THE DIVINE TRAGEDY OF EARLY RELIGION.* AMONG Turner's half-real, half-fanciful
landscapes, one of the most enchanting is the picture of "The Golden Bough," the dreamy lake bosomed amid wooded hills, the varied countryi beyond flooded with golden light, the foreground with its dancing nymphs and the figure issuing from a grove, bearing in one hand a curved sickle, in the other holding high in triumph the sacred bough—over all the hot sky of Italy, just tempered with a drifting veil of thin fleecy clouds. Peace and gladness seem to reign supreme in the sylvan scene; but the lake and woods are those of Nemi, the Aricia of Ovid and Statius, as far back as Roman tradition went, had witnessed at intervals. a bloody combat and a ritual murder. There grew a tree in search of which skulked a runaway slave with a naked. weapon in his hand. Having found the tree, he broke off a branch, and with the branch in his hand claimed the right of succession to the office of priest of the lonely and dreaded shrine whose image was reflected in the waters of the lake. But to make good his claim, he must slaughter his pre-. decessor, who, in his turn, sought, in self-defence, to slay his, assailant. Thus the priesthood was the prize of an ever- recurring duel, and the ministry of the shrine was gained and lost by what appeared to be a stupid and barbarous murder.
But had the tragedy always been a mere wanton dipping• of hands in innocent blood ? This is the question the volumes• before us attempt to answer. The difficulty of a research of this kind lies in the fact that the answer, however little obvious a one in the nineteenth century, must involve an explanation as simple as was the condition of human society when the killing of the priest was regarded as a perfectly natural and reasonable act. For however singular, however revolting, a traditional rite may appear, its institution was the logical outcome of human knowledge at the time when man's necessities or fears gave it birth. We may, therefore, be quite sure that no theory of its origin and meaning is scientific that is in the least sensational, or that is not of an entirely simple nature in relation to the contemporary stage of human society. Hence the classical explanation of the Arician tragedy, unique in the religious history of Greece and Rome, may be at once dismissed as a mere fancy,—namely, that the skulking of the slave represented the flight of Orestes, after killing Times, King of the Tauric Chersonese (Crimea), and the murderous combat with the priest the custom of sacrificing strangers who landed on that inhospitable coast
The Golden Bough a Study in Comparative Religion. By J. G. Frazor, Follow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 2 vols. With a Frontispiece London : Macmillan and Co. 1890,
to the Tauric Diana. There is, indeed, only one method of inquiry that can lead to any understanding either of myths or rituals of the origin of which no historical accounts are extant. It is through the folk-lore of the past and present ages of the world that we must seek to track the rills of evidence to a common source. The task is no easy one ; it demands wide and varied learning, a faculty, by no means common, for penetrating through the accumulated additions of centuries to the core of continuous tradition, and a peculiar quality of mind, rarer still, that enables the inquirer to rid himself of the bias and prejudice of civilisation, and enter into the feelings of men when they first began to search for some explanation of the world about them that should meet their needs and satisfy their nascent curiosity.
In all these respects, Mr. Frazer has shown himself to be well equipped for the work he has set himself to accomplish. His inquiry is, in truth, an examination of the course of what may be termed pre-historic religion—in which expression all pre-historic knowledge is resumed—in some of its most im- portant and interesting aspects. From every available source, ancient and modern, he has culled his materials, and his style is so lucid and simple, that the reader has no difficulty in dealing with the vast mass of evidence submitted to him. The story—for in essence the book is a story of man's earliest mental and moral evolution—is often strange and lurid enough ; but it is the principal merit of the work that all mystery and glamour gradually yield to Mr. Frazer's skilful treatment of his materials, and leave a residue of early human thought, simple and even commonplace, yet not destitute of poetry in its naive familiarity with Nature.
We can, of course, only summarise, and that very imperfectly, some of the principal conclusions Mr. Frazer's inquiries have led him to adopt. Professor Robertson Smith has shown that early man did not readily differentiate himself in thought from the animal world ; and in like manner the boundary between gods and men was at first of a vague and shadowy nature. Men had, and among savages still have, the attributes of the gods, just as the latter had and have those of men. Hence the replacement of divinity by humanity presented no difficulty to ancient man any more than to the modern savage. Even in the folk-lore and customs of nineteenth-century Europe, many traces of this confusion are found. The Arician priest, therefore, may well have been the representa- tive of a god. He was called a King, a common title of the chief ministrants of very ancient rites, showing the antiquity of the kingly office ; and a King, as we see constantly in Homer, was nearer to the gods than common men. All over the world he is, at some stage, more or less of an intermediary between the divine powers and his people, a circumstance that greatly facilitated his transition from or to godhead. In China and Japan, indeed, that was his sole function. But why should the god of the Arician shrine be slain 1' Gods, we need hardly say, were and still are often regarded as mortal,—immortality, in fact, divine or other, is a comparatively recent conception. Of many of the gods, Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, and others, the tombs were shown in Greece in the time of Pausanias, and the death and burial of gods are common incidents of folk-lore, and of existing or recent savage theology. When Colonel Dodge asked an Indian what great spirit made the world, the good or -the bad one, he was answered "Oh 1 neither of them, the spirit that made the world is dead long ago." Now, the god, being mortal like the man, was subject to failure of vitality, and thus the well-being of the clan or tribe which depended upon his continued vigour was put in jeopardy. To avert this calamity, the god must be killed while yet strong and hearty, and his soul, a separate entity within him, sustained by and yet sus- taining the body it tenanted, transferred to a lusty successor. For the proofs of these ideas and the details of their application, Mr. Frazer's pages must be consulted. The facts adduced seem as conclusive as the argument is clear. In Fiji, to cite an illus- trative instance of the sentiment which underlay the infliction of death ere the body grew enfeebled by age, "self-immolation is by no means rare, and they (the natives) believe that as they leave this world, so will they remain ever after. This forms a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude or a crippled condition by voluntary death." We can see, then, how the repulsive features of the Arician priesthood may be explained by reference to known facts in the history of mankind of a quite simple character, produced inevitably in the evolution of the race, and equally devoid of mystery and of horror. It
remains to show what the god was whom the priest of Nemi represented, and the special reason of his slaughter. Here, again, the conclusions have to be drawn from an immense array of evidence. But they are more than plausible; if we do not know the whole Arician story, we may be sure that we know at least what sort of a story it was. The Arician god was the spirit, originally of the woods, man's primeval home, afterwards of all vegetation. The worship of trees was universal in pre-historic times, and is still practised ; while reminiscences of it are present in many a traditional country festival, survival-forms of ancient religious rites. Among the primitive Aryans, the oak was held in the highest honour, and it was by the friction of oak-wood that the ancient fire was kindled, still. symbolised in the midsummer bonfires common all over Europe, and formerly in many parts of England and Ireland, though rare in Scotland, where the Beltane fires seem to have fulfilled their office. These fires preserved the memory of what a precious agency fire was once considered, and really was, and it is clear that they were often accom- panied by human sacrifices which afforded in effect one mode —indeed, the principal mode—of disposing of the god or his human representatives while still in the vigour of life. Thus the continuance of vegetation was provided for, its soul was kept ever young, and man's sustenance was assured. To primitive man, the preservation of life was everything, and the obvious forces of Nature, sustaining and destructive of life, pressed upon him so closely that, of necessity, he first anthropomorphised, then deified them. Poets did the same afterwards ; but it was with quite practical intentions that the process was begun. The first notion of the soul, that is of life, was that of an inner, not visible man, moving the outer and visible one. Beyond this inner man he did not care to inquire, just as modern man is content to explain the move- ment of a watch by its spring. He does not seek to explain its elasticity, and it is well he refrains, for even Sir W. Thomson can scarcely help him here. Thus the whole sequence of the story becomes intelligible,—the inner soul-man, the personification of vegetation as a life-possessing and mortal spirit, the destruction of the god ere the feeble- ness of age should impair the power which it was necessary to the well-being of man to conserve in the fullest efficiency. Slaughter by the sword, instead of by fire, was perhaps of accidental origin, merely a variation of method of no essential significance. Even at Nemi, the permanent sacred fire re- presented the earlier and, so to say, more orthodox ritual. Lastly, the golden bough which the candidate for the Arician priesthood had to pluck, must be taken to have been the mistletoe, and its importance is connected with, or at least illustrated by, the story of Balder. Balder was the impersonation of the oak ; the mistletoe, which remains green on the tree when bare of all foliage, is the symbol of its life ; hence the destruction of the strange parasite was the first stage towards the immolation of the god himself.
We have hardly attempted more than a meagre outline of a portion of the subject. The reader will find many of the most important aspects of folk-lore and primitive religion amply treated in these volumes. In particular, the early notions of the soul are explained in great detail and with abundant illus- trations. One of the most curious is the account given of the belief of the Nass River Indians (British Columbia), that a " doctor may swallow his patient's soul by mistake. A doctor who is believed to have done so is made by the other doctors to stand over the patient, while one of them thrusts his fingers down the doctor's throat, another kneads him in the stomach with his knuckles, and a third slaps him on the back. If the soul is not in him after all it is concluded that the soul must be in the head-doctor's box. The contents of the box are arranged on a new mat, and they [the other doctors] take and hold up [the head doctor] by the heels, with his head in a hole in the floor. In this position they wash his head, and any water remaining from the ablution is poured upon the sick man's head," to restore to him the missing soul which may be in the water.
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