Chapter 8 ANNUAL RELIGIOUS REGICIDE

Next we arrive at an absolutely necessary hypothesis, which I find it difficult to accept. 'In some places it appears that the people could not trust the king to remain in full mental and bodily vigour for more than a year; hence at the end of a year's reign he was put to death, and a new king appointed to reign in his turn a year, and suffer death at the end of it....

When the time drew near for the king to be put to death (in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year's reign), he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and suffered in his stead.'[48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.