Chapter 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.