ANDREW LANG (continued 3)

But the 'general reader,' perusing an argument of 1,400 pages, may fall under the hypnotic spell of numerous 'cases,' though none are to the point, and may accept an hypothesis, however violently opposed to his knowledge of human nature. To that test we are, in a case like this, compelled to appeal, however little we may value 'common sense' in other fields of speculation. Ours is the field of normal human nature, motive, and action, in which every man may be a judge. I cannot but think that the author of the theory would have been stopped by considerations so obvious and obstacles so insuperable. But first he had the remote analogy of the Aztec war-prisoner who personated a god, and to a god was sacrificed. That example is of no real service: the man was a captive and could not help himself; he was not King of Anahuac. Moreover, he was sacrificed: he was not put to a death of special shame. Again, there was the Saturnian victim, if we believe the legend about to be narrated. But he too was sacrificed: he was not stripped, scourged, and hanged. Our author, however, was fascinated by the Cross at the end of the long vista of the argument. In place, therefore, of seeking, or at least in place of finding, a simple explanation of the Persian custom, or leaving it unexplained, he accepted the impossibility of the annual regicide at Babylon, and was launched into a new wilderness of conjectures and inferences to explain the absence, in the Persian case, of sacrifice and religion, the presence of a merrymaking and a hanging.

V. THE SATURNALIA

We are next to look for an historical case of the yearly sacrifice, not of a king, but of a mock-king. The argument thus carries us to the Roman feast of the Saturnalia. This festival (in late times held in December, 16-23) so closely resembled our Christmas in jollity, that Pliny (like some of us) used to withdraw to the most retired room in his Laurentine villa to escape the noise. Mr. Frazer does not remark the circumstance, but in Rome before the Empire, or earlier, the Saturnalia seem to have been a feast of one day only. 'Among our ancestors,' says Macrobius, 'the Saturnalia were completed in a single day,' though he does not seem very certain of his fact. Livy says: 'The Saturnalia were instituted as a festal day.'[57] After the time of Caligula, the Saturnalia endured for five days, 'precisely like the feast of the Sacæa at Babylon,' of which we are fated to hear a great deal.[58]

It would thus appear that the Saturnalia were originally a feast of one day, later lengthened to five days, and again to seven days. By the time of writers like Lucian and Martial the feast continued for a week, and Lucian represents Cronos (Saturn) as a jolly old king of unreason.[59] The rich helped the poor, people made presents to each other, 'a Christmas carol philosophy,' as Dickens calls it, prevailed. The masters served the slaves at table; all was licence and riot. Wax candles were given as presents (cerea), like those on our Christmas trees. These cerea, according to Macrobius, were thought by some antiquaries to be substitutes for human sacrifices. Originally, it was said, the Pelasgi, before migrating to Italy, received an oracle from Dodona:

Τῷ πατρί πέμπετε Φῶτα

'Send a man to the Father,' that is, to the god Cronos or, in Italy, Saturn. But, by a pun on the Greek Φῶτα, they were induced to substitute lights, the wax candles.[60]

Now it is a really astonishing thing that, if actual human sacrifices were offered after our era, at the Saturnalia, no Roman antiquary (and there were plenty of antiquaries) should mention the fact, while discussing the theory that cerea were commutations of sacrifice. If, now and then, under the Empire a survival or recrudescence of human sacrifice was heard of in a rural district, the antiquaries would catch at it greedily, as a proof that wax tapers really were commutations of human sacrifice, which some doubted. That rural recrudescences do occur we know from the recent case of burning an Irish peasant woman to death, to deliver her from a fairy.[61]

Mr. Frazer, however, believes that survivals of human sacrifices at the Saturnalia did really occur. He is 'tempted to surmise' that the king of the revels (who answered to our 'Twelfth Night' 'King' or 'Queen of the Bean') 'may have originally personated Saturn himself.'[62] In the following page we read that the victim 'cut his own throat on the altar of the god whom he personated.' The only known or alleged instance of human sacrifice at the Saturnalia follows.

In A.D. 303, when the persecution under Diocletian began, one Dasius, a Christian soldier, in Lower Mœsia, is said to have been the victim whom the soldiers yearly chose for the mock-king of a month, not a week, the Saturn of the occasion. Why a month, if the ancient feast lasted but a day, and, later, but a week? After being a merry monarch for thirty days, he should have cut his own throat at the altar of Saturn (Κρόνος, in the Greek MSS.).[63] Dasius declined the crown and was knocked on the head, on November 20, by a soldier, apparently a christened man, named John. The Saturnalia at Rome lasted (at least under the Empire) from December 16 to December 23. Dasius must have been executed for his refusal, announced before his month's reign (only a week is elsewhere known) should have begun—on November 23; if the regnal month ended on December 23. Thus the festive Saturnalian kings at Rome may be guessed to descend from a custom, at Rome unknown, but surviving among the soldiers, of killing a mock-king Saturnus. Dasius was no slave or criminal, but himself a soldier. The revels of a month, in place of a day or a week, must also, one presumes, be a survival, though a day was the early limit. The date of the MSS. about Dasius Mr. Frazer does not give, but he thinks that the longest MS. is 'probably based on official documents.' To the MSS. I shall return.

The grotesque figure of Carnival, destroyed at the end of a modern Roman feast which does not fall in December, is also a survival of a slain mock-king 'who personated Saturn,' so Mr. Frazer suggests, though in ancient Rome even this carnival practice is to us unknown.[64]

It will already have been observed that even if the Romans were, in some remote age, wont yearly to sacrifice a mock-king who represented a god, they did not do so at Easter, as in the case of Christ, did not do so in spring, and did not scourge the victim. Their rite, if it really corresponded to that of the soldiers who slew Dasius, began in November, and ended in December, lasting thirty days, or, teste Macrobio, originally lasting one day. If the slaying of Dasius really occurred, and was a survival of a custom once prevalent (as in ancient Anahuac), then the early Saturnalia lasted for a month, from November 23 to December 23; but Roman antiquaries knew nothing of this. The month date is remote indeed from Easter, so Mr. Frazer must try to show that originally the Saturnalia were a spring festival, like carnival.

To make the carnival and Saturnalia coincide, Mr. Frazer points out that 'if the Saturnalia, like many other seasons of licence, was always observed at the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one, it must, like the carnival, have been originally held in February or March, at the time when March was the first month of the Roman year.'[65] Thus, in conservative rural districts, the Saturnalia would continue to be held in February, not, as at Rome, in December, though Roman writers do not tell us so, and though non-Roman pagan peoples held festival at the winter solstice. The soldiers who killed poor Dasius were ultra-conservative, but they killed him in November, when their month of Saturnalia began, not in February, when, as they held by old usage, their Saturnalia should have been kept. The hypothesis may be stated thus:

1. In rural districts 'the older and sterner practice' of murder may long have survived.[66]

2. In rural districts the Saturnalia continued to be held in February-March, not in December.[67]

3. Therefore the soldiers, who kept up 'the older and sterner practice' of remote districts where the Saturnalia fell in February-March, killed Dasius—in November!

4. Meanwhile, so wedded were the rural districts to Saturnalia in February-March, that the feast continued in these months under the Church and became our carnival.

5. The eclectic soldiers in Lower Mœsia kept up the old killing and full month of revelry (though we never hear of a full month in older or later Rome), but they accepted the new date, November (not kept in Rome) and December; though in their remote rural homes the Saturnalia were in February-March. Doubtless their officers insisted on the new official date, while permitting the old month of revel and the human sacrifice. Yet, apparently, of old there was but one day of revel.

But is the story of St. Dasius a true story? The editor and discoverer of the Greek text in which the legend occurs at full length, Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent, at first held that as far as the sacrifice of the military mock-king goes the story is false. I have already observed that Mr. Frazer says nothing about the date of the Greek MS. containing the longest legend of Dasius. M. Cumont does. The MS. is of the eleventh century of our era, and the original narrative, he thinks, was done into Greek out of the Latin, which may have been based on official documents, before the end of the seventh century[68] A.D., by some one who knew Latin ill, wrote execrable Greek, did not understand his subject, and was far from scrupulous. These sentiments of M. Cumont 'set in a new and lurid light'—as Mr. Frazer says of something else—-the only evidence for the yearly military sacrifice of a mock-king of the Saturnalia. Our author was unscrupulous, for he makes Dasius profess the Nicene Creed before it was made. As to the thirty days' revel, M. Cumont supposes that to be a blunder of our author, who did not know that the Saturnalia only occupied a week.[69] M. Cumont held that the king of the feast had not to slay himself, but only to sacrifice to Saturn; in fact, Bassus, his commanding officer, does ask him, in the legend, to 'sacrifice to our gods, whom even the barbarians worship.' Dasius, the MS. says, refused, and was knocked on the head by a soldier named John. 'John' was likely to be a Christian, and M. Cumont suggests that the ignorant translator of the Latin took 'sepultus est' ('he was buried' by a soldier named John) for 'pulsus,' or 'depulsus est,' 'he was knocked on the head' (ἐκρούσθη.) In fact the Greek translator of the seventh century retouched his Latin original à plaisir. Human sacrifices, says M. Cumont, had been abolished since Hadrian's time. The soldiers, if they sacrificed a mock-king, broke an imperial edict.[70]

Our evidence then would seem, if M. Cumont is right, to be that of an unfaithful and not very scrupulous translator and embellisher of a Latin text. He informs us by the way that similar noisy performances went on in his own Christian period, not in December, but on New Year's Day. The Saturnalia were thus pushed on a week from December 23; we do not learn that they were transferred to, or retained at, February-March. The moral lesson of the legend is that we must not be noisy on New Year's Day.

Thus M. Cumont did not at first accept the evidence for the annual sacrifice of a mock-king representing the god Saturn. But M. Parmentier suggested that an old cruel rite might have been introduced by Oriental soldiers into Mœsia (303 A.D.) thanks to the licensed ferocity of the persecutions under Diocletian. The victim, Dasius, was a Christian, and the author of his legend told the tale to illustrate the sin of revelry on New Year's Day. But what led to the revival of the cruelty? M. Parmentier quoted the story of our Babylonian festival, the Sacæa, in which a mock-king was scourged and slain. This or a similar rite the Roman legions finally confused with their own Saturnalia, both as to date and as to characteristics. The Oriental soldiers of the Roman Empire imported into the army this Oriental feast and sacrifice: just as they brought monuments of Mithra-worship into Mœsia. In an hour of military licence and of persecution, the cohorts in Mœsia may actually have tried to sacrifice a Christian private as a representative of King Saturn.

So far the sacrifice is an Asiatic importation, not a Roman survival. But M. Cumont, after reading M. Parmentier, returned from his disbelief in the veracity of the Dasius legend. He thought that the extension of the Saturnalia from one day to five days, after Caligula, might be due to an imitation introduced by Eastern slaves in Rome (an influential class) of the five days' feast of the Babylonian Sacæa. But thirty days, as in Mœsia, are not five days. He also inclined to accept the recently proposed identification of the Sacæa with a really old Babylonian feast called Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim, an identification which we shall later criticise. As to the imperial edict forbidding human sacrifice, M. Cumont now suggested that it had become a dead letter and impotent. In the general decadence of 303 monstrous cruelties flourished, and the Saturnalia were marked by gladiatorial combats. Thus, in remote Mœsia, the half Oriental soldiery might really sacrifice a Christian 'for the safety of his comrades under arms.'

So far the sacrifice of Dasius looks rather like a cruelty introduced into decadent Rome, and at the good-humoured Saturnalia, by Oriental legionaries, than like a Roman survival or recrudescence of a regular original feature of the Saturnalia. In any case the stripping and scourging of the Sacæan mock-king, his hanging, and his simulated resurrection (at which we shall find Mr. Frazer making a guess) are absent, while the date of the alleged transaction (November-December) does not tally with Purim, or Eastertide, or the date of the Sacæa. The duration of the Dasius feast, thirty days, is neither Roman nor Oriental. Thus, far from illuminating the Oriental practice, the rite reported in Mœsia does but make the problem more perplexing. The evidence has all the faults possible, and the conjecture that the Greek writer invented the sacrifice, to throw discredit on the New Year revels of his contemporaries, may be worth considering.

Perhaps I may hint that I think the historical evidence of the author of the Dasius legend so extremely dubious that I might have expected Mr. Frazer to offer a criticism of its character. The general reader can gather from the 'Golden Bough' no idea of the tenuity of the testimony, which, of course, is at once visible to readers of French and Greek. We address ourselves to scholars, and for scholars Mr. Frazer has provided the necessary citations, but my heart inclines to regard the needs of the general reader. (Cf. 'Man,' May 1901, No. 53.)

VI. THE GREEK CRONIA

From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less, to Saturn in Rome, though how much of the resemblance is due to Roman varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February, nor March, but in July.[71] Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another hypothesis) were originally in February or March, though of this we have no proof. Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at the winter solstice.

As proof that the Attic feast of Cronos (supposed to answer to the Saturnalia) was originally in spring, not in July, Mr. Frazer writes: 'A cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronos by the Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March, and there are traces of a licence accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine jars,' in the month of flowers preceding.[72] It was a proper season for licence.

The possible meaning of the cake does not go for much, and Cronos is not Dionysus. There was a spring festival of Cronos at Olympia, and Aug. Mommsen thinks that the Athenian Cronos feast was originally vernal, though Athenian tradition thought it was a harvest feast.[73]

The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos, who certainly received many such offerings.

We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally with the June-July date of the Persian Sacæa, as given by Mr. Frazer (and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74] But in his third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sacæa æabout Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]

How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of licence like the Sacæa usually occur just after harvest, the real time of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76] But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sacæa in June-July. On the other hand, the conjecture that the Sacæa were vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.

VII. THE SACÆA

We are still trying to find an historical case of a man who is sacrificed in the character of a god and a king. The argument next introduces us to the Sacæa at Babylon, when the mock-king was hanged, the Persian feast, which, as we saw, M. Parmentier, following Herr Meissner, is inclined to identify with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim.

This identification, this theory that Zakmuk, Sacæa, and the Jewish Purim are all the same feast, is essential to Mr. Frazer's theory. But, before his theory was published, Meyer, in the new volume of his 'History of Antiquity,' had declared that the identification is impossible, philologically and as a matter of fact (Geschichte des Alterthums). It would be interesting to know the meaning of the word Sacæa, or Sacea, or Sakia, which Hyde translates 'convivial drinking, drinking healths' (compotatio, propinatio).[77] We remember the Persian butler, called a Sáki, in Omar Khayyam:

The eternal Sáki from the bowl has poured Myriads of other bubbles, and will pour.

If the wine-pourer, the Sáki, of Omar is etymologically connected with the Sakæa, or Sacæa, then the feast means a wine-party. The Greeks, however, connected the Sacæa with the Sacæ, an Oriental tribe of the great race stretching from the Black Sea to Dacia. Indeed, in Strabo's time, the feasters at the Sacæa dressed as Scythians (Sacæ) and drank, as Horace tells us that the Scythians were used to drink. This occurred at Zela, a town of Pontus, where a love goddess, in Persian Anaitis, of the type of the Babylonian Ishtar, was adored. Mr. Frazer even conjectures that her high priest, or a substitute, 'who played the King of the Sacæa,' was yearly sacrificed here, perhaps as Tammuz.[78] No record of the fact has reached us.

The interesting point about this derivation of Sacæa from the tribe of the Sacæ is that the festival was believed, says Strabo, to commemorate a great victory of the Persians over the Sacæ. In precisely the same way the Persian feast of the Magophonia was supposed to commemorate a victory over and massacre of the Magi.[79] Purim, again, was held to commemorate a triumph of the Jews over the Persians and a massacre of the Persians. In three cases, then, Sacæa, Magophonia, and Purim, a feast which was a secular drinking bout, preserve the memory of a bloody victory. I do not observe that Mr. Frazer notices this coincidence.

But manifestly this kind of feast is not a feast of the death of a mock-king, still less, if possible, a religious festival of the death and resurrection of a vernal god.[80] Yet there really was (if we accept rather poor evidence) not a sacrifice but an execution of a mock-king, a criminal, at the Sacæa, as held in Babylon. I quote our authorities. First comes Athenæus, who is writing about feasts of unreason, at which, in various regions, the slaves are waited upon by their masters.[81] He says nothing of the execution of a mock-king. He remarks: 'Berosus, in the first book of his "History of Babylon," says that on the sixteenth day of the month Lous there is a great festival celebrated at Babylon, which is called Sakeas, and it lasts five days; and during these days it is the custom for the masters to be under the orders of their slaves, and one of the slaves puts on a robe like the king's, being called Zoganes, and is master of the house. And Ctesias also mentions this festival in the second book of his "History of Persia."' (Ctesias nourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is about 200 B.C.)

Thus Athenæus is silent about the execution of a mock-king, though doubtless he had the book of Berosus before him. And Dio Chrysostom, who does speak of the execution, and he alone does so, says nothing about Berosus, or any other authority. I cite the observations of Dio Chrysostom. He puts them into the mouth of the cynic, Diogenes, who is lecturing Alexander the Great, to tame his pride; and who tells illustrative anecdotes, some of them absurd, much as Mr. Barlow was used to instruct Masters Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. Dio, then, makes Diogenes say that at the Sacæa 'they take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat him upon the king's throne, and give him the king's raiment, and let him lord it and drink, and run riot and use the king's concubines during these days, and no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip, and scourge, and crucify (or hang, ἐκρέμασαν) him.'[82] He dies, not as a victim, by sacrifice, but as a criminal, by a cruel and degrading form of capital punishment.[83] According to Dio any condemned criminal would serve the turn. But Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the profession of victim was hereditary.[84]

Such is the story which Dio makes Diogenes tell Alexander, in a humorous apologue against royal pride. 'You will soon be growing a crest like a cock,' says Diogenes in Dio's essay. I cannot think that evidence found only in a literary tour de force, and put into the mouth of a professed humourist, proves historically that the mock-king was actually hanged once a year, at a feast described by Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius, who never mention so strange an affair as the hanging. The reader will not find that Mr. Frazer suggests all these doubts. Indeed, the student who avoids footnotes will believe that the tale of the hanging is 'according to the historian Berosus, who, as a Babylonian priest, spoke with ample knowledge.'[85]

Now, granting that there really was a yearly execution at Babylon of a criminal, a mock-king, why was he put to death? We know what Mr. Frazer's theory needs. It needs historical examples of men who, by being sacrificed as victims, obtain a divine character, as representing the god to whom they are sacrificed. The theory also demands that these victims shall be arrayed and crowned as kings. It is desirable, too, that they should perish about our Eastertide, and that they should be supposed to rise again. The solitary example of a Saturnalian victim in Mœsia did not fulfil these conditions. He was arrayed as a king, indeed, and was sacrificed, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius; but he was not stripped and scourged, and he died, not at Easter, but in November: if he had not refused the part thrust on him he would have died in December. There was no word about his resurrection. It was found necessary to suggest that originally the Saturnalian victim died in February-March, but this was not proved.

The other historical case, the mock-king of the Sacæa, also does not fulfil the conditions required. He is robed, and crowned, and scourged, but he is not sacrificed. We have no hint of a resurrection; none of a religious character attaching to the feast; none of a divine character attaching to the victim. The feast is traditionally a revel commemorative of a victory: the victim is a condemned criminal. As to the date of the death, Mr. Frazer has two contradictory theories. By the first (which is correct) the victim died probably in June-July (if not, certainly in September). By the second, the month date of the death is fixed (provisionally) in March-April. Let me add that, to suit Mr. Frazer's theory, the victim must not only have been divine at the origin of the institution, but must have been recognised as divine at the time of the Crucifixion of our Lord: otherwise our Lord's death, in the character of the victim, could lend him no 'halo of divinity.'

VI

ATTEMPTS TO PROVE THE SACÆAN CRIMINAL DIVINE

As our historical evidence does not meet Mr. Frazer's needs, as the Sacæan victim is not regarded as divine, as he is no 'victim' but a criminal, as he is not sacrificed, as the feast is not religious but a secular merrymaking, as no resurrection is mentioned, as the historical date does not fit Eastertide, Mr. Frazer has to invent theories which will prove far more than the facts alleged by Dio Chrysostom, Berosus in Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius; or will prove that originally the facts were the opposite of those historically recorded.

Through his whole argument Mr. Frazer seems to me to present two distinct theories alternately, and only at the close can I detect any attempt at reconciliation. A third theory, distinct from either, appears to be rejected. Indeed, Mr. Frazer's task is not easy. He may say that the Sacæan victim represents the king, and that the king being, by the hypothesis, divine, the victim is divine also. But he needs, moreover, a resurrection of the dead man, hence the theory that the victim represents not only the king, but a god of the type of Tammuz or Adonis. At the feasts of that god, a god of vegetable life, there was wailing for his death, rejoicing for his resurrection. At Babylon this occurred in June-July. But there is no evidence that a human victim was slain for Tammuz: none that he was scourged and hanged. How are the two theories, the victim as divine king, the victim as Tammuz, to be combined? Their combination is necessary, for the king is needed to yield the royal robes; while Tammuz is needed to yield the resurrection, and the fast preceding the feast before Purim, a fast of wailing for Tammuz. We hear of no fast before the Sacæa, but if Purim be borrowed from the Sacæa (which is indispensable to the theory), the Sacæa too must have been preceded by a fast, though it is unrecorded.

Clearly the king theory alone, or the Tammuz theory alone, will not yield the facts necessary to the hypothesis. Consequently the two theories must be combined. The king must not only be divine, be a god; he must also be a god of vegetation, a god of the Tammuz type, who has a resurrection. Now we have no evidence, or none is adduced, to prove that the king, whether Babylonian or Persian, was ever deemed to be an incarnation of Tammuz or any such vegetable deity. Without sound evidence to that effect the theory cannot move a step. We have abundance of Babylonian sacred and secular texts: not one is adduced to prove that the king incarnated any god, especially Tammuz.

Mr. Frazer then, after putting forward alternately the king theory and the Tammuz theory, does finally, if I understand him, combine them. He talks of 'the human god, the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called.'[1] Thus the victim is the king, and we get the royal robes, and the five days of royalty. The king is also Tammuz (unless I fail to grasp the meaning), the victim too is Tammuz, and we get the fast (though we hear of none before the Sacæa), the feast, and the resurrection. But this is a late and rather casually introduced theory, quite destitute of evidence as regards the king's being recognised for Tammuz.

Previously, throughout two volumes, the victim had alternately derived his necessary divinity from the king and from the Tammuz god. He derived more: as king he had the entrée of the royal harem; as Tammuz he was the consort of a woman, 'probably a sacred harlot, who represented the great Semitic goddess Ishtar or Astarte.' His union with her magically fertilised the crops.[2] A similar duty, in the dream-time of Mr. Frazer's hypotheses, had been that of the majesty of Babylon. 'Originally, we may conjecture, such couples exercised their function for a whole year, on the conclusion of which the male partner—the divine king—was put to death; but in historical times it seems that, as a rule, the human god—the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called—enjoyed his divine privileges, and discharged his divine duties, only for a short part of the year,' namely five days, at the Sacæa.[3]

The divine duties of the early kings of Babylon (if I understand Mr. Frazer) were 'to stand for the powers that make for the fertility of plants and perhaps also of animals.' Are we to conceive that these pleasing exercises with the lady of the divine pair were all the duties of the early kings of Babylon? In that case, who carried on the civil and military control of the Empire? Of course, if the early king did nothing at all but associate with 'the human goddess who shared his bed and transmitted his beneficent energies to the rest of nature,'[4] then he may have been a man-god, a Tammuz, if the texts say so, and his substitute might die at once as royal proxy, to save the king's life, and also as Tammuz. Moreover, it would not matter a pin's fee whether such a king died or not. Only, no man could take the billet of king.

Thus it may be Mr. Frazer's intention to combine in one the two theories of the victim as Tammuz and as royal proxy. In that case his two apparently inconsistent theories are one theory.

But, if I apprehend it correctly, it is a very audacious theory. Where have we a proven case of a king who incarnates a god of vegetation, plays the part of 'making for the fertility of plants' by the assistance of 'the human goddess who shares his bed, and transmits his beneficent energies to the rest of nature,' and who is sacrificed annually? Does this divine voluptuary also keep a royal harem, or is that essential and more or less attested part of the Sacæa a later excrescence?

Without some historical evidence for such a strange array of facts, including the yearly sacrifice of the monarch, I must hesitate to think that Mr. Frazer's theory of a king who is both king and Tammuz, and has, later, a substitute who is both Tammuz and king, is a practical hypothesis explanatory of 'the halo of divinity which was shed around the cross of Calvary.' I cannot accept as evidence for a combination of facts separately so extraordinary, a series of inferences and presumptions from rural or barbaric revels in spring or at harvest. The existence of a King or Queen of the May, or of the Bean on Twelfth Night, with occasional or even frequent mock destructions of the monarch of a playful day, cannot be used as proof that early Babylonian kings consorted for a year with a human goddess, and then were burned to death as gods of vegetable produce; especially when there is no historical testimony, and only inference from myth, in favour of any human goddess or of a burned king.

We have not, meanwhile, even any testimony to show that, in any time, in any place, any human victim was ever slain, let alone a king (and a king annually), as Tammuz. We have only a guess, founded on the weakest possible basis, that of analogy, 'The analogy,' says Mr. Frazer, 'of Lityerses and of folk-custom, both European and savage, suggests that in Phœnicia the corn-spirit—the dead Adonis—may formerly have been represented by a human victim.'[5] .... This can hardly persuade me that the kings of Babylon were annually sacrificed as Tammuz or as Adonis.

While admitting that Mr. Frazer may really mean to combine his two theories (the victim as king, the victim as Tammuz), and while he certainly makes his victim both a king and a god, I shall take the freedom to examine his theory in the sequence of the passages wherein it is proposed, and request the reader to decide whether there be one theory or two theories.

But first, have we any examples of a sacrifice by hanging, not by burning, the human victim? For the Sacæan victim, though confessedly hanged, is said, by Mr. Frazer, to be 'sacrificed.'

I. SACRIFICE BY HANGING. DOES IT EXIST?

Let us look at actual human victims, actually known to have been slain in the interests of agriculture. Are, or were, these human victims put to the infamous death of malefactors, like the mock-king of the Sacæa? They were not. Cases are given in vol. ii. p. 238 et seq.

1. The Indians of Guyaquar used to sacrifice human blood and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields.[6]

2. In the Aztec harvest festival a victim was crushed between two great stones (perhaps to represent the grinding of the maize?).

3. The Mexicans sacrificed young children, older children, and old men for each stage of the maize's growth. We are not told how they were sacrificed.[7]

4. The Egyptians burned red-haired men, and scattered their ashes with winnowing fans. This burning is a usual feature of sacrifice, and is not hanging or crucifying.

5. The Skidi, or Wolf Pawnees, burned a victim to Ti-ra-wá, 'the power above that moves the universe, and controls all things,' but the victim was a deer or a buffalo. There were also occasional human sacrifices before sowing; the victim had his head cleft with a tomahawk, and was then riddled with arrows, and afterwards burned.[8] In some cases he was tied to a cross, before being slain with an axe.[9]

6. A Sioux girl was burned over a slow fire, and then shot with arrows. Her flesh, for magical purposes, was squeezed over the newly sown fields.

7. West African victims were killed with spades and hoes, and burned in newly tilled fields.

8. At Lagos a girl was impaled among sacrificed sheep, goats, yams, heads of maize, and plantains hung on stakes. Though impalement is a form of capital punishment, probably the girl's blood was expected to fertilise the earth. We have no proof that crucifixion was used in Babylon, or the same motive might be alleged for the mock-king at the Sacæa. 'It may be doubted whether crucifixion was an Oriental mode of punishment,' says Mr. Frazer. He does not say that it was an Oriental form of sacrifice.[10]

9. The Marimos kill and burn a human victim, and scatter the ashes on the ground to fertilise it.

10. The Bagolos hew a slave to pieces.

11. Some tribes in India chop victims up.

12. The Kudulu allow to a victim all the revels, women and all, of the Sacæan mock-king, and then cut a hole in him, and smear his blood over an idol. This is sacrifice, not capital punishment.

13. The Khonds slew their revered and god-like victim in a variety of ways, strangling him in a tree, burning, and chopping up, that his flesh might be sown on the fields. The head, bowels, and bones were burned.

Such are the examples of a real human victim slain for the good of the crops. In six out of fourteen cases the victim's ashes, blood, or flesh is used magically to fertilise the fields, and probably this is done in several other instances. In seven cases burning occurs. In two sacrifice to a god or idol occurs. In one only is the mode of death a recognised form of capital punishment.

Therefore Mr. Frazer does not seem to me to be justified in taking for and describing as 'sacrifice' the capital punishment inflicted at the Sacæa on a mock-king who notoriously was a criminal condemned to death, and who was hanged, not sacrificed.

To be sure Mr. Frazer tries to turn this point, and how? Perhaps ancient kings of Lydia were once burned alive on pyres, 'as living embodiments of their god.' For the Lydian, like the Macedonian and many other royal houses, claimed descent from Heracles, who, being on fire already under the shirt of Nessus, homeopathically burned himself. Crœsus, defeated, was about to die by fire, but not out of his own head. Cyrus was going to burn him alive, like Jeanne d'Arc, Cranmer, Wishart, and others. This cruel infliction by a foreign enemy hardly proves a Lydian custom, nor are Lydians exactly Babylonians. Again, if an old Prussian king 'wished to leave a good name behind him,' he burned himself before a holy oak. 'Crummies is not a Prussian,' nor were the kings of Babylon. Once more Movers thought that the 'divine pair who figured by deputy' at the Sacæa were Semiramis and Sandan or Sardanapalus. (Which divine pair, the king's proxy and one of the king's concubines, or the Tammuz man and the sacred harlot?) Sandan was thought to be Heracles by the Greeks, and his effigy was perhaps burned on a pyre at his festival in Tarsus. Now the Persians, according to Agathias, worshipped Sandes (Sandan), and perhaps the Babylonians did so also, though really that agreeable Byzantine minor poet, Agathias, cannot be called a good witness. Next, K. O. Müller thinks that Sandan (Sandes) may have been burned in a mystery play in Nineveh, Müller giving free licence to his fancy, as he admits. Movers, too, thought that 'at the Sacæa the Zoganes represented a god, and paired with a woman who personated a goddess.'[11] And Movers thinks that the Sacæan victim was originally burned.[12]

For these 'exquisite reasons,' that the Lydian monarchs claimed descent from Heracles, who was burned, that Cyrus wanted to burn Crœsus alive, that old Prussian kings who wished to leave a good name burned themselves, that Movers thought that Sandan or Sardanapalus might have figured at the Sacæa as Zoganes, that Agathias mentioned Sandes as a Babylonian deity, and that Movers thinks that the man who acted the god was burned, Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the mock-king of the Sacæa was burned, once upon a time.[13] But we only know that he was scourged and hanged. So perhaps, Mr. Frazer suggests, he was both scourged, hanged, and burned afterwards, or perhaps hanging or crucifixion 'may have been a later mitigation of his sufferings'—a pretty mitigation! And why was flogging added?[14] One had liefer be burned, like a god and a king, than be first whipped and then crucified, as a malefactor of the lowest and most servile kind, losing, too, the necessary suggestion of sacrifice and divinity implied in being burned. Besides, apart from this theory of a cruel and debasing 'mitigation,' there is no evidence at all except what proves that the mock-king at the Sacæa was first stripped of his royal robes, then whipped, then hanged. If he dies as god or king, why is he stripped of his royal robes? The man was hanged, was capitally punished (which as a condemned criminal he richly deserved), and 'there is an end on't,' as Dr. Johnson rudely remarked. Now 'we must not forget' that Mr. Frazer has announced this I sacrifice 'of a divine king as his theory, but we need not, I may even say must not, accept the theory. Because, first, Mr. Frazer gives many examples of persons believed each to contain a god, either temporarily or permanently.[15] But in not one single case is the person said to be killed for the benefit of the god whom he contains.

Secondly, there was historically no sacrifice in the case of the Sacæan mock-king.

The mock-king, then, if he has any divinity, has it not as a sacrifice, for he is not sacrificed; nor as representing a king who incarnates a god, for no kings or others thought to incarnate gods, whether temporarily or permanently, are proved to be slain for the benefit of that god. Nor are any kings who are actually slain, slain by hanging. The death of a man, as a god, belongs, if to anything, to quite another festival, that of Tammuz or Adonis, and to quite another set of ideas. We have no proof indeed that a man was ever hanged or sacrificed as an embodiment of Adonis or Tammuz. But Mr. Frazer's theory of the reason for the Crucifixion on Calvary demands the sacrifice of a human victim, who is, ex officio, a god, is sacrificed in that character, and is feigned to rise again. He must also be royal, to account for the scarlet robe and crown of thorns of the great victim.

II. STAGES IN MR. FRAZER'S THEORY

Let us now trace the stages of Mr. Frazer's theory that the Sacæan victim is both god and king.

1. First in order of statement comes the description of the Sacæa, combined from Athenæus, who mentions no victim, and Dio Chrysostom, who does. We learn (from Mr. Frazer, not from Dio)[16] that the victim 'dies in the king's stead.' But 'we must not forget that the king is slain in his character of a god, his death and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people and the world.'

That is Mr. Frazer's theory: we have seen no proof of it, we have remarked that sacrificed victims are not hanged; that kings are not scourged; that there is no evidence beyond conjecture for an earlier Babylonian process of burning; while conjecture also explains whipping and hanging as a 'mitigation,' or alleges that possibly the victim was hanged first and burned afterwards.

Here the king is certainly not,[17] on the face of it, a god of vegetation: if anything, he is more like the Chitome in Congo, who was a 'pontiff.' His credulous people believed that the world would end if the Chitome died a natural death, 'so when he seemed likely to die' he was clubbed or strangled. He was sacrificed to no god whom he incarnated.[18] He was not clubbed once a year (like the Babylonian king of Mr. Frazer's theory); he was given a rude euthanasia 'when he seemed likely to die.' Does science ask us to believe that each Babylonian king had the cosmic rapport of a Congo savage pontiff, and was sacrificed after a year's reign, because a savage pontiff in Congo is put to death, not annually, but 'when he seems likely to die'?

Here, whatever science may expect us to believe, we are told by Mr. Frazer that the king in Babylon was annually sacrificed, as a god, indeed, but not explicitly as a god of vegetation, who has a resurrection.

2. A Babylonian god of vegetation, and a known god, appears in ii. 123, 124. This god is Tammuz. We hear that 'water was thrown over him at a great mourning ceremony, at which men and women stood round the funeral pyre of Tammuz lamenting.... The dead Tammuz was probably represented in effigy, water was poured over him, and he came to life again.' Mr. Frazer does not here plead for a human victim. The festival 'doubtless took place in the month Tammuz (June-July),' or in different places, at different times, from midsummer to autumn, or from June to September, as the late Mr. Robertson Smith calculated. Tammuz, so Mr. Sayce is cited, 'is originally the spring vegetation, which dies in his month, Tammuz or Du'ûzu' (June-July).

Here, then, we have a death and resurrection of Tammuz. It occurs in June-July, or June-September, and Tammuz is undoubtedly the god of spring vegetation. But Mr. Frazer does not here tell us that the king of Babylon is also Tammuz. Tammuz is not whipped and hanged at the Tammuz feast in July. His dead body is 'probably' a dummy.

In vol. ii. 253 Mr. Frazer returns to the victim, the mock-king, of the Sacæa. But he says nothing here about the real king of Babylon. He wishes to show how and why the victim is divine. Now, in ii. 26, we were told that the victim is divine because he 'represents a dying god.' 'For we must not forget that the king dies in his character of a god.'...

Was Mr. Frazer satisfied with this explanation given in ii. 26? Apparently not; for[19] he gives a new explanation and a different one. 'It seems worth suggesting that the mock-king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' Here the Tammuz dummy or effigy of ii. 123, 124, is, perhaps, discarded. Still, if a real live Tammuz was burned on a funeral pyre[20] his ashes might well be represented by a dummy. It has not yet occurred to Mr. Frazer, as it does later, to have the re-arisen god personated by a living human counterpart (Mordecai in a later page) of the dead Tammuz (Haman). The festival of the Sacæa is now a Tammuz festival, a religious feast, and, indeed, is identical with that of ii. 123, 124, for it occurs in the month Lous. Now Lous, says Mr. Robertson Smith, 'answered to the lunar month Tammuz,'[21] and the month of Tammuz[22] was June-July, or June-September.

There could not surely be two Tammuz feasts in the month Tammuz? We are therefore confronted by the singular facts that Tammuz lay 'on a funeral pyre'[23] and also that, as the Sacæan victim, who, Mr. Frazer thinks it 'worth suggesting' personated Tammuz, he was at the same feast, the Sacæa, whipped and hanged.[24] Mr. Frazer goes on: 'If this conjecture is right, the view that the mock-king at the Sacæa was slain in the character of a god' (Tammuz) 'would be established.'

But it was established already, was it not on other grounds, to Mr. Frazer's satisfaction, in ii. 26? There the criminal victim died as a king, and as a god, for the king was a god, and so was his proxy. Now, on the other hand, if Mr. Frazer's latest conjecture is right, the victim dies as a real known god, Tammuz. We keep asking, Was the king also an incarnation of Tammuz? May I not be excused for surmising that we have here an hypothesis in the making, an hypothesis resting on two different theories? If Mr. Frazer holds that the king of Babylon was also Tammuz, as the mock-king was, here was the opportunity for saying so, and proving the fact from Babylonian texts.

Mr. Frazer here gives us a Tammuz feast in which Tammuz lies on a funeral pyre, and also a Tammuz feast in which the human representative of that deity is whipped and hanged, while 'the dead Tammuz was probably represented in effigy,' water was poured over him, and he came to life again. How? In the person of Mordecai? These are the results of ii. 123, 124, and of ii. 253, 254.

These things are, confessedly, conjectures. But one thing is quite certain: the Sacæa, wherein Tammuz either lay on a funeral pyre, and afterwards had water poured over him, 'probably in effigy,' or was hanged, was a festival of June-July. Variations of calendars, however, might make the Sacæa fall 'from midsummer to autumn or from June to September' (ii. 123, note of Mr. Robertson Smith). These dates are remote from Eastertide.

To this point Mr. Frazer[25] promises 'to return later.' He does so in the most disconcerting manner. For when he returns the Sacæa, which were in the month Tammuz, June-July,[26] startle us by being held in March or March-April.[27] May I not say that I seem to detect traces of an hypothesis in the making, and of discrepant theories? We have already been rather puzzled by the Tammuz on a funeral pyre, who has cold water poured over him, 'probably in effigy,' and also is honoured by being whipped and hanged in the person of a human representative, a mock-king, at the same festival. But perhaps there were two Tammuz feasts in the month of Tammuz? And possibly the victim was whipped and hanged at one of them, while his mortal remains were burned on the pyre at the other? 'It is quite possible,' says Mr. Frazer, when explaining why a victim of a sacrifice was hanged, not burned as is usual, 'that both forms of execution, or rather of sacrifice, may have been combined by hanging or crucifying the victim first and burning him afterwards;'[28] but he neglects the buxom opportunity of corroborating this conjecture, by referring to the Tammuz victim who had both a funeral pyre and a gibbet, in ii. 123, 124, 253, 254.

III. A POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION

There is, perhaps, a mode of reconciling the dates of the Tammuz festivals, at one of which Tammuz was honoured with a pyre, at the other (in the person of his representative, the Sacæan mock-king) with a gibbet. Dr. Jastrow places a Tammuz feast in the fourth month, which, if the Babylonian year begins, as Mr. Frazer says it does, with the month Nisan, means that the fourth month and a Tammuz feast occurred in our June-July. But Dr. Jastrow also writes that in the sixth Babylonian month, our August-September, 'there was celebrated a festival to Tammuz.'[29]

Thus Tammuz might have his gibbet in June-July, and his pyre in August-September. But alas! this will not do, for the pyre is of June-July.[30] Nor can he have his gibbet in August-September, as I had fondly hoped, for he is to be identified with the mock-king of the Sacæa, and the month of his hanging is Tammuz, Lous, or June-July, if Mr. Robertson Smith is right.[31] Thus I really fail to believe that Tammuz could have both a burning and a hanging in June-July. I hoped that Dr. Jastrow's two Tammuz feasts had solved the problem, but I hoped in vain.

IV. THE SACÆA SUDDENLY CHANGES ITS DATE

Meanwhile, even though we have allowed for two Tammuz feasts, are we also to admit a third Tammuz feast at the March festival of the Sacæa? For in vol. iii. 151-153, March has become the date of the Sacæa, rather to our surprise, for the date had been June-July.[32] Now three Tammuz feasts in six months seem one too many, if not two. Consequently the arguments which in ii. 123, 124, 253, 254, show the Sacæan victim, because he died in the month Tammuz, to represent the god Tammuz fail, perhaps, if the victim really died in March, at the Babylonian Zakmuk, or Zagmuku, a feast in honour, not of Tammuz, but of Bau (a goddess), and later of Marduk.[33] Neither Bau nor Marduk is Tammuz; nor does the victim seem likely to represent Tammuz, after his death is shifted from the Tammuz feasts of May-June or June-July, July-August, to March, when the feast was really in honour, not of Tammuz, but of Bau, or later, of Marduk.

All our difficulties, indeed, pale before the fact that the date of the Sacæa, when the possible Tammuz victim was hanged, is fixed twice; once, with much show of reason and 'with unconcealed delight,' in June-July, in the second volume; while, next, it is argued from, in the third volume, as if the date were March-April.

I conjecture, therefore, that the July date was not inconsistent with what is now Mr. Frazer's theory when he revised his second volume. Otherwise he would not have said that Mr. Robertson Smith's decision as to the July date 'supplies so welcome a confirmation of the conjecture in the text,'[34] and then, in iii. 152, 153, have proceeded to argue on the presumption that Mr. Robertson Smith's calculations may be, for the purposes of the theory, disregarded. And they are disregarded, as we shall see. If they were dubious, they should never have been welcomed.

V. VARIOUS THEORIES OF THE VICTIM

Meanwhile, for our own argument, as to the precise nature of the Babylonian King's divinity, vegetable or not, I do not think that we have yet found the King of Babylon explicitly identified with a god of vegetation.

The victim, remember, was at first divine, either as proxy of the king, incarnating, I think, a god unknown; or as full of cosmic rapport, as a man-god of the second species.[35] Next his divinity was established, if Mr. Frazer rightly conjectured that he 'represented Tammuz himself.'[36] Next he was a criminal vicariously sacrificed for 'the saving of the king's life for another year.'[37]

Next 'it would appear that the Zoganes' (the same old victim) 'during his five days of office personated not merely a king but a god, whether that god was the Elamite Humman, the Babylonian Marduk, or some other deity not yet identified.'[38] Next the victim personated 'a god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis, (and) enjoyed the favours of a woman, probably a sacred harlot....' in addition to the caresses of the royal seraglio.[39] Next the indefatigable victim represented the king, 'the human god, the Saturn, Zoganes, Tammuz, or whatever he was called,' though all we know of the god Zoganes is that Zoganes was the title of the slave lord of the household at the Persian Sacæa.[40]

It would thus appear almost as if all gods are one god to Mr. Frazer by a kind of scientific 'Henotheism.' Humman or Saturn, Zoganes or Tammuz, Marduk or Adonis, any one of them, or all of them, will do for the king to incarnate or personate. Any one of them, or all of them, will figure as representatives of vegetable life in company with Zeus and the horses of Virbius! 'We may conjecture that the horses by which Virbius was said to have been slain were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation.'[41] Now let me too say 'we may conjecture.' Mr. Frazer tells us that 'horses were excluded from the grove and sanctuary' of Virbius.[42] Is it putting too great pressure on evidence to conjecture that the horses, while being driven out, were whipped? Now the horses embodied, perhaps, as we are told, a deity of vegetation. They were whipped, and therefore it was usual to whip the representatives of a deity of vegetation. This solves our problem, why was the victim, the divine victim, whipped?

Seriously, have we not in all this book to do with that method of arbitrary conjecture which has ruined so many laborious philosophies of religion?

As to one essential conjecture, that the Babylonian, or rather the Persian, kings represented a deity of vegetation, I can offer only one shadowy testimony. Nebuchadnezzar for a while exhibited a caprice in favour of a purely vegetable diet. This may have been a survival of a royal taboo. As a god of vegetation, a king would not eat vegetables any more than a savage usually eats his totem. But some savages do eat their totems on certain sacred occasions, and that may be the reason why Nebuchadnezzar, for a given period, turned vegetarian.

VII

ZAKMUK, SACÆA, AND PURIM

It is necessary to get the death of the Sacæan victim into touch with Easter. The Sacæa, when he died, had been in June-July, in vol. ii., in Mr. Frazer's first edition, before he evolved his theory. When the theory is evolved, in the second edition and third volume, the Sacæa prefer to occur in March-April, which gets the sufferings of the mock-king into touch with the Jewish Purim, and so within measurable distance of our Passion Week, though the June-July date of the first edition survives in the second volume of the new edition. The change of date of the Sacæa is arranged for by the plan, rejected by Meyer and Jastrow, of identifying the Persian Sacæa and the Jewish Purim with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk or Zakmuk, a New Year festival of March-April.[1] To be sure, if that be the date, we seem bereft of our useful Tammuz, from whom, in ii. 254, it was conjectured that the victim mock-king derived his divinity, an old superstitious belief which 'shed the halo of divinity' on the victim of Calvary. For the Tammuz feast was certainly in June-September. However, perhaps there were three Tammuz feasts, resurrection and all, and Mr. Frazer's last choice of a date, in March-April, has the immense advantage for his theory of getting us near Eastertide.

But did the Sacæa actually desert their old date, June-July? To prove that we must identify the Sacæa, a Persian, with Zakmuk, a Babylonian feast, which really fell in March or April. The old Babylonian feast, Zakmuk, is known to the learned through inscriptions. We have seen that M. Cumont and Herr Meissner inclined to regard Zakmuk as identical with the Sacæa, while the feast Zakmuk-Sacæa is supposed by Mr. Frazer to be the origin of the Jewish Purim. But the Sacæa fell in the Macedonian month Lous, as Athenæus tells us according to Berosus, a Babylonian priest, using the Macedonian Calendar. And Lous, as Mr. Robertson Smith proved, was our July.[2] Zakmuk, on the other hand, fell in our March-April, and Purim in our March, neither of which is July, when the Sacæa were held.

Now it is desirable for Mr. Frazer's argument that the Sacæa should fall, not in July, as it did in ii. 254, but in or about Eastertide. Mr. Frazer therefore shifts the Sacæa from July to Eastertide in face of difficulties.

All we know concerning Zakmuk is[3] that this feast, originally a feast of Bau, says Dr. Jastrow, fell about the vernal equinox (near the beginning of the old Babylonian year); that, after a certain period, it was held in honour of the chief god of Babylon, named Merodach; that a council of gods was thought to meet in Merodach's temple, under his presidency, and that they determined the fate of the year, 'especially the fate of the king's life.' The festival existed as early as 3000 B.C., whereas the Sacæa, 'so far as appears from our authorities, does not date from before the Persian conquest of Babylon' (536 B.C.).[4] But in spite of dates it is desirable for Mr. Frazer's purpose to identify the Persian Sacæa with the Babylonian Zakmuk. For, if he succeeds in this, then Sacæa must fall when Zakmuk fell, and nearly when Purim fell, at—or not so very far from—Eastertide. But[5] Sacæa was eagerly welcomed by Mr. Frazer as a July, not a spring, feast, whereas, in iii. 152, Sacæa is identified with Zakmuk, which did fall in spring. Again, we have not even a hint that any mock-king, or Tammuz man, or anybody, was slain at the Babylonian feast of Zakmuk, as a man was slain, says Dio, at the Sacæa. However, Mr. Frazer tries to show that Sacæa and Zakmuk may be the same feast. For Sacæa and Zakmuk are names that resemble Zakmuk and Zoganes.[6] We may reply that the word Sacæa also rather closely resembles the name of the tribe of Sacæ, from whom the Perso-Greeks derived the word Sacæa, while the Sacæa were held to commemorate a victory over the Sacæ. Again the word Sacæa, which was a drinking feast, resembles the word Sáki, Persian for a pourer forth of wine. I The word Sáki is Arabic, being the nomen agentis of the verb Saḳi "to water" (abreuver). This root is common to several Semitic languages—e.g. Hebrew and Æthiopic—and if we could prove the word Sacæa to be of native Babylonian origin, it might very probably come from the same root,' Mr. Denison Ross informs me. In any case we cannot build on resemblances in the sound of words. That argument for the identification of Zakmuk and the Sacæa fails.

Next Mr. Frazer contends that since, at Zakmuk, the gods determined the fate of the king's life, it was a critical time for the king. Now 'the central feature of the Sacæa' appears to have been 'the hanging of the mock-king for the saving of the real king's life.'[7] Here, then, are two critical hours for the king: one at Zakmuk, when the gods settle his fate; one at the Sacæa when his life is saved by the execution of his proxy. Are not then these two critical periods one period, and is not Sacæa another name for Zakmuk?[8] But Mr. Frazer has also told us that the main feature of the Sacæa was the death of a man who represented Tammuz, and was killed after doing sympathetic magic with a sacred harlot.[9] Was there, then, in connection with this Tammuz man, a third Tammuz feast in March-April, for there were two, in June-September? Thus, even if we could admit that, because two periods are critical, both are the same period, yet as the victim of the Sacæa was a Tammuz man, slain to do good to the crops, we are unable to concede that he also died 'in the king's stead,' and to save his life, unless the king was Tammuz. Besides, no authority tells us that either, or both, of this victim's deaths occurred at the Babylonian feast of Zakmuk: it occurred at the Persian feast of the Sacæa, if at all.

Indeed, even if Mr. Frazer's two arguments for the identity of Zakmuk and Sacæa were persuasive (and' how persuasive they are we have seen), there would remain a difficulty. For Berosus says, as we saw, that the Sacæa fell on Lous 16, which is July, whereas Zakmuk fell in March-April.

I. HISTORICAL DIFFICULTY

This obstacle seems to be, and really is, insuperable. But Mr. Frazer, undaunted, writes: 'The identification of the months of the Syro-Macedonian Calendar is a matter of some uncertainty; as to the month Lous in particular the evidence of ancient writers appears to be conflicting, and until we have ascertained beyond the reach of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus' (say 200 B.C.) 'it would be premature to allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of the two festivals' (namely Zakmuk and the Sacæa). Henceforth Mr. Frazer's hypothesis seems to me to proceed on the fancy that Sacæa and Zakmuk are identical, which is impossible, since the Sacæa fall in July or September, and Zakmuk in March-April.

It is absolutely certain, historically, that Sacæa and Zakmuk cannot be identical. They were as remote in date as they well could be. For the conflicting evidence of ancient writers as to the date of the month of the Sacæa, namely the Macedonian month Lous Λῶος Mr. Frazer gives two references. The first is to Mr. Robertson Smith's proof that Lous is July.[10] That does him no good. The second is to Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.'[11] In that work I read that the only doubt as to the month Lous is whether it fell in July or September. Smith's 'Dictionary' is a book so common and accessible that I need not inflict on the reader the nature of the conflicting evidence. It is enough to say that the month of the Sacæa, Lous, was almost certainly July, but, if not July, was undeniably September. Now neither July nor September is Eastertide, or near it. So that the effort to make the Sacæa identical with Zakmuk, and therefore more or less coincident with Purim, and with our Easter, is an absolute failure. The Jews, then, could not (as in Mr. Frazer's theory) borrow abroad a July or September mock-king, and attach him to a vernal festival, their Purim. Thus, as Zakmuk is several months remote from the Sacæa, it is not identical with the Sacæa. Mr. Frazer himself says: 'If the Sacæa occurred in July and the Zakmuk in March, the theory of their identity could not be maintained.'[12] But he loses, rather than gains, if the Sacæa were in September, and that is the only possible alternative. The game is over; the mock-king of Babylon died, if at all, in July or September, at the Sacæa; not at Zagmuk or Zakmuk, in March-April. There is not a known hint that any mock-king died in Babylon about Eastertide, or earlier, at the feast of Zakmuk.

I confess that when I found Mr. Frazer declining to 'allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of the two festivals,' till it was 'ascertained beyond the reach of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus,' I presumed that 'the apparently conflicting evidence of ancient writers' meant a difference of opinion as to whether Lous was a spring or a midsummer month. But I looked at Smith's 'Dictionary' and found nothing of the sort! The difference of opinion, the conflict of evidence, is concerned (see Smith) with the question whether Lous was September (as it seems to have been in the time of Philip of Macedon) or whether it was July, as in the time of Plutarch. Neither opinion gives Lous the faintest chance of being a spring month. Therefore the vernal Zakmuk is not the Sacæa; therefore there is not the ghost of a reason for guessing that a mock-king was hanged at Zakmuk; therefore Zakmuk, in April, cannot lend a hanged mock-king to Purim, in March; therefore Purim, having no slain mock-king, cannot hand one on to Eastertide, which, moreover, does not occur at the same date as Purim, but some weeks later, as may happen. Therefore the mock-king, if he had been divine (which he was not), and if he had been sacrificed (which he was not), could not have lent his 'halo of divinity' to gild the Cross at Calvary. But that he did so is Mr. Frazer's hypothesis—sometimes.

II. PERSIANS ARE NOT BABYLONIANS

The Sacæa, according to all our authorities, was a Persian, not a Babylonian, feast. We have not a tittle of evidence to show that the Babylonians, with whom Zakmuk was a feast of old standing, ever heard of the Sacæa before they were conquered by the Persians (B.C. 536). Mr. Frazer admits this: the Babylonian custom, 'so far as appears from our authorities, does not date from before the Persian conquest; but probably it was much older.'[13] Why 'probably'? On the strength of this 'probably' Mr. Frazer calls the doings at the Persian Sacæa 'a Babylonian custom.'[14] It was a custom of the Persian conquerors of Babylon, if we can believe Dio Chrysostom; but we have no evidence that it was a Babylonian custom. Yet it 'has just got to be' a Babylonian custom that Mr. Frazer may attach it to a vernal Babylonian feast, Zakmuk, and so to Purim, and so to Eastertide.

III. ORIGIN OF PURIM

About the real origin of Purim, a purely secular jollification, preceded, after a certain date, by a fast, we know nothing. It is first mentioned in the Book of Esther, which is so secular that the name of God is never mentioned in it. Scholars have debated as to the date of Esther, which Mr. Frazer places in the fourth or third century B.C.; some, as Kuenen, place it later. Some think it historical, as Mr. Sayce does; others regard it as a romance, composed to supply an account of the origin of the feast of Purim, which we never hear of before the exile.

The account in Esther is well known. Xerxes quarrelled with his queen, Vashti, and, after a series of experiments in wives, selected Esther, cousin of an artful Jew named Mordecai. This man discovered, and through Esther reported, a conspiracy. He later behaved with insolence to Haman, the Vizier, who settled with Xerxes a kind of St. Bartholomew's day for all the Jews. But Xerxes was accidentally reminded of the services done by Mordecai, and asked Haman how a grateful prince should reward an unnamed servant. Haman suggested the ride in royal splendour, which Mordecai enjoyed. Haman then erected a very tall gallows whereon to hang Mordecai. But Esther got news of the intended massacre, and, as Xerxes had promised to give her any gift she asked for, she demanded the death of Haman. So Haman was hanged, and the Jews were allowed to defend themselves. They massacred an enormous number of their enemies, and henceforth kept Purim, a feast of two days, on Adar (March) 14 and 15. 'Wherefore they called these days Purim, after the name of Pur,' and 'pur, that is, the lot, was cast before Haman for a whole year from Nisan to Adar.'[15]

The word pur, 'a lot,' does not occur in Hebrew, says Mr. Frazer. However, the Assyrian puhra means an assembly, and there was an assembly of the gods at the feast of Zakmuk. Why the Jews went after an Assyrian word we may guess; but we also learn that 'pur or bur seems to be' (one wants to know if it really was) 'an old Assyrian word for 'stone,' and a stone may be used for a lot,[16] as the Greek ψῆφος, a pebble, also means a vote. Thus either the Assyrian puhra or pur may have lent a name to the feast of Purim.

I am no friend to etymological conjecture, especially when two Assyrian words put in rival claims to be, each of them, the origin of a Jewish word. Mr. Frazer does not, I think, allude to the other guess, connecting Purim with the Persian feast, Phurdigan (Phurim? or Purim).[17] We find Purdaghân, Purdiyan, and so forth. This Persian feast was a drinking bout and time of jollity, so that Hyde very naturally compares it to Purim and to the old Persian Sacæa, or Sakea, or Sakia, which means 'drinking together,' or 'drinking healths.'[18] If Sakia means a convivial feast in Persian, it fits very well the Persian Sacæa, which were a time of jollity. The learned may settle their etymological guesses among themselves, but we are not obliged, for want of another conjecture, to fly to old Assyrian for Purim: still less do we agree that Mr. Frazer has made out a fairly probable case for holding that 'the Jewish feast (Purim) is derived from the Babylonian new year festival of Zakmuk.'[19]

No ease at all, I venture to think, is made out. Mr. Frazer's Assyrian etymologies are met by competing etymologies. Moreover, we know next to nothing of the Babylonian Zakmuk, but we do know that the Persian Sacæa, Sakea, or Sakia was, like Purim, a period of hard drinking and wild licence: which does not resemble a solemn religious festival of the supreme god, Marduk, or a period of wailing for Tammuz. There is another coincidence, unnoted, I think, by Mr. Frazer, but already noted by us. Herodotus, our oldest Greek source for the Persians, tells us that their chief feast was called Magophonia, and celebrated the massacre of the hostile Magi.[20] Strabo tells us that the Sacæa were supposed to commemorate a massacre of intoxicated Sacæ. Purim is held to celebrate a massacre of the foes of the Jews. Can these three feasts for a massacre coincide by accident? It is not easy to see how this tradition attached itself to the slaying of a criminal, either as king's proxy or as representative of Tammuz.

IV. IS PURIM PRE-EXILIAN OR POST-EXILIAN?

In any case Purim has not been successfully connected with Zakmuk. Mr. Frazer, however, says that 'an examination of that' (the Jewish) 'tradition, and of the manner of celebrating the feast, renders it probable that Purim is nothing but a more or less disguised form of the Babylonian feast of the Sacæa or Zakmuk.'[21] We have seen that stern dates do not allow us to identify Sacæa with Zakmuk. The month Lous is firm as the Macedonian phalanx, and will not masquerade as March-April, when Zakmuk was held. Setting that aside, 'there are good grounds for believing that Purim was unknown to the Jews until after the exile,' and yet 'that they learned to observe it during their captivity in the Bast.'[22] But their captivity in the East was the exile, so how did they know nothing of Purim at the very time when they also learned to celebrate that festival'? However, it is reckoned 'fairly probable' that the Jews borrowed Purim either 'directly from the Babylonians or indirectly through the Persian conquerors of Babylon;' the only question is from which?[23]

The Jews probably borrowed Purim in or after the exile. But they also kept Purim before the exile, at least Mr. Frazer thinks that 'the best solution.' It is Jensen's solution, stated, however, only 'in letters to correspondents.'[24]

It really seems hardly consistent that Mr. Frazer should both think Purim probably a feast borrowed in or after the exile, and also appear to approve a theory which regards the feast as familiar to the Jews before the exile. Yet that is what he has apparently succeeded in doing.

He prefers Jensen's solution, which is this: A fast was held before the feast of Purim.[25] Why?

'The best solution appears to be that of Jensen, that the fasting and mourning were originally for the supposed annual death of a Semitic god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis, whose resurrection on the following day occasioned that outburst of joy and gladness which is characteristic of Purim.'[26] Yes; but the Jews had that institution before the exile. In the first days of his own captivity Ezekiel was carried, in the flesh, or out of the flesh, to the temple at Jerusalem. 'Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was towards the north, and, behold, there sat women wailing for Tammuz.'[27]

Now Jensen's solution is that the fast at Purim represents the wailing for Tammuz, or somebody of his type. But, if the Jews did that, as they did, before the exile, and if that was Purim, how did they also borrow Purim after the exile, especially as 'there are good grounds for believing that Purim was unknown to the Jews till after the exile'?[28] How can both views be correct? Or is this March feast of the Tammuz kind an addition to the old pre-exilian Jewish Tammuz feast?

Moreover, Purim is probably, according to Mr. Frazer, 'a mere disguised form of the Sacæa,' which, in his opinion, is the same as Zakmuk.[28] But 'the central feature of the Sacæa appears to have been the saving of the king's life for another year by the vicarious sacrifice of a criminal.'[29] Yet its central feature is also the sorrow for the death and glee for the resurrection 'of a Semitic god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis,' following Jensen. How can the Sacæa have two central features? If it is only an affair of hanging a man to save the king's life, why should the Jews at Jerusalem fast before the vicarious sacrifice of a criminal for the Babylonian king? They did fast, we know. And why should the victim's resurrection (if any) on the following day 'occasion that outburst of joy and gladness which is characteristic of Purim'?[30] What had the Jews to make with the resurrection of a proxy of the king of Babylon?

Mr. Frazer has not, I think, suggested that the kings of Israel or Judah were once annually sacrificed. So why were the Jewish women wailing at the north gate of the Temple? For Tammuz, as we know from Ezekiel; but Tammuz was not a Jewish king, or, if he was, it should be stated. Also, if the Jewish ladies wailed and rejoiced for Tammuz at the Temple in Jerusalem before the exile, how can it be consistently maintained that they knew nothing of these rites till after the exile, and then borrowed them from Babylonians or Persians? If Purim is a Tammuz rite, the Jews had it before the exile, as Ezekiel proves. If it is not a Tammuz rite, why is Jensen's the best solution? for Jensen's solution is that 'the fasting and mourning were originally for the supposed annual death of a Semitic god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis, whose resurrection on the following day occasioned that outburst of joy and gladness which is characteristic of Purim.'[31] Then, once more, that outburst of joy and gladness for the re-arisen Tammuz was[32] probably in the month Tammuz, our June-July. But now[33] it is at Purim—that is, in March.

How are Mr. Frazer's theories to be reconciled with each other and with the facts? Did the Jews wail for Tammuz, in spring, before the exile; and, after the exile, adapt their old rite of a Tammuz fast and feast to the vicarious sacrifice of a condemned criminal (whether in July or in April) in the interests of the king of Babylon? Had they been wont to hang a man, while they wailed for Tammuz, before the exile? If so, why did they hang him, and what did they borrow during the exile? Or was all that they borrowed just the habit of crowning, discrowning, whipping, and hanging a mock-king, as an addition to their pre-exilian Tammuz fast and feast? We have certainly no evidence that they did these cruel things before the exile. And there is no evidence, as we shall see, that they yearly committed the same atrocity after the exile.

V. THEORY OF A HUMAN VICTIM AT PURIM

As Mr. Frazer is to make our Lord one of the annual victims at Purim, he has to try to prove that the Jews did annually hang or crucify a mock-king supposed to be divine at Purim. To be sure neither prophet nor legislator, neither Ezekiel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, nor Zachariah, says one word about this heathen abomination borrowed by the Jews. Mr. Frazer therefore tries to prove that the man was hanged at Purim by the evidence of 'traces of human sacrifice lingering about the feast of Purim in one or other of those mitigated forms to which I have just referred,' such as the uncertain 'burning an effigy of a man at Tarsus.'[34]

Mr. Frazer is, I think, rather easily satisfied with this kind of testimony to human sacrifice. Every fifth of November a man, called Guy by the populace, is burned in effigy. But, as we know the historical facts, we do not, though science in the distant future may, regard this rite as a trace of Druidical human sacrifice, Guy being a god of the dying foliage of November, when St. Dasius was slain. Mr. Frazer explains the old custom of burning Judas on Easter Saturday as 'all for the purpose of protecting the fields from hail,' and as 'really of pagan origin.'[35] It maybe so: the ashes are used in agricultural magic. But we know that Guy Fawkes is not a relic of human sacrifice. Moreover, it is natural to destroy a foe, like Haman, or John Knox, or Mr. Kruger, in effigy: the thing is often done. The Jews undeniably regarded Haman, on the authority of Esther, as an enemy of their race. So they destroyed him in effigy. In the fifth century of our era, when the hatred between Jews and Christians had become bitter, the Jews, 'in contempt of the Christian religion,' attached the effigy of Haman to a cross. This insult was forbidden by the Codex Theodosianus.[36] Similar doings, without the cross, prevailed at Purim in the Middle Ages. But how does this prove the hanging of a real Haman victim before the rise of Christianity? It merely proves that, after the strife between Jews and Christians began, an effigy of Haman, the national enemy, was crucified 'in contemptu Christianæ fidei,' as the edict says—to annoy the Christians.

But Mr. Frazer has 'some positive grounds' for thinking that 'in former times the Jews, like the Babylonians from whom they appear to have derived their Purim, may at one time have burned, hanged, or crucified a real man in the character of Haman.' We have seen that[37] Purim, if it is a Tammuz feast and fast, was kept by the Jews before they went to Babylon. But, passing that, what are the 'positive grounds'?

Merely that in 416 A.D. some Jews in Syria, being heated with wine after 'certain sports,' began to deride Christianity, and, for that purpose, bound a Christian child to the cross. At first 'they only laughed and jeered at him, but soon, their passions getting the better of them, they ill-treated the child so that he died under their hands.' Mr. Frazer 'can hardly doubt that' the 'sports' 'were Purim, and that the boy who died on the cross represented Haman.' Granting that the 'sports' were Purim, and that the Christian child did duty for Haman, the purpose was 'to deride Christians and even Christ himself.' These motives did not exist before Christianity, so how does the anecdote of brutal and cruel mockery, ending in murder, afford 'positive grounds' for the hypothesis that, ever since the exile, the Jews, in imitation of the Sacæan proceedings in July or September, yearly hanged a mock-king in March?[38]

VI. CONTRADICTORY CONJECTURE

Mr. Frazer is so far from holding by these arguments for the practice of hanging a yearly victim at Purim, as to suggest a conjecture that the victim was not killed at Purim at all, but a month later![39] If he thinks this possible, what becomes of his 'positive grounds' for holding that Purim was the date of the hanging? I have shown the value of the positive grounds for maintaining a theory that the Jews, before our era, annually hanged a mock-king as Haman at Purim. Mr. Frazer himself is so far from being convinced that the Jews hanged a man at Purim[40] as to suggest the supposition that they did not do so.[41] If they did not, it gets him out of the difficulty caused by the unlucky circumstance that our Lord was crucified, not at Purim, but a month after Purim, as we read in the Gospels. But, alas! if the Jews did not (on this theory) hang a Haman at Purim, what becomes of all Mr. Frazer's proofs that they did hang a Haman at Purim? In the total absence of all evidence to that effect, we may be sure that the Jews did not borrow (unrebuked by prophets and legislators) a heathen brutality in March from a heathen brutality occurring, if at all, in July or September. And if they did not, Christ was not the Haman of a year, which it is Mr. Frazer's contention that he may have been.

VII. A NEW THEORY OF THE VICTIM

We have seen that Purim is either an old Jewish Tammuz feast, existing before the exile, or a post-exilian adaptation of a Persian rite, in which a condemned criminal died to save the king's life; or both.[42] The victim next 'personates not merely a king but a god, whether that god was the Elamite Humman, the Babylonian Marduk, or some other deity not yet identified.'[43] But[44] the victim represented the king: no other god was mentioned. Again Mr. Frazer says: 'At the Sacæan festival, if I am right, a man who personated a god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis enjoyed the favours of a woman, probably a sacred harlot, who represented the great Semitic goddess Ishtar or Astarte....'[45] But did the king also stand for I a god or hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis'? Did he associate with sacred harlots? And did he, and the victim also 'personate a god, whether that god was the Elamite Humman, the Babylonian Marduk, or some other deity not yet identified'?[46] Were the 'Elamite Humman and the Babylonian Marduk' (or Merodach) gods of vegetation? Marduk, or Merodach, to be sure, was the chief god of Babylon, a solar deity, says Dr. Jastrow. But as Mr. Frazer suggests that the supreme Aryan god, Zeus, may have derived his name, 'the Bright or Shining One,' from the oak tree (he being 'actually represented by an oak,' and oakwood producing bright sparks when used in fire-making),[47] why then another supreme god, Marduk, may also be a god of vegetable life. But, like the horses of Virbius, the Sacæan victim has been plausibly identified with Tammuz or Adonis.[48] 'It seems worth suggesting that the mock-king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' He also takes that rôle, with his sacred harlot, in iii. 178. It is, therefore, a little bewildering to find him appearing as Humman or Marduk, or some other god unknown, in iii. 159, 160. How many single gods are rolled into one, scourged, and hanged in this most unhappy condemned criminal?

We have been told that Marduk presided over a council of the gods at the Zakmuk, which is the Sacæa.[49] But the hanged man[50] very probably personates Marduk. Mr. Frazer may think that, when the supreme god is presiding over the Olympian assembly in his Temple, it is a natural and pious compliment to whip and hang him in the person of his human representative. This, at least, is the result of his theory in iii. 159, 160. I do not feel sure that the supreme god, whether Marduk or Humman, would have taken the same favourable view of the tactless rite.

VIII. NEW GERMAN THEORY OF PURIM

I have hitherto but incidentally mentioned Marduk and Humman as competitors with Tammuz and the king for the glory of receiving a vicarious whipping and hanging. They are brought into this honourable position by an entirely new Teutonic theory of Purim: not Mr. Frazer's. It was lately an old Jewish Tammuz rite, or quite a new adaptation of the Sacæa. But 'it is possible,' says Professor Nöldeke, 'that we have here' (in Purim) 'to do with a feast whereby the Babylonians commemorated a victory gained by their gods over the gods of their neighbours, the Elamites, against whom they had so often waged war. The Jewish feast of Purim is an annual merrymaking of a wholly secular kind, and it is known that there were similar feasts among the Babylonians.' From the Babylonians, then, the Jews borrowed Purim, a feast commemorative of a victory of the gods of Babylon over the Elamites. But, if that feast was religious, the Jews turned it into 'an annual merrymaking of a totally secular kind.'[51]

Mr. Frazer, if I do not misunderstand him, does not accept the hypothesis of Nöldeke. He says, however, 'We can hardly deny the plausibility of the theory that Haman and Vashti on the one side, and Mordecai and Esther on the other, represent the antagonism between the gods of Elam and the gods of Babylon, and the final victory of the Babylonian deities in the very capital of their rivals.' But plausibility, we shall see, is remote from proof. And how can Mr. Frazer think this theory plausible if the Sacæa really is a King-Tammuz feast?

But, if Purim is now to be a rejoicing over a victory of the Babylonian gods (naturally endeared as these gods were to the Jews), why was the fast held before Purim? It was held, according to 'Jensen's solution' (which is 'the best'), 'for the supposed annual death of a hero of the type of Tammuz or Adonis, whose resurrection on the following day occasioned that outburst of joy and gladness which is characteristic of Purim.'[52] But, if 'the outburst of joy and gladness characteristic of Purim' is a jubilation over a victory of the Babylonian gods, on Nöldeke's theory, why is there a fast, 'the fast of Esther,' before Purim, which is a feast of the Tammuz type? To fast for the death of Tammuz is a comely thing, but why should Jews, of all people, fast before a feast commemorative of a victory of the Babylonian gods? And why should the Jews, of all people, scourge and hang, at the same time, the possible human representative of Marduk, the chief of the gods whose victory they for some reason are commemorating?[53]

IX. ANOTHER NEW THEORY. HUMMAN AND THE VICTIM

To be sure we are given our choice: the victim may represent Marduk, the chief of the victorious gods; but he may also represent Humman, one of the defeated gods. In that case the vanquished hostile god's human representative may well be whipped and hanged, in derision of the defeated deity, Humman. But I do not observe that Mr. Frazer offers this hypothesis, which seems relatively plausible.

Indeed, I am fairly certain that Mr. Frazer does not accept Nöldeke's theory that Purim is a form of a Babylonian rejoicing over a victory of their gods. It cannot be both that and also a Tammuz feast,[54] or a festival for the saving of the king's life by the vicarious hanging of a criminal.[55]

We are next to see how Haman, Mordecai, Vashti, and Esther are mixed up with the Sacæa, Zakmuk, Purim, Marduk, and Humman.

VIII

MORDECAI, ESTHER, VASHTI, AND HAMAN

It may be asked, How did Humman or Marduk come to appear as the god connected with the Sacæa, whereas Tammuz had previously taken that part? The answer is that Humman and Marduk came in when we were tentatively regarding Purim, not (1) as a Semitic Tammuz feast, nor yet (2) as a Persian punishment of a condemned criminal acting asking's proxy, but (3) as a festival for 'the final victory of the Babylonian deities' (Marduk and the rest) 'in the very capital of their rivals' (Humman and his company).[1] This was a theory suggested by Professor Nöldeke. It has etymological bases.

The name Mordecai resembles Marduk, Esther is like Ishtar, Haman is like Humman, the Elamite god, and there is a divine name in the inscriptions, read as resembling 'Vashti,' and probably the name of an Elamite goddess. Thus the human characters in Esther are in peril of merging in Babylonian and Elamite gods. But, lest that should occur, we ought also to remember that Mordecai was the real name of a real historical Jew of the Captivity, one of the companions of Nehemiah in the return from exile to Jerusalem.[2] Again, Esther appears to me to be the crown-name of the Jewish wife of Xerxes, in the Book of Esther: 'Hadassah, that is Esther.'[3] In the Biblical story she conceals her Jewish descent. Hadassah, says Nöldeke, 'is no mere invention of the writer of 'Esther.'[4] Hadassah is said to mean 'myrtle bough,' and girls are still called Myrtle. Esther appears to have been an assumed name, after a royal mixed marriage.

Now if a real historical Jew might be named Mordecai, which we know to be the case, a Jewess, whether in fact, or in this Book of Esther, which, says Dr. Jastrow, 'has of course some historical basis,' might be styled Esther.[5] Dr. Jastrow supposes from the proper names 'that there is a connection between Purim' (the Jewish feast accounted for in 'Esther') and some Babylonian festival, 'not that of Zagmuku,' or Zakmuk. Nöldeke says that no Babylonian feast coinciding with Purim in date has been discovered.[6] Indeed this fact gives Mr. Frazer some reason for various conjectures, as the date of Purim is not that of Zakmuk. But, if Mordecai be, as it is, an historical name of a real Jew of the period, while Esther may be, and probably is, a name which a Jewess might bear, it is not ascertained that Vashti really is the name of an Elamite goddess. Yet Vashti is quite essential as a goddess to Mr. Frazer's argument. 'The derivation,' he says, 'of the names of Haman and Vashti is less certain, but some high authorities are disposed to accept the view of Jensen that Haman is identical with Humman or Homman, the national god of the Elamites, and that Vashti is in like manner an Elamite deity, probably a goddess whose name appears in inscriptions.'[7] Now suppose that we adopt Mr. Frazer's method about that unruly month Lous. 'The identification of the months of the Syro-Macedonian Calendar is a matter of some uncertainty; as to the month Lous in particular the evidence of ancient writers appears to be conflicting, and until we have ascertained beyond the reach of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus, it would be premature to allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of the two festivals.'

Following this method we might say 'the identification of Haman and Vashti with a probable Elamite god and goddess is a matter of some uncertainty; as to Vashti in particular the opinion of modern writers seems to be conflicting, and until we have ascertained beyond the reach of doubt that Vashti was an Elamite goddess, and a goddess of what sort, it would be premature to allow much weight to the conjecture'—and then we might go on to allow none at all. But this would be too hard a method of dealing with Mr. Frazer's hypothesis. We should merely be getting rid of his theory in the same way as his theory evades a definite historical obstacle.