CHAPTER II
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Westermarck, Edward
In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.229 A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king’s house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, “Wickedness! wickedness!” so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice was to take away the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless manner “as if the weight of all their wickedness were thus carried away”; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. “Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God’s laws during the past year…. Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year—such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications, adulteries, witchcrafts, incests, slanders, &c.—were expected to pay in twenty-eight ngugus, or £2 0s. 7½d., as a fine; and this money was taken into the interior, to purchase two sickly persons, to be offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes—one for the land, and one for the river.”230 As will be seen in a following chapter, human sacrifices to rivers are very common in the Niger country. In the cases mentioned by the English missionary, the idea of vicarious expiation is obvious. But I find no evidence of actual sin-transference.
Dr. Frazer further mentions a custom which, according to Strabo, prevailed among the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus.231 In the temple of the Moon they kept a number of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man thrust a sacred spear into his side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which the victim fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.232 Dr. Frazer maintains that “the last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hand on the animal’s head.”233 So it may be, although, in my opinion, the purificatory ceremony described by Strabo also allows of another interpretation. The victim was evidently held to be saturated with magic energy; this is commonly the case with men, or animals, or even inanimate things, that are offered in sacrifice, and in the present instance the man was regarded as holy already, long before he was slain.
To stand on the corpse, then, might have been regarded as purifying in consequence of the benign virtue inherent in it, just as, according to Muhammedan notions, contact with a saint cures disease, not by transferring it to the saint, but by annihilating it or expelling it from the body of the patient. But whether the ceremony in question involved the idea of sin-transference or not, there is no indication that the sacrifice of the slave was of an expiatory character. The same may be said both of the Egyptian sacrifice of a bull, mentioned by Herodotus, and of the white dog sacrifice performed by the Iroquois. The Egyptians first invoked the god and slew the bull. They then cut off his head and flayed the body. Next they took the head, and heaped imprecations on it, praying that, if any evil was impending either over those who sacrificed or over the land of Egypt, it might be made to fall upon that head. And finally, they either sold the head to Greek traders or threw it into the river234—which shows that the real scapegoat, the head, was not regarded as a sacrifice to the god. Among the Iroquois, also, the victims were slain before the sins of the people were transferred to them. According to Hale’s and Morgan’s accounts of this rite, which have reference to different tribes of the Iroquois, no mention of sin-transference is made in the hymn which accompanied the sacrifice.235 Only blessings were invoked.
This was the beginning of the chant:—“Now we are about to offer this victim adorned for the sacrifice, in hope that the act will be pleasing and acceptable to the All-Ruler, and that he will so adorn his children, the red men, with his blessings, when they appear before him.”236 Mr. Morgan even denies that the burning of the dog had the slightest connection with the sins of the people, and states that “in the religious system of the Iroquois, there is no recognition of the doctrine of atonement for sin, or of the absolution or forgiveness of sins.”237
I think we can see the reason why, in some cases, a sacrificial victim is used as scapegoat. The transference of sins or evils is not looked upon as a mere “natural” process, it can hardly be accomplished without the aid of mysterious, magic energy. Among the Berbers of Ait Zelṭn, in Southern Morocco, sick people used to visit a miracle-working wild olive-tree, growing in the immediate vicinity of the supposed grave of Sîdi Butlîla. They there relieve themselves of their complaints by tying a woollen string to one of its branches; in case of headache the patient previously winds the string three times round the top of his head, whilst, in case of fever, he spits on the string, and, when tying it to the tree, says, “I left my fever in thee, O wild olive-tree.” He believes that he may thus transfer his disease to this tree because there is baraka, “benign virtue,” in it; he would not expect to be cured by tying the string to any ordinary tree. This illustrates a principle of probably world-wide application. In Morocco, and, I presume, in other countries where disease-transference is believed in, rags tied to a tree are a sure indication that the tree is regarded as holy. Similarly I venture to believe that the transference of sins and evils to a scapegoat is generally supposed to require magic aid of some kind or other.
Among the Hebrews, it took place on the Day of Atonement only, and the act was performed by the high-priest.238 Among the Iroquois, it was by “a kind of magic” that the sins of the people were worked into the white dogs;239 and that the animals themselves were held to be charged with supernatural energy, appears from the fact that, according to one account, the ashes of the pyre on which one of them was burnt were “gathered up, carried through the village, and sprinkled at the door of every house.”240 Considering, then, that sacrificial victims, owing to their close contact with the deities to whom they are offered, are held more or less sacred, the idea of employing them as scapegoats is certainly near at hand. But this does not make the sacrifice expiatory. In fact, I know of no instance of an expiatory sacrifice being connected with a ceremony of sin-transference. Hence the materialistic conception of sin hardly helps to explain the belief that the sins of a person may be atoned by another person being offered as a sacrifice to the offended god.
A sacrifice is expiatory if its object is to avert the supposed anger or indignation of a superhuman being from those on whose behalf it is offered. In various cases the offended god is thought to be appeased only by the death of a man. But it is not always necessary that the victim should be the actual offender. The death of a substitute may expiate his guilt. The expiatory sacrifice may be vicarious.
We shall see, in a subsequent chapter, that, as a general rule, human victims are sacrificed for the purpose of saving the lives of the sacrificers: before the beginning of a battle or during a siege, previously to a dangerous sea-expedition, during epidemics, famines, or on other similar occasions, when murderous designs are attributed to some superhuman being on whose will the lives of men are supposed to depend. But these sacrifices are not always expiatory in nature. A god may desire to cause the death of men not only because he is offended, but because he delights in human flesh, or because he wants human attendants, or—no one knows exactly why. It is impossible to find out in each particular case whether the sacrifice is meant to be an expiation or not; it is not certain that the sacrificers know it themselves. Yet in many instances there can be no doubt that its object is to serve as a vicarious atonement.
In Eastern Central Africa, “if a freeman were to set fire to the grass or reeds beside a lake, and cause a great conflagration close to the chosen abode of the deity, he is liable to be offered up to the god that is thus annoyed,” but if he be the owner of many slaves he can easily redeem himself by offering one of them in his place.241 The Ojibways, it is said, were once visited with an epidemic, which they regarded as a divine punishment sent them on account of their wickedness; and when all other efforts failed, “it was decided that the most beautiful girl of the tribe should enter a canoe, push into the channel just above the Sault, and throw away her paddle.”242 In Bœotia, a drunken man having killed a priest of Dionysus Aegobolus, and a pestilence having broken out immediately after, the calamity was regarded as a judgment on the people for the sacrilege, and the oracle of Delphi ordered them to expiate it by sacrificing to the god a blooming boy.243 In his work on the Jews, Philo of Byblus states that “it was the custom among the ancients in cases of great dangers, that the rulers of a city or a nation, in order to avert universal destruction, should give the dearest of their children to be killed as a ransom offered to avenging demons.”244 The idea that sins could be expiated by the death of one who had not deserved it, was familiar to the Hebrews.
It was said that “the death of the righteous makes atonement.”245 The passage in Isaiah liii. 12 was interpreted of Moses, who “poured out his soul unto death246 and was numbered with the transgressors (the generation that died in the wilderness) and bare the sin of many “that he might atone for the sin of the golden calf.247 Ezekiel suffered “that he might wipe out the transgressions of Israel.”248 And of the Maccabaean martyrs it is said, “Having become as it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of those godly men and their atoning death, divine providence saved Israel which had before been evil entreated.”249 In these cases, of course, there was no sacrifice in the proper sense of the term, but they obviously illustrate the same characteristic of the divine mind. In fact, the death of Christ, by which he atoned and obliterated the sins of all ages, was conceived as a sacrifice, or spoken of in sacrificial figures.250
It is said that, according to early ideas, “it did not essentially concern divine justice that the punishment of faults committed should fall precisely on the guilty; what did concern it was that it should fall on some one, that it should have its accomplishment.”251 Men, we are told, could not fail to discern that a transgression produces suffering as its consequence, and, seeing this, they “associate suffering with the expiation of sin, and, in atoning for their transgressions, they mark their contrition by the suffering which they inflict vicariously on the victim. They argue thus: ‘I have broken a law of God. God exacts pain as a consequence of such a breach. I will therefore slay this lamb, and its sufferings shall make the atonement requisite.’”252 But, so far as I can see, this interpretation of the idea of vicarious expiation is not supported by facts. The victim whose suffering or death is calculated to appease the wrathful god is not anybody at random, whosoever he may be. He is a representative of the community which has incurred the anger of the god, and is accepted as a substitute on the principle of social solidarity.
So, also, according to the Western Church, Christ discharged the punishment due to the sins of mankind and propitiated the justice of his Father, in his capacity of a man, as a representative of the human race; whereas in the East, where it was maintained that the deity suffered (though he suffered through the human nature which he had made his own), the idea of substitution could hardly take root, since, as Harnack remarks, “the dying God-man really represented no one.”253 The Greek Church regarded the death of Christ as a ransom for mankind paid to the devil, and this doctrine was also accepted by the most important of the Western Fathers, although it flatly contradicted their own theory of atonement.254 There can be no doubt that expiatory sacrifices are frequently offered as ransoms, in other words, that the god or demon is supposed to be appeased, not by the suffering of the victim, but by the gift. Among men it often occurs that the offended party is induced by some material compensation to desist from avenging the injury—in many societies such placability is even prescribed by custom,—and something similar is naturally believed to be the case with gods. From this point of view, of course, it is not necessary that the victim should be a person who is connected with the offender by ties of social solidarity, although he may still be regarded as in a way a substitute. He may be an alien or a slave; or animals or inanimate things may be offered to expiate the sins of men.
Among the Dacotahs, “for the expiation of sins or crimes a sacrifice is made of some kind of an animal.”255 Of the Melanesian sacrifices, says Dr. Codrington, “some are propitiatory, substituting an animal for the person who has offended.”256 The Shánárs of Tinnevelly offer up a goat, a sheep, or a fowl, in order “to appease the angry demon, and induce him to remove the evil he has inflicted, or abstain from the infliction he may meditate.”257 It would be almost absurd to suppose that in similar cases the suffering or death of the animal is looked upon in the light of a vicarious punishment. Of the Hebrew sin-offering, Professor Kuenen aptly remarks:—258“According to the Israelite’s notion, Yahveh in his clemency permits the soul of the animal sacrificed to take the place of that of the sacrificer. No transfer of guilt to the animal sacrificed takes place: the blood of the latter is clean and remains so, as is evident from the very fact that this blood is put upon the altar; it is a token of mercy on Yahveh’s part that he accepts it….
Nor can it be asserted that the animal sacrificed undergoes the punishment in the place of the transgressor: this is said nowhere, and therefore, in any case, gives another, more sharply defined idea than that which the Israelite must have formed for himself; moreover, it is irreconcilable with the rule that the indigent may bring the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour as a sin-offering.”259 It should also be noticed that a purifying effect was ascribed to contact with the victim’s blood: the high priest should put or sprinkle some blood upon the altar “and cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.”260
Source notes
229 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 109 sq.
230 Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, p. 344 sq.
231 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 112 sq.
232 Strabo, xi. 4. 7.
233 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 113.
234 Herodotus, ii. 39.
235 Hale, in American Antiquarian, vii. 10 sqq. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 217 sq.
236 Hale, loc. cit. p. 10.
237 Morgan, op. cit. p. 216.
238Leviticus, xvi. 21.
239 Seaver, op. cit. p. 160.
240 Beauchamp, loc. cit. p. 239.
241 Macdonald, Africana, i. 96 sq.
242 Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 208.
243 Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.
244 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, i. 10. 40 (Migne, Patrologia, Ser. Gr. xxi. 85).
245 Moore, in Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, iv. 4226.
246Exodus, xxxii. 32.
247Sōṭāh, 14 A, quoted by Moore, loc. cit. col. 4226.
248Sanhedrin, 39 A, quoted ibid. col. 4226.
2494 Maccabaeans, xvii. 22, quoted ibid. col. 4232.
250 See Moore, loc. cit. col. 4229 sqq.
251 Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, p. 135.
252 Baring-Gould, Origin and Development of Religious Belief, i. 387 sq.
253 Harnack, op. cit. iii. 312 sqq.
254Ibid. iii. 307, 315 n. 2.