, at Java, kill himself for love of the Sultan, thereby securing liberal pensions for his family, as his father and grandfather had done before him. 'We may conjecture that formerly the Sultans of Java, like the Kings of Quilacare and Calicut, were bound to cut their own throats at the end of a fixed term of years,'[43] but that they deputed the duty to one certain family. We may conjecture, but, considering the lack of evidence, and the stories that Ibn Batuta freely tells, I doubt! Ibn, at the Court of Delhi, saw cups and dishes I at a wish appear, and at a wish retire.' Did the Sultan of Java incarnate a god?

14. This case is so extremely involved and hypothetical (it concerns Sparta, where I never heard that the king was a man-god) that the reader must be referred to the original.[44]

Meanwhile the list of instances is numerically respectable. But are the instances to the point? Do they prove a practice of killing a royal man-god, for the purpose of helping a god incarnate in him, or even of preventing his magical power (or mana, in New Zealand) from waning? They rather prove regicide as a form of superannuation, or as the result of the machinations of priests, or of public discontent. Above all, they do not demonstrate that the king is ever killed as an incarnation of a deity who needs a sturdier person to be incarnate in.

So recalcitrant is the evidence, that of all Mr. Frazer's kings who are here said to be gods, or to incarnate gods, not one is here said to be put to death by his worshippers.[45] And of all his kings who are here said to be put to death, not one is here said to incarnate a god.[46] Such are the initial difficulties of the theory: to which we may add that elderly men are notoriously killed by many savages just because they are elderly, whether they are kings or commoners.

Mr. Frazer's point is that Christ died in 'a halo of divinity,' visible 'wherever men had heard the old, old story of the dying and rising god.'[47] But, apart from other objections already urged, Mr. Frazer's present instances do not contain one example of a 'dying and rising god,' stated to be represented by a living man who is therefore killed; even if there are one or two cases of a slain king who is a medicine-man, sorcerer, or cosmic sensitive. Thus the argument fails from the first. Christ is to be reckoned divine as representing a king who was killed as an incarnation of a god. But of regicide for this reason no proof is afforded, as far as I can see.

IV. ANNUAL RELIGIOUS REGICIDE

Next we arrive at an absolutely necessary hypothesis, which I find it difficult to accept. 'In some places it appears that the people could not trust the king to remain in full mental and bodily vigour for more than a year; hence at the end of a year's reign he was put to death, and a new king appointed to reign in his turn a year, and suffer death at the end of it.... When the time drew near for the king to be put to death (in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year's reign), he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and suffered in his stead.'[48]

Later we read of 'the time when the real king used to redeem his own life by deputing his son to reign for a short time and die in his stead.'[49]

The hypothesis is, then, that at Babylon the king used to be sacrificed once a year. Later he appointed a son, or some other member of the royal family, or some one else, to die for him, while, last of all, a criminal was chosen.

Is not this a startling hypothesis? Yet on it the whole argument about the Divinity of Christ depends. Mr. Frazer overestimates human ambition. We wonder that Moray, Lennox, and Morton pined to be Regents of Scotland. Yet at least they had a faint chance of escaping death within the year. But the kings of Babylon had no chance: they were sacrificed annually. Mr. Frazer asks us to suppose that any men of royal race, anywhere, men free and noble, not captives, not condemned criminals, would accept a crown, followed, in 365 days, by a death of fire! A child knows that no men have ever acted in this way. Even if they were so incredibly unlike all other human beings as to choose a year's royalty, followed by burning to death, how was the succession regulated? Even the primitive Arunta, naked savages in Central Australia, have a kind of magistrate, merely a convener, called the Alatunja, 'the head man of a local totemic group.' He is an hereditary official, inheriting in the male line.[50] Does any one believe that a poor black man would accept the Alatunjaship if he knew he was to be roasted, and so die, at the end of a year? Now the Babylonians (or rather the Persians) were infinitely more civilised than the Arunta. Their kings were hereditary kings. How, then, would Mr. Frazer's system work? The king is sacrificed; his eldest son succeeds; is sacrificed next year; they soon work through the royal family. Thus, in Scotland, Darnley is sacrificed (1567). Next year you sacrifice the baby, James VI. Next year you begin on the Hamiltons. Chatelherault lasts a year: then Arran, then Lord John, then Lord Claude. Beginning in 1567 you work out that result in 1572. Then you start on the Lennox Stewarts. You have Lennox offered up in 1573, his son Charles in 1574, and by the end of the century you have exhausted the female and illegitimate branches of the royal family. You can only sacrifice males, and these must be adults, for each sacrificed man, by Mr. Frazer's theory, has to consort before his death with a lady, probably 'a sacred harlot.'[51]

Mr. Frazer perhaps will say 'these Babylonian kings were polygamous, and had large families of sons.' But think of the situation! When the king comes to providing a son as a substitute, to reign for a few days and be sacrificed in his stead, he may be a young king, just married. Even if he could count on a male baby, or a score of them, annually, they would be of no use: they could not consort with the sacred harlot, which is indispensable.[52] So, after the young king is sacrificed, we are in a quandary. We must overlook primogeniture, and begin sacrificing the king's brothers; they will not last long; we fall back on the cousins. Soon we need a new dynasty. Now no government could be carried on in the circumstances imagined by Mr. Frazer. The country would not stand it. No individual king would ever accept the crown. Human beings never had such a preposterous institution. But, if they had not, Mr. Frazer's whole theory of the Crucifixion is baseless, for it all hangs on the yearly sacrifice of the divine king in Babylon. Where there is no historical evidence of annual regicide, we must appeal to our general knowledge of human nature. The reply is that the thing is impossible. Moreover, that sacrifice is wholly without evidence.

The only reason for believing that the kings of the great Babylonian Empire, or even the kings of Babylon when it may have been a small autonomous town, were sacrificed once a year, is the faint testimony existing to show that once a year at a Persian feast a mock-king was hanged. To account for that hanging Mr. Frazer has to invent the hypothesis that real kings, in olden times, were annually sacrificed. The only corroboration of actual fact is in the savage instances of king killing, not annual, which we have explained as, in most cases, a rude form of superannuation; in no case as certainly the deliverance of a recognised god incarnate in the king There are also instances in folklore of yearly mock executions of a king of the May, or the like, and a dubious case in Lower Mœsia. These do not prove annual sacrifices of actual kings in the past, if they prove any sacrifice at all. In these circumstances, I venture to hold, science requires us, if we must explain the alleged yearly hanging of a mock-king at Babylon, to look for a theory, an hypothesis, which does not contradict all that we know of human nature. For all of human nature that we know is contradicted by the fancy that the kings of Babylon were once sacrificed annually. I shall later produce a theory which, at least, does not run counter to the very nature of man, and so far is legitimate and scientific.

Mr. Frazer says that his theory 'will hardly appear extravagant or improbable' when we remember that, in Ngoio, the chief who puts on the cap of royalty one day is, by the rule, killed the next day.[53] So nobody puts on the cap. And nobody would have put on the Babylonian crown under the condition of being roasted to death at the end of the year.

If the theory were correct, the king incarnating a god would be slain yearly. But he would not like that, and would procure a substitute, who would yearly be slain (a) as a proxy of the king, or (b) as the god of vegetation, incarnate in the king, or as both. Yet, I repeat, not a single instance has been given of a king who is slain for magico-religious reasons, and who is also the incarnation of any god whatever. The slain kings in the instances produced were, as a rule, superannuated because they were old, or got rid of because they were unpopular, or because a clerical cabal desired their destruction, or for some other reason: at most, and rarely, because they were outworn 'sensitives.' We know scores of cases of god-possessed men, but none are killed because they are god-possessed.

The argument has thus made no approach to Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the belief in the divine character of Christ and of his doctrine.

At this point Mr. Frazer's theory turns from god-mankings slain to preserve their mana, or cosmic rapport, to persons who suffer for these kings. Not one single historical proof that there ever was such a custom is adduced. All is a matter of inference and conjecture. There is, we saw, a region Ngoio, in Congo, where the throne is perpetually vacant, because whoever occupied it was killed the day after coronation day—no substitute is suggested, and no one sits in the Siege Perilous.[54] There are cases of 'temporary kings,' as King February, for three days in Cambodia—the temporary king being of a cadet branch of the royal family. He is not killed. In Siam a temporary king for three days conducted a quête, or jocular pillaging, like our Robin Hood in Scotland. This is an example of the Period of Licence when law is in abeyance, and the importance of this period we shall later prove. The mock-king also ploughed nine furrows, and stood later with his right foot on his left knee. He did the same thing on a later occasion, and omens were drawn from his steadiness; he was supposed, if firm, to conquer evil spirits, and had another quête. In Upper Egypt a king of unreason for three days holds mock tribunals, then is condemned, and his 'shell' is burned; probably, as I shall show, to mean that 'the gambol has been shown' and is over.[55] There are two or three similar cases, and Mr. Frazer suggests that the mock-king is invested with the 'divine or magical functions' of the real king. But the local Pacha, on the Nile, has no such functions, and his august representative wears 'a tall fool's cap.' None are put to death: the Upper Egyptian case alone and dimly, if at all, suggests the proxy supposed (as in Ibn Batuta's tale interpreted by Mr. Frazer) to die for the king.

Next we approach instances of sons of kings who are sacrificed, but these are cases of sin offerings (as when the King of Moab sacrificed his son on the wall), and, even if the lads were substitutes for their royal fathers, there is no presumption raised that the fathers were habitually killed year by year, to keep their cosmic rapport unimpaired, or to release the god incarnate within them, a custom of which I find no example at all.

One instance of what he conjectures to be a proxy sacrifice for a king Mr. Frazer finds in a festival at Babylon called the Sacæa.[56] To this we return in due order. We must first examine cases of similar customs, or inferred customs, in Greece and Borne.

Meanwhile we hope to have shown that Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin of the belief in the Divinity of Christ already rests on three scarcely legitimate hypotheses. First, there is the hypothesis that kings were slain to release a known deity, incarnate in them, and to provide a better human vehicle. Of this rite no instances were given. Next, there is the hypothesis that the King of Babylon was annually sacrificed, and succeeded by a new king, who was sacrificed at the end of the year. Historical evidence does not exist, and the supposed custom is beyond belief. Thirdly, we are to believe in proxies or substitutes who die annually for the king. Of this practice no actual example is adduced.

Here, perhaps, the reader may be invited to ask himself whether he believes that there ever was, anywhere, a custom of yearly killing the king, the head of the state. If he cannot believe this, in the entire lack of proof, he may admire the faith which can move this mountain in the interests of Mr. Frazer's conclusions. For my part I may say that I was so hypnotised, after first reading through the long roll of Mr. Frazer's 'sad stories of the deaths of kings,' that I could only murmur 'But there is no historical evidence for the yearly Babylonian, or rather Persian, regicides.' Then I woke out of the hypnotic trance; I shook off the drowsy spell of suggestion, and exclaimed 'The king is killed annually!' Next, I asked myself whether mortal men would take the crown, and how the arrangement would work, and, alas! it was my belief in Mr. Frazer's theory that was shattered.