Cults, Myths and Religions  

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Cultes, mythes et religions (1905 - ?) is a series of books by Salomon Reinach.

Full text in English[1]

INTRODUCTION

In the eyes of the evolutionist — and we are all evolution- ists nowadays — man springs from beast, humanity from animality. But man, take him where and when you will, is a religious animal ; and religiosity, as the Positivist would say, is the most essential of his attributes. It can no longer be maintained, with Gabriel de Mortillet and Hovelacque, that quaternary man was ignorant of religion. Unless, then, we admit the gratuitous and childlike hypothesis of a primitive revelation, we must look for the origin of religions in the psychology, not of civilised man, but of man the farthest removed from civilisation.

Of this man, anterior to all history, we have no direct knowledge, beyond what we glean from the imple- ments and artistic products of the quaternary period. True, these teach us something, as I have striven to show on a later page ; but, equally truly, they teach us far less than we could wish. To supplement our information, three other sources have to be tapped : the psychology of the present-day savage, the psychology of children, and the psychology of the higher animals.

It is probable that animals, certain that savages and children, are animists — that they project the twilit intelligence, stirring within them, into the external

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vi INTRODUCTION

world, and people the universe, especially the beings and objects that surround them, with a life and sentiment akin to their own. Poetry, with her personifications and her metaphors, is only a self-conscious survival of this state of mind, which we might even say has found an eleventh-hour justification in the scientific monism which discerns everywhere the manifestations of one identical principle of energy.

The higher animals not only obey that residuum of ancestral experience known as instinct ; they have their physical energies curbed by scruples. ' Hawks do not pike out hawks' een,' says the homely adage ; and any exceptions that may be alleged against the general rule serve only to confirm it. This scruple, in regard to shedding the blood or devouring the flesh of the species, may not be primitive ; but in the case of every species, whose young need to be suckled or protected, it is a vital condition of its preservation. Where no such scruple existed, the species has quickly and inevitably disappeared : natural selection is powerless against suicide. With primitive or savage humanity, the scruple of blood would seem less general than among certain animals. Homo homini lupus, said Hobbes. On the other hand it is singularly intense in certain groups united by ties of consanguinity ; that is to say, in clans whose members believe themselves to be descended from a common mother — descent from the female being the only form of filiation which can be absolutely established.

Thus the scruple— this barrier opposed to the destruc- tive appetites — is an heritage transmitted to man from animals. Scruples, or at least certain scruples, are as natural to him as the religious sentiment itself. In fact, scruples and animism combined are the starting-point of

INTRODUCTION vii

religion. For if animism is the mother of mythology, scruples lie at the root of religious laws and piety.

Here a third element, peculiar to the homo sapiens, comes in. Many of the higher animals live in a gregarious state, implying the scruple of the blood of the species ; but they do not form communities. Man, however, is not only a social animal : he is also, in the Aristotelian phrase, a political animal — i^dov ttoXitikov. Possibly, bees and ants fall into the same category ; but among mammals, with the single exception of man, there is nothing similar. This social instinct, a development of the gregarious instinct, impels man to seek the company, the friendship, and the protection of his kind. But he goes further, and, under the influence of the animistic illusion, enlarges indefinitely the circle of his relations, actual or imaginary. The savage finds certain animals and certain plants about him, and the very mystery of their existence leads him to give them place in the group formed by the members of the clan. Soon he infers that animal and plant must spring from a common origin with himself, and he proceeds to apply the same scruple to them as to his own people. This respect for plant and animal life is the germ of dendrolatry and zoolatry. In 1900 I called it an hypertrophy of the social instinct, and I do not believe that anyone has since proposed a more acceptable explanation.

The irrational scruple, leading up to a blank, unreason- ing interdiction, the sanction of which is death, is found in all human communities and at all periods. These interdictions, in their most primitive and explicit form, have been carefully studied in Polynesia, where they bear the name of Taboo. Sociologists have acquiesced in this barbarous but convenient term, and I see no

viii INTRODUCTION

reason for discarding it. Taboo is not only the inter- diction itself ; it is also the being or the object protected by that interdiction. Thus blood is taboo, and con- versely we speak of the taboo of blood.

Zoolatry and dendrolatry, like the worship of inanimate objects, or fetichism, were familiar enough to the classical civilisations, but only as survivals pure and simple. It was among the North American peoples of the eighteenth century that they were first observed in general and active operation, entailing the most serious consequences for the constitution of the family itself. Hence^via the missionaries — has come the name totern, which the red man applied to the animal, the plant, or (more rarely) the mineral or celestial body, which his clan recognised as an ancestor, a protector, and a rallying symbol. The primitive form of zoolatry and dendrolatry, antedating any kind of anthropomorphism, is totemism. It may not be so widespread as animism, but the fact remains that it exists, or has existed, among numerous tribal groups, both living and dead, in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania.^

A study of the psychology of children tends to confirm the observations of historians and ethnologists, by enabling them to watch the actual workings of this hypertrophy — this morbid exaggeration of the social instinct— which I imagine to be the origin of totemism. It is only necessary to take a child to the Zoo to be convinced of the extraordinary attraction, quite distinct from mere curiosity, which the animals exercise upon

^ It is useless to say, with a writer in the Revue des traditions populaires (1904, p. 323), that to discuss the subject is tantamount to ploughing the sands, as there is not one totemism but many totemisms. The remark is equally true of magic, religion, and morality ; yet it is both our right and our duty to disengage their essential principles.

INTRODUCTION ix

him, and the sympathy or respect — the poles removed from fear — with which certain types inspire him. If this tangled complex of sentiment is totemism in embryo, then twentieth-century man is a totemist from his mother's womb !

The animal fable is the oldest form of popular litera- ture, and, to this day, the best beloved by children. For is it not an echo of tales conceived by the imagination of man, and accepted by his credulity, in those dim ages when the beasts of the field spoke with tongues ?

Between the taboo and the totem are many links ; and the transition is easy from one to the other. In fact, the primitive taboo, the germ of every social compact, protects the totem, which is the animal or plant tabooed. The totem is inconceivable without a taboo, and the logical outcome of a generalised taboo can hardly be anything else than a totem.

Again, if we knew nothing of the Polynesian taboo, nothing of the American totem, and nothing of the analogous phenomena noticeable in so many quarters of the globe, the mere existence of domestic animals and cultivated plants, among the half-civilised peoples of the Old World and the New, would compel us, after eliminating all other hypotheses, to assume the presence of some powerful agency, akin to the taboo and the totem, as alone capable of explaining the domestication of these animals and plants. It is obvious enough that, before they were reared by man and made to increase under his protection and for his use, they must have been spared by man. But with primitive humanity, ignorant of cattle and cereals, destitute of food-reserves, and perpetually face to face with starvation, there could be only one influence strong enough to save an edible plant or animal

X INTRODUCTION

from destruction. That influence was a religious scruple — a taboo, the violation of which entailed, or was supposed to entail, death. But the taboo which preserves an animal or plant is the essential principle of totemism ; and the animal or plant, which a clan respects and keeps in its immediate neighbourhood as a protector and friend, is the totem. Thus we can establish a priori the existence of taboos and totems in countries where domestic animals and cereals have been known from early times. Now, on the other hand, it is perfectly certain — thanks to the traveller and his note-book — that the taboo and totem flourish almost exclusively in regions where the domestic animal and cultivated plant are conspicuous by their absence. The conclusion was drawn by Mr. Jevons : if totemism has left no perceptible trace in the ideas and rites of a given locality, its surest monument is that very civilisation which has so profoundly modified them both. It is to the honour of Robertson Smith that he was the first to throw into clear relief the religious consequences of totemism — consequences which still persist in the heart of our modern civilisation. As a rule, the animal or vegetable totem, conceived as a well-spring of holiness and power, was allowed to live in peace ; but in exceptional cases the clansmen solemnly slew and ate it as a means of sanctification. As these religious banquets became more frequent, they degenerated into ordinary debauches ; then, with the progress of rationalism, the sacrosanct character of animal or plant was forgotten in its self- evident utility. But the tradition of holy feasts, cele- brated in special circumstances, did not disappear, and there always lingered the simple and seductive idea of a gastric assimilation of the divine . essence. Theophagy and Communion are relics of this savage creed ; and with

INTRODUCTION xi

every fresh insight into the genuinely popular and primi- tive elements of ancient religions, it grows more and more obvious how many votaries that creed must have had even in the Old World. Man is never seriously attracted by fire-new ideas, but by modifications of those old ideas which are insensibly fructifying within him.

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In this and the following volumes will be found many applications and confirmations of the foregoing principles, some new, some already seen as through a glass darkly, and others anticipated and developed by different scholars. Had I been the first to formulate them, I should rank with the first thinkers of my day, and modesty alone would preclude me from saying so on the house-tops. As a matter of fact, I do not exactly know who made the discoveries. The names of Tylor, Mac- ' ^^^ I'tont^Cj Lennan, Lang, Smith, Frazer, and Jevons suggest <a^ c^ themselves ; but the one thing certain is that it was / ;

not myself. Mine has been a lowlier part, — to grasp the , ideas of my betters, and to diffuse them as widely as I might, first in my lectures at the Ecole du Louvre, then in the Academic des Inscriptions, and again in many popular and scientific reviews. In France, when I began my excursions into these fields, the whole subject was so absolutely a sealed book that M. Charles Richet had to ask me to explain the word totemism, before I dealt with that group of phenomena in the Revue Scientifique} At the Academic des Inscriptions, in igoo, the only members who did not doubt my sanity, when I read some lucubra- tions on the biblical taboos and the totemism of the Celts, were MM. Maspero and Hamy. The German scholars whom I saw about the same time, Mommsen among the

' The article in question forms chapter vi. of the present volume.

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xii INTRODUCTION

rest, had never heard of a totem. The taboos and totems of the Bible, a question underlying those alimentary interdictions which ignorance regards as hygienic precepts, brought the Jewish theologians into the lists. One of them dealt faithfully with me as an anti-semite, an epithet already hurled at me by my distinguished friend Victor Berard, because I had ventured to impugn, in the pages of the Mirage Oriental, the antiquity and omni- presence of Phoenician commerce. To-day the voice of ignorance is a Httle less heard in the land. Thanks to the diffusion of the English works which have inspired me, thanks to the labours of the lamented Marillier and the editors of the Annee Sociologique, — thanks perhaps, in some degree, to my own missionary efforts which, with the ardour of the neophyte, I have carried into the very precincts of the Popular Universities, — those who once kicked most obstinately against the pricks now acknow- ledge that the system of anthropological exegesis is ' the fashion,' and that ' something may be said for ' totems and taboos. In England, where the relations of the mother-country with her remote colonies have long familiarised the public with these ideas, there is now a school which complains that the totem has been as much abused as the solar myth.^ A characteristic sign of reaction is that certain latter-day writers on Greek mythology religiously eschew the word totem, — which thus, by a curious turn of the wheel, becomes taboo. This reaction is every whit as unscientific as the abuse which is supposed to have given it birth. It seems to me that the ground won, and well won, should neither be

' A. Lang, Man, 1901, p. 12. But the same scholar justly remarks {ibid. 1902, p. 86) : ' Without totemism one can hardly see how eaily human society was ever organised at all.'

INTRODUCTION xiii

extended by rash usurpation, nor faint-heartedly aban- doned. The system of taboos and totems is not a key to fit every lock. In the complex whole of religious phenomena, myths, and cults, there are many things which ought to be explained otherwise. In mythology, particularly, I believe that the earlier methods, especially that of iconological exegesis, can justify their existence by irrefragable arguments, some few of which are due to myself. But wherever the myth or ritual involves a sacred animal or plant, a god or hero torn in pieces or sacrificed, a masquerade of true believers, or an alimentary prohibition, the duty of a scholarly interpreter is to read the riddle in terms of the taboo and totem. To do otherwise, after the results already attained, is to turn one's back upon the obvious— I might almost say, upon scientific honesty.

The former systems of exegesis, from Euhemerus and the Stoics to Creuzer and Max Miiller, have this feature in common : they consider myths and religions as the product of a special faculty of man, set in motion by an impression from without, an historical recollection, or an abstract idea — or, it may be, led astray by some verbal will-o'-the-wisp. The great superiority of the new system lies in the fact that it emphasises the stringent ties which connect the evolution of cults and myths with the sum total of human faculties and the progress of civilisation both moral and material. The primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal, is religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off, one by one, art, agriculture, law, moraUty, poHtics, and even rationalism, which sooner or later must eliminate all religions. For the original function of rationalism was to devise a ritual capable of breaking the fetters in which man had bound

xiv INTRODUCTION

himself, and to enlarge the liberties of humanity by relaxing the rigours of the taboo. The instrument of this emancipation was the sacerdotal caste, which served the cause of freedom before it turned oppressor. Nor was this its only merit. By fixing ritual while belief was still fluid, it rendered the antagonism between those two elements of religion more sensible and, in the long run, more intolerable.

The careful reader, if this book should find any, will observe that it is not free from repetition. Repetition was inevitable, since each chapter or article forms a sell-contained whole. In any case, that vice which Villemain preached as a virtue to the professors of his day is a necessity to the writer who aims at familiarising the man in the street with the results of a science which, like Philosophy aforetime, is both liberal and liberatress.

S. R.

Paris.

CONTENTS

Introduction .....

I. General Phenomena of Animal Totemism

II. The Theory of Sacrifice

III. The Origin and Essence of Taboos

IV. Tarpeia ......

V. The Domestication of Animals

VI. The King Sacrificed

VII. The Origin of Prayers for the Dead

VIII. Art and Magic .....

IX. The Apostles among the Anthropophagi

X. The Babylonian Myths and the First Chapters of Genesis ....

XI. The Hebraic Sabbath

XII. The Sentiment of Modesty

XIII. The Morality of Mithraism

XIV. The Progress of Humanity

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CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

CHAPTER I

THE GENERAL PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 1

At the outset of this article, it may be advisable to recall the fact that the word totem — sign, mark, family — • emanates from America, precisely as tahoo — interdiction, thing interdicted — is native to Polynesia. The two terms, however great their discrepancy of origin, are for the future scientifically inseparable ; for totemism, as will appear later, is simply a particular system of taboos.

The totem, as a rule, is an animal ; less frequently a vegetable ; only in exceptional instances is it an inorganic object. The radical distinction between it and the fetish is this : the fetish is one individual object ; the totem is a class of objects, regarded by members of the tribe or clan as tutelar — protective, in the widest sense of the word. Take the case of a clan with a serpent totem : the members will call themselves Serpents, claim descent from a serpent, abstain from killing serpents, raise pet serpents, read the future by the aid of serpents, believe themselves immune from serpent-bites — and so on indefinitely.

' Revue scientifique, October 13, 1900.

2 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

This aggregate of superstitions and customs radiating ■from the totem constitutes what for the last thirty years has been known as Totemism. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, French missionaries were struck with the importance of totems in the reHgious, social, and political life of the North American native. One of them, the Jesuit Lafitau, actually conceived the idea — a stroke of genius in that age — of appl^dng the phenomena of totemism, which he was studying among the Iroquois, to the interpretation of a special type of Greek m^^tholog} : the Chimaera.

During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, missionaries and travellers in almost every quarter of the globe kept gleaning facts analogous to those observed in eighteenth-century America. More than this, it became apparent that not only had similar phenomena been noted in Peru as early as the sixteenth century, but that unmistakable allusions could be traced in the classical writers themselves — in Herodotus, Diodorus, Pausanias, Aelian, &c. In 1869 MacLennan — author of the famous work on primitive marriage — proposed a theory implying the survival of totemic custom and belief in a large number of civilisations both ancient and modern ; but he preached to deaf ears. Towards 1885 the question was again taken up with riper knowledge and greater critical acumen by Robertson Smith and Frazer. Since then it has never ceased to engage the attention of science, especially in England, where Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, Jevons, Cook, Grant Allen, and others have occupied, or still are occupying, themselves with it.

The fundamental characteristic of animal totemism is the existence of a religious compact, none too clearly

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 3

defined, between certain clans of men and certain species of animals. 1

Although cases of totemic survival have been authenticated, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in all parts of the world, ^ it may be laid down as a broad principle that totemism has only continued to exist where civilisation has remained rough-hewn, more especially in countries where the domestication of animals has made but little headway. We may say, in fact, that if totemism creates a bond between animal and man, the natural consequences of that bond are often fatal to the totemism which created it. The statement may savour of paradox ; but in reality, as Mr. Jevons well showed, the causal nexus is perfectly clear and natural. •> For example :

Suppose a group of totemist clans, given to taming bears, serpents, or eagles, because the}- credit them with a divine quality by which they hope to profit : obviously this state of affairs might last indefinitely, for the simple reason that the animals in question are totally unsuited for domestication. No doubt, if one of them were edible, it would soon come to be eaten at periodical gatherings of the clan ; the idea being to renew the covenant between man and beast by a species of communion. But, on the other hand, there would be

1 For the sake of brevity, I have dealt with animal totemism alone. Vegetable totemism, though rarer, lends itself to the same comparative method.

- See Frazer's Totemism, pp. 91-95 {Geogyaphical Distribution of Totemism). I am aware that the author's ideas were considerably modified in 1899 (v. Annie Sociologique, iii. 217) ; but the facts which he has so ably classified — and to which I must perpetually refer in the course of this work — outweigh any theory on the primitive character of totemism.

^Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, pp. 114 and following.

4 CULTS, MYTHS. AND RELIGIONS

little temptation to multiply these sacred banquets unduly, for wild animals could not be had for the asking, and the supply of tame specimens would of necessity be limited.

Now take another group of clans, and give them as totems the bull, the boar, and the sheep. A few half- tame couples are certain to reproduce their species in the immediate neighbourhood of the clans. As a result, the periodic sacrifices of the totem, and the banquets following those sacrifices, will tend to increase in frequency, until in the long run their character be- comes less and less sacramental and more and more gastronomic. When the animals in question are thoroughly domesticated, formed into herds, guarded by dogs, and constantly in touch with man, the tradition of periodic sacrifices and banquets will still be retained as a religious form ; but in practice the tendency will be to discard the old superstitious reverence and look on the animal simply as a flesh-producer. This stage in the decadence of totemism is apt to produce a set of pheno- mena, for examples of which we need only turn to old- world civilisations. The animal clan is no longer the object of a cult : what remains of the primitive sentiment is focused on particular animals, considered as divine,- — such as the bull of Apis, the he-goat of Mendes, the crocodile of Lake Moeris, and the lion of Leontopolis in Egypt.^ Often enough, the prohibition against killing animals of one or more species has survived as a taboo ; 2 that is to say, as an interdict without a motive, or, at most,

^ Diodorus Siculus, i. 80.

- At the present day, many totemic tribes are known who are not forbidden to eat their totems. These exceptions can easily be justified and leave the principle intact.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 5

with motives (hygienic, for instance) which belong to an absokitely different order of thought and are merely due to the misplaced ingenuity of a later age. The Mussulman and Jewish religions of to-day are cases in point.

But the principal factor in the decline of totemism is the creation of the Pantheon : in other words, mythology. The idea of divine clans is replaced by that of personal divinities, w^hose family-trees and family-histories, fixed by poets and priests, reflect in turn totemic traditions, atmospheric phenomena, spnbolic conceptions, and occasionall}' — for there is truth in all the systems proposed — purely verbal combinations or confusions. Religion migrates from earth to heaven, but for all that she never loses touch of earth. After the dissolution of his league with the animal clans, man distributes them among his new clientele of gods. With these gods — whose numbers are rapidly reduced by syncre- tism and selection — certain species of animals are rather loosely identified : in some instances, the same species is connected by ritual and legend with several gods, because two or more clans with the same totem have each attributed it to a different deity. Thus, according to Turner, one Samoan god was incarnate in the lizard, the owl, and the milleped ; another in the bat, the pigeon, the domestic fowl, the sea-urchin, and so forth.

In classical mythology, Jupiter is represented in the form of an eagle, a bull, and a swan. Conversely, the wolf is the animal of Apollo and Ares alike ; the bull represents Zeus as well as Dionysos ; and the dolphin is the emblem both of Apollo and Posidon. To multiply examples is useless.

6 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Before going further, it may be well to note that, till the very end of ancient mythology, these animals — the attributes, companions, mounts, or favourite victims of the gods — retain throughout the distinctive mark of totemism ; their sanctity resides, not in the individual, but in the species. The statement, that man distributed his totems among his gods, was more than an empty phrase ; for totemism, or something very nearly akin to it, was transplanted to Olympus. It was not one eagle which was the bird of Zeus, nor one wolf which was the companion of Ares ; it was every eagle, every wolf, an animal species for each individual god. Thus the old notion, as to the sanctity of the animal clan, lived on in the shadow of the sanctity of God.^

If mythology, by absorption, tends to cause the disappearance of totemism, it must not be forgotten that, to some extent, it owes its origin to totemism. In Greek mythology, for example, we not only find animal totems associated with the gods, but also a cloud of legends relative to the transformation of gods into animals. These metamorphoses of fable are simply poetical ex- pedients for fitting an older animal legend into the cycle of a divine legend. So, Zeus takes the form of a swan in order to seduce Leda, who brings an egg into the world. This fable must have originated among a group of tribes with a swan totem. In view of the sacrosanct character of the bird and the supposed relationship of the animal clan with the human clan, they would find no difficulty in believing that a swan could couple with

' Even to-day the Russian peasant never kills a dove, because it is the bird of the Holy Ghost ; and children are still taught in France not to crush the insects called betes du bon Dieu (lady-birds).

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 7

and impregnate a woman. ^ When totcmism was verging on extinction, the legend survived ; but if the swan- lover of Leda was to remain divine, mythological tradition was bound to represent him as the incarnation of a god. Thus metamorphosis is not a primary postulate of mythology, but a semi-rationalistic hypothesis to reconcile the relics of totemism to the taste of a nascent anthropomorphism.

The distribution of the clan totems among the tribal and national gods was not the work of a day : it must have been conditioned by a whole mass of circumstances — alliances, wars, local amalgamations — the clue to which is obviously lost forever. One factor of the first import- ance seems to have been the ritual of sacrifice ; which, like all rituals, is eminently conservative. Take the case of a clan owning the bull as its totem, and sacrificing it at intervals. In time the era of personal deities is ushered in ; the bull is converted into an attribute of the chief god, and offered up to him in sacrifice : yet there lingers a more or less distinct recollection of the victim's own divinity. From this combination of the old idea with the new springs a third, which has been destined to pla} no trivial part in the religious history of mankind — the idea of the sacrifice of an anthropomorphic god. This conception is especially noticeable in the cult of Zagreus, the Thracian Dionysus, who, according to the rite-begotten legend, fled from the Titans under the form of a young bull, only to be caught, torn in pieces, and devoured. As long as the godhead dwelt in

' In Egypt the goat was adored at Mendes, and Herodotus relates that, in his day, a goat of the Mendesian canton ' had open commerce with a certain woman' (ii. 46). These vagaries of superstition were natural enough, when the myths were swarming with parallels.

8 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

the species and not in the individual, a sacrifice of this type could be repeated ad infinitum : every bull that was slain, and — limb by bleeding limb — divided among the faithful, was, so to say, a new vessel of election, the sacrifice of which still left a perennial spring of holiness in the species A

But when the deity was no longer distributed evenly over the species, but concentrated in a single person, the idea of sacrificing him became inadmissible, except on condition of his subsequent resurrection. And this is precisely what we find in the legend of Dion^^sus Zagreus, who, after being devoured by the Titans (the ancestors of man), was restored to a glorious life by Jove.

Generally, however, the effect of anthropomorphism was to obscure the idea of a sacrifice of the god, and to accentuate the offering of the victim to the god as a gift or an expiation. This latter conception is not primitive ; for it implies the existence of the non- primitive individual god, and the anthropomorphic hypothesis, with which it is bound up, marks a tolerably recent phase in the history of religion. Still, so un- questioned was its vogue in Greece, from the age of Homer and Hesiod downwards, that — except in the case of a few mystic survivals — no other form of sacrifice was dreamed of. Hence, whenever we meet with rites

' An absolutely complete example of the ' totemic sacrament ' was observed, in 1899, by Messrs. B. Spencer and F. Gillen (Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 204 ; cf. Hubert, Annee sociologique, vol. iii. pp. 208-215). Among certain tribes of Central Australia, the totem is solemnly eaten by the members of the totemic group, at the end of certain ceremonies called Intichiuma. ' Not only have they the right to eat of it ; they must eat of it first. Then, and then only, the members of other totemic groups have the right to eat as much as they choose.'

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 9

presupposing the death of a god, — accompanied by lamentations for his taking-off, and followed by ecstatic rejoicings at his resurrection, — we are face to face with the vestiges of totemism. The point might easily be shown by an analysis of the ritual followed at the festival of the Syrian Adonis, who, the legend says, was done to death by a wild boar (an animal that remained taboo in Syria), but who was originally neither more nor less than the wild boar itself — a totem slain and eaten once a year at a solemn feast of communion.

In the totemic period, man offers no victims to his gods or their priests, because he knows neither gods nor priests. The clan sanctifies itself — or, to be accurate, renews its store of sanctity — by eating an animal totem in accordance with certain rites. This need was still felt after the phase of strict totemism had passed awa}'. It survived under two forms. Some- times the totem, now regarded as an unclean beast, continued to be eaten ritually. This w'as the rule in the mystic conventicles of Jerusalem, referred to in the following passage of Isaiah (Ixvi. 17) : They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord. Here the forbidden foods are already playing the part of those magic potions to be found in all popular phar- macopoeias — the efftcac}^ of which varies directly with their repulsiveness. But the idea of a cleansing sancti- fication is still clearly indicated by the prophet ; and the custom, against which he inveighs so forcibly, is only a survival from the grey past of religion.

In the second place, where the need for sanctiiication could no more be satisfied at the expense of an animal

10 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

whose prestige had disappeared owing to the decadence of totemism, it was inevitable that man should turn to man : homo res sacra homini. The result was human sacrifice accompanied by acts of cannibalism ; in which Robertson Smith rightly saw an aftermath of the totemic sacrifice. References abound in the classical authors ; although the cannibalism is usually limited to tasting the victim's blood or eating a small part of his body. The most important texts on the subject are those of Plato and Pausanias on the cult of Zeus L3-caeus in Arcadia — a deity who has been mistakenly identified with the Phoenician Baal.i This cult succeeded a totemic wolf-cult involving a ceremonial sacrifice of the animal, followed by a banquet, in virtue of which the faithful beUeved that they assimilated the sanctit}^ of the victim and were themselves translated into divine wolves. When the wolf totem was superseded by the Lycaean, or lupine, Zeus, the ritual was preserved, but the victim became a man consecrated to the god. As the body of believers still held that by tasting his flesh they were transformed into wolves, they assumed the name of Xvkol — exactly as the initiates of Bacchus became ^cLKxoi ; the devotees of Bassareus (the Fox-Dion3^sos), Bassarids ; and those of the ursine Artemis {dpKTO'i), Arcti.

There is no such thing as a stationary civilisation : however slow may be the intellectual evolution of a people, the religious ideas of to-day are not those of yesterday. Consequently, it must be confessed that, for us, primitive totemism is largely a sealed book, limited as our knowledge is to survivals, more or less corrupt, of a vanished creed. The description applies equally to

' Cf. Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iv. p. 189.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM ii

the fragmentary indications of classical literature and to the detailed accounts of the travellers who have studied totemism as practised by the modern savage ; the difference is purely one of degree. And yet, if we confine ourselves to the phenomena of most usual occur- rence among savages, it is possible to draft a sort of totemic code, whose articles are customs or beliefs that have their counterparts, many or few, in both classical and non-classical religions. Here we have what may be regarded as a practical test of the universality of totemism in the beginning ; for if the tree is known by his fruits, it is equally certain that the original identity of doctrines is proved by the identity of the practices which are the logical result of those doctrines.

We should be inclined to formulate the code of totemism as follows :—

I. Certain animals are neither killed nor eaten, hut man rears specimens and tends them.

Examples are the cow, the cat, the sheep, the hawk, &c., in Egypt ; the goose, hen, and hare among the Celts of Britain ; ^ the fish in Syria ; - the bear among the Ainos (whose women sometimes suckle the cubs) ; the eel and the crayfish in Samoa ; the dog among the Kalangs of Java ; and the eagle among the Moquis of Arizona.^ In Hellenic countries we find many cases of tabooed animals, fed and reared because they were the property of a god ; for instance, the holy sheep of Helios at Apollonia in Epirus ; the heifers sacred to Persephone at Cyzicus ; ^ the mice of Apollo at Hamaxitus in the Troad ; ■ the

' Caesar, Bell. Gall. v. 12.

- Robertson Smith, Religion of the- Semites, p. 173.

^ Frazer, Totemism, p. 14.

Reinach, Traite d'&piqvaphie grecque, p. 153.

■> Aelian, Hist. Anim. xii. 5.

12 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

bears, eagles, horses, and oxen at Hierapolis ; ^ the geese of Juno on the capitol at Rome, &c. It is evident that the idea of divine property is secondary, as it could only come into existence at a time when an organised sacerdotal class was already administering, in its own interests, the properties attributed to the god. Originally all these were totemic animals, like the red dogs of the Kalangs of Java.

II. Mourning is worn for the accidental death of a member of a particular animal species ; and it is buried with the same honours as a member of the clan.

This was the case with a crab at Seriphos,- with the wolf at Athens,^ the heifer in Egypt, ^ the goat at Mendes,'^ the gazelle in Arabia, the owl in Samoa, the hyena among the Wanikah of West Africa, the cobra at Travancore,^ and the hen among certain Indian tribes in South America. The fact that several of these animals are not domestic, but dangerous even, excludes the hypothesis — improb- able enough on a priori grounds — of a cult inspired bj' gratitude.

III. Occasionally the alinicntary interdiction applies only to a part of the animal's body.

Genesis mentions — and explains by a legend^ — the ban against eating the tendon of the thigh : ^ Herodotus says that the Egyptians abstained from the heads of animals.^ Among the Omahas of North America, the

^ Lucian, De Dea Syria, 41.

- Aelian, Hist. Anim. xiii. 26.

^ Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 124.

•• Herodotus, ii. 41.

'" Ibid. ii. 46 ; cf. Diodorus, i. 83, 84.

^ Frazer, Totemism, pp. 22 5^.

' Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions, p. iiS.

'"^ Genesis xxxii. 33.

^ Herodotus, ii. 39.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 13

members of the clan of Black Shoulders may not eat the tongue of a buffalo ; the ' Eagles ' cannot touch its head, nor the Hangas its ribs.^ These partial taboos are due to a compromise with the primitive taboo applying to the whole animal, and were dictated by the practical needs of life.

IV. When animals, ordinarily spared, are killed under the stress of urgent necessity, the slayers address excuses to them, or strive by various artifices to extenuate the violation of the taboo : in other words, the murder.

This fact explains the ritual of the Bouphonia at Athens.- The ox, by eating the sacred cakes, was supposed to go voluntarily to his death, and the mock trial held after his dispatch ended in a verdict of guilty against the knife, which was accordingly thrown into the sea. At Tenedos, the priest who offered up a young bull to Dionysus was attacked with stones. In Corinth, the annual sacrifice of a goat to Hera Acraea was performed by foreign ministers hired for the purpose, and even these were careful to place the knife in such a way that the victim seemed to kill itself by accident.'^ In the tribe of Mount Gambier (Southern Australia), a man only kills his totem in case of famine, and then he expresses his grief at having to eat its flesh. ^ Some tribes of New South Wales do not kill their totems themselves, but, like the Corinthians, employ strangers to do so ; after which they eat without scruple. The Bechuanas never kill a lion until they have made their apologies, and the slayer must

^ Frazer, Totemism, p. ii.

2 Cf. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 304 sqq.

^ Ihid. pp. 305, 306.

•• Frazer, Totemism, p. 7.

'" Ibid. p. 19.

14 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

undergo a purification.^ In North America an Outaouak of the Bear clan excuses himself to the bear for having been forced to kill him, and explains that his children are hungry. ^

V. The tabooed animal is mourned for after it has been ritually sacrificed.

' The Thebans,' says Herodotus,-' ' do not sacrifice rams but hold them sacred. On one day in the year, however, on the feast of Zeus, they flay and cut up one single ram and cover the image of Zeus with its skin. . . . This done, all who are in the temple beat themselves, lament the death of the ram, and then bury it in a sacred tomb.'

According to Frazer,^ a Californian tribe, which revered the buzzard, used to hold a yearly festival at which the chief ceremony was the killing of a buzzard without spilling a drop of its blood. It was then skinned ; the feathers were kept to make a sacred garment for the medicine-man, and the body buried in holy ground, to the lamentations of old women.

The similarity between the two narratives is striking. In Herodotus, the animal's skin is placed on the statue of the god ; but this ceremonial detail cannot be primitive, as images of the deity are of no very great antiquity. Probably, in the beginning, the skin was reserved for the sacrificer or chief-priest, — the equivalent of the Californian medicine-man.

The mourning of the Syrian women for the death of Adonis is susceptible of a like explanation, though the

' Frazer, Totemism, p. 19.

- Ibid. p. 19.

•' Herodotus, ii. 42. (Macaulay's translation.)

^ Frazer, Totemism, p. 15.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 15

primitive ritual oi the Adonia is obscure. The object of the lamentations, following as they did the sacrifice of a totem, appears to have been to lighten, or quite throw off, the load of responsibility incurred.' However certain, however imminent the resurrection of the god, his worshippers must still bewail his death — a fact too easily paralleled to need insisting upon. 2

VI. Men put on the skins of certain animals, especially in religious ceremonies. Where totemism exists, these animals are totems.

Among the Tlinkits of North America, the men, on solemn occasions, appear completely disguised in the skins of animal totems. The Condor clans of Peru orna- ment themselves with the bird's feathers. Among the Omahas, whose totem is the buffalo, the boys arrange their hair in two curls, in imitation of buffalo horns. Among the Southern Slavenians, a male child, at birth, is clothed in a wolf-skin, while an old woman sallies out of the house and cries : ' A she-wolf has brought forth a wolf.' ^ It was on record that the new-born Zalmoxis was enveloped in a bear's hide."- During the celebration of certain rites, the men of an Australian tribe, whose totem is the wild dog, or dingo, mimic it by howling and walking on all fours. Classical antiquity is fruitful of examples ; though, here, totemism is only conjectural. Thus the candidate for admission to the mysteries of Sabazius was invested with the skin of a fawn ; "' the

' Robertson Smith, op. cit. p. 412.

- It is only necessary to recall what still occurs on Good Friday and the following days. The votaries of a dead God mourn until He shall rise again to the joy of all hearts.

■* Frazer, Totemism, pp. 27-33.

•• Ibid. pp. 32-33.

' Demosthenes, De Corona, p. 260.

i6 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

young girls of Attica, between the ages ol five and ten, were called apKTot [she-hears), and, clothed as such, took part in the cult of a bear-goddess, the Brauronian Artemis ; ^ while the pilgrims starting for Hierapolis sacrificed a sheep, ate it, and covered themselves with the skin.2

We have already mentioned the Egyptian rite of clothing the statue of the Theban god with the skin of a sacrificed ram ; and we have observed that originally it must have been the priest and not the statue that was covered. Robertson Smith broached an ingenious theory, that the widespread custom of donning the skin of a sacrificed animal gave birth to the plastic types of the animal-headed Egyptian gods — Bast, Sekhet, Khnum, &c.-^ His hypothesis is the more probable since the passage of Herodotus allows us to assume a period of transition, during which the skin was placed, not on the sacrificer, but on the image of a divinity supposed to be present.

VII. Clans and individuals take the names of animals. Where totemism exists, these animals are totems.

The habit is almost universal among the Indians of North America ; and examples are also numerous in Australia.^ In Egypt it seems as though the animal names bestowed on the nomes, or cantons, must have been totemic. In the Hellenic world we meet clans like the Cynadae of Athens, the Porcii of Rome, and the Hirpi (wolves) of Samnium ; along with nations Hke the Myrmidons (ants), the Mysians (mice), the Lycians

' Frazer, Totemism, p. 40.

2 Lucian, De Dea Syria, c. 55.

3 Cf. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ed. 2, vol. ii. p. 129. •• Frazer, Totemism, pp. 61-82.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 17

(wolves), and the Arcadians (i.q. Arctadians, bears). The case of the Arcadians is pecuHarly interesting, as we know there existed in the country a cult of an ursine Artemis, Callisto, who was changed into a bear by Hera.'

Lubbock and Spencer have subscribed to the view that totemism had its origin in the weakness of primitive man for assuming an animal's name ; so, the grand- children of the warrior Serpent might convince them- selves that they were descended from the actual reptile. Unfortunately, the theory starts from the false premise that the idea of descent is the essence of totemism ; while, as a matter of fact, it is simpl}^ the hypothesis of a savage groping after an explanation of the immemorial alliance between the animal clan and his own. The facility of animal nomenclature is an effect, not a cause, of totemism.

VHL In many instances, the clan carries the image of an animal on its ensigns and arms. The individual may paint this image on his body, or tattoo himself with it.

Mr. Frazer has adduced many American examples of this practice, in which the image of the tutelar animal is that of the totem.- In the ancient world we find the wolf figuring on the ensigns of Rome, the wild boar on those of Gaul ; while other considerations suggest that both wolf and boar were once totems among the two peoples. In Egypt the hawk blazoned on the king's banner was undoubtedly the totem of the family which founded the Egyptian royal house. It is remarkable that the Greeks themselves tried to establish a relationship between the facts of totemism, as observed in Egypt,

' Cf. Berard, Origine des cultes arcadiens, p. 130. - Frazer, Totemism, pp. 29-31.

c

i8 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

and the choice of animals for ensigns. We read in Diodorus : ^ ' The second explanation which they give touching the worship of sacred animals is couched thus : the inhabitants of Egypt, who beforetime were oft beaten by their enemies, through their ignorance of the art of war, conceived the idea of having rallying signs in their battles. Now these signs were representations of the animals which they venerate to-day, and the chiefs affixed them to the point of their pikes, in view of each rank of soldiers. The said marks contributing much to their victory, the}^ regarded them as the cause of their salvation, and for very gratitude forbore to kill any of the animals so depicted. Afterwards this custom became an article of religion.' Diodorus gives three explanations — none rational — of the origin of totemism in Egypt. The one quoted has at least the advantage of clearly establishing the fact that the sacred animals appeared on the Egyptian ensigns ; precisely as the natives of the Upper Darling engrave their totem on their shields, and as several American tribes in time of war carry sticks surmounted by pieces of bark on which their animal totems are painted,- As the standards always precede troops on the march, it is probable that the animal-ensign represents the animal-augur or animal- guide which we shall have to consider a little later (see XI).

IX. The totemic animal, if dangerous, is supposed to spare the members of the totemic clan, but only when they belong to it by birth.

This belief lies at the root of the totemic ordeal, examples of which are found in the classical period. In

1 Diodorus, i. 86, - Frazer, op. cit. p. 30.

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 19

Senegambia the men of the Scorpion clan declare they are never bitten by the creature ; the Psyllians of Marniarica (Eastern Tripoli), as well as the Ophiogenes of Parium, considered themselves proof against snake- bites. ^ In fact, the Psyllians exposed their new-born children to serpents as a test of legitimac}^ ; and to-day the ]\Ioxos of Peru, whose totem is the jaguar, submit their medicine-men to a similar ordeal.- Among the Bechuanas there is a Crocodile clan, which expels any member who has been bitten by a crocodile, or so much as splashed by water from a stroke of its t:n\.-^ The exposure of Romulus and Remus (sons of the Wolf Mars), whom the she- wolf by sparing recognises as her offspring, may also be classed as a kind of totemic ordeal.

X. Animal totems help ami protect the members of the totemic clan.

There w^as a tale in Egypt that one of the ancient kings had been saved from death by a crocodile, who carried him across Lake Moeris on his back.^ The Greek legends of animal preservers, like Arion's dolphin and the fox of Aristcmienes, have probably a similar origin ; and the same explanation will cover the numer- ous traditions of fabulous heroes fed by beasts. Both ancients and moderns, however, are in error, when they

1 Strabo mentions a tribe of Ophiogenes at Parium on the Propontis. They believed themselves akin to serpents and descended from a snake-hero. The males were credited with the power of curing viper bites by the laying-on of hands (Strabo, xiii. 58S). A slip of Pliny's locates them in Paros — in insula Paro (xxviii. 30), and the variant Cypro has led some of the moderns to assign them to Cyprus. Elsewhere (vi. 2, 2), Pliny — citing Crates of Pergamus — says the Ophiogenes lived ' on the Hellespont around Parium " (in Hellesponto circa Parium) ; and in this he coincides with Varro. Aelian also speaks of a tribe of Ophiogenes in Phrygia, claiming descent from Halia, who became pregnant to a sacred serpent.

- Frazer, p. 20. ^ Ibid. p. 21. ■* Diodorus, i. 89.

c 2

20 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

attribute totemism to a sentiment of gratitude for the services of animals. In the first place, most totems belong to the dangerous species ; and, in the second, the inost useful animals — those which have been domes- ticated by man— owe both their usefulness and their domestication to totemism itself. The idea of gratitude, like the idea of relationship, has no value beyond that of a convenient explanation, invented to account for a state of things the origin of which was already forgotten.

XI. Animal totems foretell the future to the faithful, and serve them as guides.

In Greece and Rome we can only suppose that the augural animals were former totems ; but, in Egypt, Diodorus distinctly states that the hawk, the totem of the royal family, was venerated because it foretold the future. 1 In Australia and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow, and the owl premonish their fellow clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far as to rear owls for the sake of their vaticinatory qualities in war,- In this connection we may recall the prophetic hare of the British queen Boadicea (Budicca), who governed a country where, in Caesar's time, the hare was fed but not eaten, — which is tantamount to saying that it was treated as a totem. ■' Another instance is the stor}^ of the wolf which guided the Samnites to the foundation of their colony. '^ This last example is the more interesting that the Samnites in question called themselves Hirpini — from hirpus, their word for wolf.^ It is, therefore, extremely probable that they looked upon the wolf as a totem.

> Diodorus, i. 87. - Frazer, op. cit. p. 23, •' Dion Cassius, Ixii. 9.

■' Compare the pillar of cloud or lire (Yahveh) which guided the Israelites in the desert (Exodus xiv. 21). '" Strabo, vi. 12

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 21

This use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realised that the senses of animals were acutcr than their own ; nor is it surprising that they should have expected their totems — that is to say, their natural allies — to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those provisions of nature, wells especially, which animals seem to scent b}^ instinct.^

Divination by animals can have had no other origin ; and the h3'po thesis also explains why the augural animals at an earlier period seem to have been both guides, augurs, and totems at one and the same time. The bird which so often precedes the war-chariots, on ancient Greek vases, certainly played the double part of guide and augur.

XII. The juembers of a totemic clan frequently believe themselves related to their animal totem by the bond of a common descent.

I put this characteristic last, though many have seen in it the very quintessence of totemism. To my mind it is simply a vain thing foolishly invented b}' totemic man, to account, either for certain taboos whose origin he failed to comprehend, or for the traditional name of his own clan. Still, this attempt at an explanation is very old, and traces of it exist in classical antiquity. Thus the Ophiogenes of Parium, whose totem was the serpent, believed — as their name indicates — that they sprang from a snake. 2 According to an Aeginetan fable recorded by Strabo, the Myrmidons were ants transformed into men after a plague which depopulated the whole

' Tacitus, translating an Alexandrine author, will have it that the Jews adored the ass because wild asses had re\-ealed to Moses the existence of a spring {Histories, v. 3).

- See the Stephanus-Didot Thesaurus, s.v.

22 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

island.^ This legend, without a doubt, must have grown up round the name Myrmidon (ant) itself ; on the other hand, Ophiogenes (the serpent-born) must be the transla- tion of a genealogical legend coined to explain the tribal intimacy with serpents.

The Gaulish patronymics beginning with the name of an animal, and terminating in genos, which indicates a divine filiation — e.g. Matiigenos (boar-son), Brannogenos (crow-son), &c. — are themselves no more than a reflec- tion of traditions associating the cult of an animal with a certain family. The Semitic tribes have furnished Robertson Smith with several instances of a supposed kinship between man and beast. Among modern totemic races examples are legion. It is enough to refer the reader to Mr, Frazer's collection ; ~ to add to it, though easy, would be labour lost.^

From the foregoing evidence it follows conclusively that the different countries composing the ancient world show unequivocal traces of taboos and customs analogous to those of modern totemic religions. The one thing lacking is a clear and definite statement of that com- pact, which to us appears the very essence of totemism. It must be conceded, however, that nowhere — even in totemic countries — is the idea distinctly formulated. Almost everywhere it has been replaced by the notion of relationship or an exchange of services in the remote

^ Strabo, viii. i6. - Frazer, Totemism, pp. 3 sqq.

• I purposely refrain from classing exogamy with the logical develop-

ments of totemism. Exogamy, like the horror of incest, which is an attenuated form of it, springs from the taboo of the blood of the clan. As the members of a clan are recognised by their possession of a common totem, it is only natural that totemism and exogamy should often go in pairs ; but exogamy is neither an offshoot of totemism nor insepar- able from it (cf. Annee Sociologiqiie, vol. iii. p. 218).

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 23

past ; in other words, by a later attempt to explain the meaning of the old taboos.

Still, as the idea of a pact is the only one that accounts for all the phenomena of totemism, it remains both possible and logically sound to start from those phenomena and reascend to the parent conception. We have shown that the facts in question were of fairly frequent occurrence in the Mediterranean world before the Christian era : it seems, therefore, perfectly legitimate to consider them as the fruits — dried, perhaps, but authentic nevertheless — of a train of thought similar to that observable at the present day in both Americas, part of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The conclusion may not have the cast-iron rigour of a mathematical demonstration ; but, at least, it shares that high degree of probability which is the utmost we can expect in any investigation of religious and social data.

We may also approach the question from another, more general and philosophic, point of view, and show that primitive totemism would be an absolutely necessary hypothesis, even if we had neither ethnological facts nor literary evidence to support it.

Attempts at defining the homo sapiens have stopped at the formula : ' Man is a religious animal.' The definition is scrupulously exact — on the one condition that we take religion in its widest sense, and not as a s^Tionym for modern theological doctrines. Primarily religion is a system of taboos — spiritual restraints on the brute energies and instincts of man. The first religious codes were collections of prohibitions and interdictions, the oldest and most universal of which forbade the shedding of blood within the limits of a group united by ties of blood. Superstition, however, under this system, sapped

24 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

all the energies of man. The taboos applied alike to the human, animal, and vegetable kingdoms ; between which the savage — an animist by nature — was incapable of discriminating with precision. Now, so far as the system of taboos centred round the relations of man to man, it formed the nucleus of family and social law, of morality and of politics ; so far, however, as it concerned the animal and vegetable world, it constituted totemism. Totemism — or the whole body of prohibitions curbing human activity in its dealings with animal and plant life — is not merely a correlative of law and morality in their infancy ; it is inextricably mingled and blent with both, just as, in the eyes of primitive man and the child, human beings, animals, and plants form but one kingdom, permeated by the same vital principle.

We have said the oldest taboos only protect the members of a clan ; even in the Decalogue, the words Thou shall not kill have not the universal force with which, theoretically, at least, we credit them. But, at the time of the Commandments, the clan had already emerged from the intermediate, or tribal, stage, and was now a people. Clan-alliances, the germ of a larger national unity, were early necessitated by the struggle for existence ; isolated clans disappeared, and the survival of a group depended on the vigour of its social instincts. Now, with the haziest of boundary-lines between the king- doms of nature — plant, animal, and man — it was natural enough that human clans should contract alliances, not only with each other, but also with animal or vegetable clans or both. As a result, the protective taboos in the human clan came to include the animal or vegetable species with which it was leagued and on whose aid and

PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL TOTEMISM 25

protection it relied. ^ Thus we gain what may be called an a priori explanation of the fundamental compact constituting totemism — a compact which is simply an extension of the universal and primitive taboo, Thou shall nol kill.

' Truth to say, these primitive alliances are no more strange than the well-known covenant, between Israel and Jehovah, on which the Mosaic religion is based. Judging from experience, men could no more expect succour from Jehovah than from an animal or vegetable clan. Yet they believed they could, and from that belief drew an enduring force which to this day sustains them in their trials.

CHAPTER II

THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE ^

Sacrifice is the crucial point of all cults, the essential bond between man and deity. In this respect it is comparable to prayer ; but whereas the latter is a spiritual appeal, the former entails the employment of a material substance forfeited or destroyed in the sacrificial act.

The general conception of sacrifice is that of a gift offered by man to the divinity in order to conciliate his favour ; in other words, it is a purchase of friendship by the mammon of unrighteousness. ' Gifts,' says Hesiod, ' prevail upon gods and reverend kings.' The abbe Bergier in the ' Dictionnaire de Theologie ' defines it as ' the offering up to God of an object which is de- stroyed in His honour, as a recognition of His sovereign dominion over all things.' If we analyse this sentence closely, the underlying absurdity is apparent : how does the destruction of any object do honour to any person ? The abbe proceeds : ' It is not in the least anomalous for a poor man to make some slight present to a rich man who has done him a kindness ; he considers

^ Lecture given in Paris, 1902, at the Universite populaire, rue

Richer.

26

THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE 27

that, though his benefactor may not need the gift, still an expression of gratitude cannot fail to please him.'

There is, perhaps, a certain crudity in the notion, but with that we are not concerned. Here in the eyes of most critics is the root idea of sacrifice. Its principle is that man behaves towards divinity as he would to- wards one or more persons endowed with powers vastly superior to his own — potentates whose aid it were ill to seek with empty hands.

If it were true that the gift-sacrifice was the primitive form of sacrifice, it would also be necessary to prove that peoples on a lower plane of religious belief regard the superhuman and mj^sterious beings, upon whom they conceive themselves to depend, as men writ large ; that is to say, as personalities subject to the same limitations and frailties as man, but gifted with higher or more active faculties. In that case, we should find them treating those beings precisely as their experience has shown it advisable to treat the grandees of this world, to wit, the priests and chiefs. Now, the etiquette observed bv every non-civilised race forbids a man to approach his chief without a present. This constitutes the propitiatory sacrifice. If he has received a favour, he shows his gratitude by a fresh gift, and this may be called the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Or he thinks the chief is displeased, and to appease him, offers a sacrifice of pacification or expiation.^

All the above is true, but it is true only of a com- paratively recent period in the history of mankind.

You know what is understood by the doctrine of

' Goblet d'Alviella, Revue dc runiversitc de Bnixelles, 1897-S9, pp. 499-500. I have more than once borrowed textually from this excellent article.

28 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

evolution. It is the knowledge that all things are in motion, and subject to a slow transformation governed by certain determinable laws.

One of the axioms which should guide the sociologist who accepts this doctrine is that our modern ideas, because they are modern, cannot have been the ideas of primitive man, but must have been evolved from his by a gradual process of transformation.

Now the theory which considers sacrifice as a gift made to the divinity — the divinity being regarded as an immortal and therefore trebly formidable man — cannot hold good for the beginning of things, for it still dominates the superstition of to-day.

Open one of the recent books — the ' Chinoiseries Romaines ' of Stheno, the ' Cordicoles ' of Tery, the ' Dossier des Pelerinages ' of Noel Parfait, or the excellent articles published in the Semaine Religieuse by the abbe Hemmer — and you will find that the essential character of present-day devotion, say the cult of Saint Anthony of Padua, lies in the idea of exchange — of gif-gaf. ' Good Saint, let me pass my examination, let me find my umbrella and I will give you, according to the state of my purse, a hundred francs or a hundred sous. You may even have them in advance, if that will weigh in my favour.'

Gentlemen, I do not say that this is either good or bad, childish or reasonable ; we are students, not tractarians. But, without leaving our own times, ob- serve that, besides these sacrifices consisting of gifts or fines — privations which the believer inflicts upon him- self — religion contains another and far more mysterious rite, hard for the non-elect to understand : I mean the so-called Sacrifice of the Mass. The salient features are

THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE 29

these. The priest, impersonating the community, absorbs, under the form of bread and wine, the tlesh and blood of the deity in order to impregnate himself with the divine essence. At intervals the faithful are allowed to participate in this sacrifice ; but since the Middle Ages, from motives of pure expedienc}', only the bread is given, not the wine.

I have no sympathy with the sceptic — Voltairean he calls himself — who jests at this solemn and ancient rite ; he would be much better occupied in studying its origin and development. The question whether the godhead is or is not present in the host is not a scientific question ; the answer in the affirmative is only an opinion, and admits of no discussion. The problem we have to solve is this : Why, in the religion of to-day, are there two forms of sacrifice — one of the earth earthy, quite clear, and universally intelligible (I refer, of course, to the gift-sacrifice) ; the other obscure in the extreme, shrouded in mysticism, and so peculiar in its character that the communicant himself is none too sure what he is doing ?

If we concede the theory of evolution, it is certain that the straightforward sacrifice by gift must be a recent growth, while conversely the perplexing sacrifice of the deity himself must date from a past correspondingly remote. But it may be asked, how can the sacrifice of the Mass be older than the other, when the Mass was instituted less than two thousand years ago, whereas the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians knew and practised the gift-sacrifice three or four thousand years before the birth of Christ ?

That is precisely the fallacy. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were highly civilised nations, and there-

30 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

fore, like ourselves, cognizant of the gift-sacrifice. But, though distinctly reticent on the subject, they were also acquainted with the more mystic type, and aware of its extreme antiquity.

Moreover, a nation may have lived two thousand years before another and yet represent a more advanced stage of civilisation. Take an Australian savage of the present day, and compare him with one of those Greeks who, twenty-five hundred years ago, created the beautiful monuments of Athens. Which of the two is the primitive man ? Which of the two would have the more rudimentary — the more primeval — notions on religion ? The savage, obviously. The savage, then, is our principal witness ; and for the last hundred years he has been cross-examined with the utmost care. Now this is what happens. An Australian aboriginal tells you a strange tale. He says, for example, that he is absolutely forbidden to eat a certain animal, because that animal is his ancestor. This is surprising enough at first ; but, if you are a reader, you remember that the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews have all testified to similar beliefs lingering among them as vestiges of the past — survivals as the moderns have it. You conclude then that the existing savage resembles a bed of limestone cropping out in an alluvial country. If we dig to a sufficient depth under the gravel, we strike the same limestone again ; and analogously if we delve far enough into the history of civilisation, from three to five thousand years before Christ, we rediscover our savage's articles of faith.

Thus, the twentieth-century savage enables us to catch a glimpse — or more than a glimpse — of the opinions of our far-off ancestors, members of races that ripened

THE THEORY OE SACRIFICE 31

earlier into civilisation, but nevertheless passed through the phase in which the savage still remains.

To return to the gift-sacrifice. If it were a primitive conception, then the lowest strata of savage humanity would exhibit two phenomena : firstly, the belief in one or more gods after the pattern of men ; and, secondly, the existence of priests acting as representatives and treasurers of the god. For without the priest there is no gift-sacrifice ; a pair of visible hands is always necessary to receive the offering in lieu of the unseen God.

But the case is not so. On the contrary, the most primitive religions know neither a personal god made in the image of man, nor a priest, the deputy of that god.

The Bible might be quoted as an exception ; but if from the very beginning the Bible assumes a personal god, it knows nothing of the priest. The priest is a late- comer in the history of Israel. And as for the anthro- pomorphic deity of the Pentateuch, he is barely older than the year 1000 B.C., the earliest date to which the present version of Genesis can be attributed. A millen- nium before Christ is little more than the day before yesterday — and the proof is easy. We all know now that there was a long period in the history of man when he knew neither metals, domestic animals, nor cereals. Now the redactor of Genesis is so comparatively recent a person that he had no inkling of any such period : Adam tends the trees in the garden of Eden, and, immediately upon his expulsion, betakes himself to agriculture, as though men from the first must have been familiar with fruit trees and cereals. Therefore the writer to whom we owe the biblical Genesis is modern, and his idea of a man-like god cannot be primitive.

32 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

On the other hand, the animal — or animal-headed — deities of Egypt carry us back to a much earlier epoch, anywhere between 5000 B.C. and 6000 B.C. Thus we may plausibly conclude that long before the divinity was in- vested with human traits he was envisaged under the form of certain animals.

And now comes a striking coincidence. Go to the most primitive of modern savages and you find a religion to which the man-god is unknown, and the animal or plant god all in all. It is not an individual animal or plant which they adore ; it is a particular species — ^animal or vegetable — the members of which they imagine are bound to themselves by a mysterious and immemorial tie. These, to their minds, are the protectors, the talismans, of the tribe or clan. More than this, they are apt to persuade themselves that they are lineal descendants of the guardian animal or plant, and proceed, logically enough, to adopt its name.

For instance, certain North American Indians call themselves Beavers. They hold that their ultimate ancestor was a beaver, who miraculously brought forth a man ; they will not pass a beaver without some token of respect or attachment ; and they are fertile in anecdotes of beavers who saved their lives — beavers who showed them fords — beavers who did them all manner of services.

From time to time, primitive peoples, addicted to the cult of animals, indulge in a peculiar type of sacrifice. Suppose that a tribe is afflicted with famine, drought, or an epidemic ; it argues that, for some reason or other, the mascot — say, the beaver— has withdrawn its counte- nance and protection. To effect a reconciliation, two methods will be employed. On the one hand, the tribe

THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE 33

will offer gifts — in other words, carry food — to its tutelar animal : this is the gift-sacrifice. At other times the remedy is more eccentric. The first step is to convene a grand synod of tribal chiefs ; then a beaver must be caught and killed; and, finally, every man present eats a portion of its flesh. The point of this ceremony is supposed to lie in the fact that it is a sort of self-deifica- tion, inasmuch as it directly increases the element of divine energy inherent in every man. In a word, it is a savage sacrament, resorted to in supreme moments of distress or peril — a communion in which the sacrifice of a divine object imparts divinity to all that eat of it.

The great discovery of Professor Robertson Smith, of Cambridge, who died there at an early age in 1884, has shown that sacrifice by communion was older and more primitive than the sacrifice by gift ; that it was, in fact, the oldest form of sacrifice ; that traces of it are found among the Greeks and Romans as well as among the Hebrews ; and, lastly, that the communion in Christian churches is only an evolution of this primitive sacrificial rite. The communion did not originate with Christianity. On the contrary, it was a time-honoured and widely prevalent institution, especially among the half-civilised communities of Asia, where it had a great vogue with the lower classes, as the more enlightened section of the population had been won over to the simpler idea of the gift-sacrifice. To-day, then, we may call it a survival — a survival from the very childhood of the world. And here we have a perfectly satisfactory solution to two problems : firstly, why this extraordinary form of sacrifice should have taken so firm a hold on the better half of mankind ; and, secondly, why its primary significance should have been so obscured both in the

34 CULTS. MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Middle Ages and in our own generation. In the first case, it gained ready and rapid acceptance because man was predisposed in its favour by his own religious past ; and in the second, its import has been easily obliterated because it corresponds to an idea as far removed from modern modes of thought as a primitive chip flint from a Lebel gun.

Even yet we meet with the notion that when two men take food together a kind of moral and physical bond is established between them. Originally this idea was still stronger ; but only sacred food could knit the sacred tie. Nothing but the flesh of the holy animal would serve, and the solemn mystery of its death was justified in the sight of the faithful by their conviction that so and not otherwise must the mystic bond between the believer and his god be created and confirmed. Thus all there was of a higher life in the primitive community was bought by the death and periodic sacrifice of a god.

And now let us try to outline the evolutionary process which fused this primitive type of sacrifice with that of sacrifice by gift. When once agriculture and the domes- tication of animals had dispelled the mystery surrounding the different forms of plant and animal life, familiarity began to breed contempt. Little by little the idea of a divinity hedging certain species of animals faded away, and man began to create the godhead in his own likeness. Yet there remained a tradition of animals sacrificed and eaten by the community. Therefore both sacrifice and banquet were retained, in the belief that the god- anthropomorphic now — smelt the blood and inhaled the smoke of the burnt-offering. To provide him with a representative, a priest assisted at the ceremony, until in the end he and his ritual completely dwarfed the part

THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE 35

played by the body of the faithful, and, while the sacrifice and banquet still survived, their significance was wholly inverted.

Gentlemen, I stop here. The question is difficult enough without my proceeding to pile problem upon problem. The point which I wished to bring out is this : that in primitive sacrifice the idea of communion — how- ever modem it may appear at the first glance — is a factor of prime importance. The English scholar, who first discerned this truth, literally revolutionised the study of religion. He built, so to speak, a solid bridge between our own day and those dim ages when man bowed down and adored the beast. And this he accomplished by throwing into its proper perspective the primitive and strangely persistent conception of the god-animal, fated to be slain and eaten by its worshippers. I venture to think the discovery involves so much and has found so little recognition that you will pardon me for having made it the subject of these remarks.

CHAPTER III

THE ORIGIN AND ESSENCE OF TABOOS ^

Theoretically man's activity has but one limit — that of his physical powers : he can eat what he pleases, kill as he lists, provided always that he is the stronger. Driven by his needs and his passions, he stops only before a power superior to his own, and nothing but outside force can restrain or repress his energy.

But this state of absolute independence is purely theoretical. In practice — look as far back as we will into the past — man submits to an inner or subjective restraint as well as to an outer or objective one. Not only does he experience obstacles, he creates them for himself, in the shape of fears and scruples. In the course of time these fears and scruples have taken to themselves names — moral law, religious law, political law. And precisely as these three laws exist to-day and still exercise their restraining influence on human activity, so they existed — confused and undivided as yet — among the earliest of savage communities. Morality, religion, and politics, as we conceive them, had not so much as dawned on the primitive mind, but man submitted to and accepted a multitude of restraints, which, taken as a whole,

1 Lesson given in 1900 at the licole dn Louvre. 36

THE ORIGIN AND ESSENCE OF TABOOS 37

constituted what is called the system of taboos. The general formula of the taboo is : 'Do not do this, do not touch that.' It is the English dont, as applied to children. The taboo, whatever form it may take, has always the one characteristic, that it sets a bound to human activity. This path is taboo, do not walk there. This fruit is taboo, do not eat it. This field is taboo on such a day, do not work there. Thus, unlike civil, religious, or moral law, the law of taboo never implies action, but always abstention : it is a curb, not a whip.

I have said this curb was forged of fears and scruples : and, in fact, if we set aside brute force opposed to force, it is difficult to see what could restrain the energy of man except fear, which is the sentiment that engenders scruple. Now, the savage not only fears the lion's tooth and the serpent's fang ; he dreads above everything illness and death, punishments inflicted by the angry spirits with which his imagination peoples the world. Man is pre-eminently a social animal ; at every stage of civilisation he pictures the external world as an integral part of the same community as himself, and by a natural generalisation concludes that the spiritual principle, which he feels to be working within him, must be working also in the infinite phenomena without him. Before he rises to a definite and consistent idea of godhead, he feels himself surrounded by gods, fears them, and strives to live at peace with them.

The general cause of taboos, then, is the fear of danger. If man — civilised now, and with science perpetually at hand to steel him against the nightmares of childhood — still falls a constant prey to groundless terrors, what must have been his thraldom, when, science yet unborn, every act, no matter how innocent, was liable to be taken as

38 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

the direct cause of the next chance mishap which befell him ? Are we not to this day everlastingly tempted to confuse temporal sequence with causal connection ? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc — B follows A, therefore A is the cause of B — the fallacy is daily committed by education and illiteracy alike.

The savage, lacking the notion of cause and effect but endowed with a memory, was certain to assign a given misadventure to some immediately preceding event, though nine times out of ten the two would be uncon- nected. Thus, in primitive communities, there grew up a vast oral tradition of leading cases : such or such an act has such or such a fatal consequence — on such or such a day I fell and hurt myself, because, when I went out in the morning, I saw a snake. If all these hasty generalisations had taken root in any one community, fear would have suspended all action, and the community would have perished. But here, as in all things, selection played a part. The fears experienced by the tribal magnates — old men, chiefs, and priests — were shared by the rank and file, and gave rise to various scruples all more or less widely diffused : the rest were forgotten.

Thus the taboos came into being. They cannot be said to be the result of experience : the everyday lessons of experience — as, that fire burns and water drowns — have no need to be confirmed by any prohibition or interdict of a religious character. Nor yet are they due to scientific experiment, to repeatedly verified observations of cause and effect. The taboos correspond to fears, and the fears, in their turn, to rash generalisations from isolated facts.

We have all the more reason for this view of the case, when we consider the similarly vicious process of thought

THE ORIGIN AND ESSENCE OF TABOOS 39

in modem superstition. Every railway company knows that there are fewer travellers on the thirteenth of the month ; every hostess, that it is fatal to have thirteen at table. Now this prejudice is based on a generalisation from a single instance — the Last Supper where Jesus sat down with the twelve Apostles. Two of the thirteen died before the year was out, and this one accident has been enough to create a taboo, the effects of which will doubtless be felt for long to come.

Even when he gives his imagination free play, primitive man loves a realistic explanation. To the savage a dangerous object is essentially an object dangerous to touch, whence the widespread idea that the principal cause of danger is contact. Things taboo and persons taboo, are not to be touched, and are therefore sacred — intangible in the strict sense of the word. But why should contact be dangerous ? Here the naive physical science of the savage comes into play. A dangerous contact is one by which something dangerous passes from an alien body into ours : the sting of an insect or a snake, for example. Hence the conception of objects taboo or tabooed as so many reservoirs of dangerous forces, contact with which may produce electrical and devastating results. This idea suffices to explain not only the greater part of the taboos, but also the ceremonial employed in Polynesia, and elsewhere, to annul their effects. Thus, a man who touches the accursed thing — a tabooed object — absorbs by his act a dangerous element, capable of injuring both him and all whom he may touch in his turn. To rid himself of this poison in the system, he has recourse to widely different means, reducible, however, to two great classes. Sometimes he puts himself in contact with a person charged with a

40 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

more powerful taboo, and thus passes on the danger without prejudice to its recipient ; sometimes, by bathing, he transmits the taboo to the water, which can absorb it with impunity. In the island of Tonga a tabooed person touches the foot-sole of a superior chief, by pressing it against his stomach. Now, this guileless method of curing a malady by contact with some great one of the earth has been held efficacious almost to our own day. Only by the light of the taboo can we penetrate the inner sense of the ceremony by which the kings of France — though neither magicians nor priests — healed the species of scrofula known as the King's Evil. From the twelfth century onwards the French kings were supposed to have the power of curing this infirmity by simply touching the sufferer. The proof that we have here a pagan custom of great antiquity lies in the fact that St. Louis — most pious of sovereigns — thought it his duty to christianise the rite, just as crucifixes have been planted on certain menhirs in order to modify the heathen cult associated with the old stones. Guillaume de Nangis tells us that, while his predecessors merely touched the patients, St. Louis supplemented the treatment with the sign of the Cross, in the hope, adds the chronicler, that they would ascribe the cure to the virtue of the Cross and not to the dignity of the king. Louis XIV, at the time of his coronation, and James II of England, during his exile at St. -Germain, were still asked to touch for the Evil — the sick men, victims of a taboo, discharged it on a person whom the taboo could not attack. What Louis XIV would have said, had it been pointed out that he was forming himself on the model of a Polynesian chief, is another question.

The desire to remove taboos, and so to restore the

THE ORIGIN AND ESSENCE OF TABOOS 41

liberty of men and things, was the corner-stone of a special science, which in Greece and Rome was called the science of lustration and purification. Like the taboos themselves, this science has been of incalculable service to humanity. If the taboo had never been, the savage, deaf to reason and regardless of the morrow, would have turned the earth into a wilderness. The taboo taught him restraint and moderation. But had there been no corrective to the taboo, the savage, equally deaf to criticism and enamoured of the marvellous, would have so enchained his life through the fear of losing it, that civilisation would have been forever impossible. The priestly purification gave him back a measure of freedom, judiciously restricted by the dread of contracting new taboos which might require a complicated and painful lustration. Now, as far back as we can go, the duty of priests was to purify. To the priesthood, then, man owes his partial liberation from the terrors which paralysed him. The conclusion is worthy of notice ; for it shows once more the falsity of the pet theory of the eighteenth century, according to which the priesthood was governed by the purely selfish motive of deceiving men and con- fiscating their liberties in its own behoof.

If the taboo served a useful end, it was because the very thought of its violation inspired profound horror. In the beginning there was no question of a social sanction, no thought of punishing the sinner : the crime itself begot the penalty. To violate a taboo, unintentionally though it were, was to expose oneself to death. In the civilisations which are known to us from eye-witnesses, like that of Polynesia at the opening of the nineteenth century, the severity of the penalties has already been relaxed, and society — as represented by the chiefs — has

42 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

taken upon itself to make hard the way of transgressors. And indeed, if the violation of a taboo exposes the whole tribe to a dangerous contagion, and may also provoke the anger of spirits, drastic measures are necessary, both by way of example, and to appease the irate powers. But clearly punishment by the community is not primi- tive ; it begins in the period when respect for the taboo is on the wane, and the need arises for a penal code to reinforce the chastisement which it was once believed would follow inevitably from the offence itself.

CHAPTER IV

TARPEIA ^

' Why,' asks Plutarch in the thirty-seventh chapter of his ' Roman Questions,' 'should custom have ordained that, out of all the offerings we make to heaven, only the spoils of war should be left to the mercies of moth and rust, untended and unrepaired ? ' " Plutarch's questions are invariably of great interest, for the simple reason that they hinge upon customs to which his age had lost the clue. Plutarch's answers, however, are usually absurd, for the equally simple reason that he brings to the inter- pretation of prehistoric religious usage the intellectual stock-in-trade of a philosophic amateur in the first century after Christ. In the present instance, he hazards two solutions of the problem. Either the disappearance of the spoils would dim the splendour of the exploits com- memorated, and spur another generation to fresh feats of arms ; or, on the other hand, there might be some- thing odious in the notion of perpetuating the memory

• Revue avcheologique, 1908, i. pp. 42-74.

- Pint. Quaest. Rom. c. 37, p. 2376. The text is uncertain on one point {irpoaKvvi'iv in the sense of ' taking care ') ; but the general sense is not in doubt.

43

44 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

of spilt blood and stricken fields — precisely as Greek opinion deplored the audacity which first reared trophies in stone or bronze. ^ . . . These specimens of exegesis speak for themselves : comment would be out of place. To-day the question raised by Plutarch is one of a class which the science of comparative religion and custom is able to answer off-hand : if the Romans did not repair their trophies, it was because those trophies were invested with a sanctity of their own which rendered all contact perilous. The Hebrew Ark of the Covenant, to go no further, is a case in point, though with this difference : the sanctity of the Ark was inherent in its origin, while the sanctity of spoils wrested from the enemy was an adventitious result of the circum- stances which caused them to change hands after the combat.

II

Among the early Romans, who erected no trophies on the field of battle, ^ we find the spoils hung in temples and public buildings, in private houses and on trees — particularly oaks. This last mode of exposure, to which both Virgil and Statins allude, ^ is obviously the first in point of time. Nor had its memor}^ passed away in the first century of the Empire ; witness the famous passage ^ where Lucan compares Pompey to an old and leafless oak, long dead, which, standing in the midst of a fruitful field and charged with ancient spoils, still remains an

' Cf. Cic. De Invent, ii. 23, 69 ; Diod. Sic. xiii. 24 ; Plut. Alcib. 29. The use of metal trophies was general later on in Greece ; but the Macedonians never raised trophies of any sort (Pans. ix. 40, 9).

- Florus, iii. 2.

•' Virg. A en. xi. 5 sqq. ; Stat. Theb. ii. 707 sqq.

^ Lucan, Phcii's. i. 136 sqq.

TARPEIA 45

object of adoration. Now, if a tree like this — whose age was to be counted by centuries — could stand in the very heart of the countryside, braving the casual cupidity of every passer-by, and yet retain its burden inviolate, there is only one conclusion to be drawn : the spoils were protected from all contact by the sanctity attached to them. Conversely, if these were left to hang on the withered boughs of a tottering oak, and not a man dreamt of transferring them to a sounder stem, it can only have been because the support of the spoils was as sacred as the spoils themselves. Only the natural chances of time and tide could reduce them to dust : the hand of man must on no account interfere in the process.

Equally intangible, in the strict sense of the word, were the private trophies in the home of a successful commander. Generation after generation they hung secure from injury — -patents of nobility to the house, and sources of prestige to its owner. ^ So, after the dis- aster at Cannae, when Fabius wished to fill up the gaps hewn in the senatorial ranks, he chose a certain number of burgesses whose family residences were ornamented with spoil stripped from the enemy.- Pompey's house — • rostrata dormis — was still gay with the prows of Cilician ships when it passed to Mark Antony, and later, by inheritance, to a forbear of the emperor Gordian.'^ In the great fire under Nero, Suetonius tells us, the mansions of old-world generals perished ' still ornamented with

' ' They arrange their trophies,' says Polybius (vi. 39), ' in the most conspicuous positions available, as they consider them palpable evidence of their own prowess.' Similarly, TibuUus (i. i, 54) admits it may well become Messala to war by sea and land, ' that his house may flaunt it in hostile spoils.' Compare also Li v. x. 7 ; Cic. Phil. ii. 28 ; Sil. It. Pun. vi. 436, &c.

" Liv. xxiii. 23 : ' qiai spolia ex hoste fixa domi haberent.'

^ Capitolinus, Gordian, 3 ; cf. Cic. Phil. ii. 28, 68.

46 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

the enemies' spoils.' ^ Even when a house passed by sale to another family, the new owner might not touch the spolia, still less remove them.- There is a shade of guilelessness in the notion that this prohibition of touch- ing, tending or repairing the spolia was dictated by fear lest the unscrupulous should display apocryphal spoil in their houses — much as old armour or family portraits are bought at a price to-day.-^ The scruple, proof of which we have already adduced, was purely religious, and the Romans continued to act in conformity with it long after they had lost all real comprehension of its character.

In the temples — the habitation of the gods — the trophies were nailed on the walls and could never be removed. Only in circumstances of the utmost gravity, when the salvation of the state hung by a thread, was it permissible to equip recruits with the arms of a van- quished enemy. After Cannae, at a moment when Rome appeared defenceless, the consuls, according to Livy, had weapons made in hot haste, and ' the spoils of ancient foemen were torn down from temple and portico.' ^ A little later the dictator M. Junius Pera was authorised by special edict to mount on horseback, — this was contrary to religious law, — and proceeded to accoutre six thousand men in the Gaulish arms which had decked the triumph of Flaminius.'^ Livy well knew that such a measure was every whit as exceptional as the other which was passed at the same time and opened the ranks of the Roman army to slaves. They were, he says, ' the last resources

' Suet. Nero, 38 : ' hostilil^us adhuc spoliis ornatae.' - Pliny, XXXV. 7.

^ ' The object being doubtless to guard against the frauds of false pretenders.' Smith, Diet, of Ant., s.v. ' Spolia,' p. 691. ■* Liv. xxii. 57. " Ibid, xxiii. 14.

TARPEIA 47

of an almost desperate state, driven to make convention give way to necessity.' ^ The use of arms taken in war was so abnormal a course that it was only adopted with hesitancy, even if the spoils were not the fruits of victory, but a gift. During the revolt of Syracuse, Livy relates,

• the armed citizens mustered in the public squares,

while the unarmed flocked to the shrine of Olympian Jove in search of the Gallic and lUyrian spoils which Rome had bequeathed to Hiero. Let Heaven be gracious, they prayed, and lend them these sacred arms ; every blow they struck should be for fatherland, for freedom, and for the temples of their gods.' ~ The arms were indeed sacred, but not more so than those in the porticoes and private houses of Rome. The point was, not that they belonged to a temple, but that they were arms taken in war — exuviae. By the very fact of their capture they were withdrawn from use, and became — theoretically, at least — untouchable ; just as we have seen to be the case when they simply hung on tree-branches or house-walls. The religious character of the temples where they were lodged added nothing to the sanctity inherent in them ; the most it could do was to guarantee that sanctity by rendering it apparent to all eyes.

Ill

This example, after so many others, shows the perversity of certain historians, still inspired by the prejudices of the eighteenth century, who seek in pubhc utility — or what we are now pleased to consider such —

1 'Honesta utilibus cedunt ' (Liv. xxiii. 14, 3). Cf. the speech of Fabius in the Punka of Silius, x. 598 517^. ^ Livy, xxxiv. 21.

48 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

the origin of primeval law and custom. Two poverty- stricken tribes go to war ; an engagement is fought, and the victors collect the arms and clothing of the vanquished. Common sense, a bad guide for once, would say they were making hay while the sun shone, in order to follow up an initial success with fresh resources. Unfortunately, the winning tribe does nothing of the sort, unless driven by an absolute necessity which silences the scruples of religion. The spoils are sacred, and must be called in from circulation because they have become dangerous to touch. Sometimes, as we have seen, they may be hung out of reach in a building : sometimes, and this earlier — - for man makes war long before temples, porticoes, and houses — they may be thrown into water, or destroyed by fire. Finally, if the tribe is sedentary, they may be piled upon a consecrated part of its territory, with the prohibition attached that none shall lay a hand on them. In short, the rites prescribed for the treatment of spoils correspond to the various funerary rites — suspension in mid-air until the slow process of natural decay is com- plete, immersion, cremation, burial. The four elements, air, water, fire, and earth, combine to rescue man from the dangers — not of this world — with which he is threatened by the sacred objects. In the course of time, thanks to the priesthood whose business it is to conciliate or neutralise the powers of magic, we find the work of destruction arrested. Man no longer sequestrates the whole of his capture from the usages of life, he surrenders a fraction to the gods — in other words, to the priests who allow him to dispose of the remainder at will. The bulk of what were spoils has become booty. And yet on the ever valid principle of the survival of rehgious scruples, the spoils taken from an enemy have never entirely lost

TARPEIA 49

the sacred character with which . they were originally invested ; there has always been a shade of reluctance to treat them as everyday objects available for any purpose. At a period when first-fruits and tithes of the booty were no longer offered to heaven, Napoleon had the cannon captured by the Grande Armee cast into a triumphal column, instead of adding them to his batteries or keeping them in his arsenals to fight another day.

IV

We have spoken of the destruction of spoils by fire, of their immersion in water, of their exposure on land ; we have now to collect a few examples of these primitive rites.

Orosius, probably on the authority of Livy.i states that the Cimbrians and Teutons, after routing the consul Manilius and the proconsul Caepio, destroyed the whole of the immense booty which they seized in the two Roman camps. Articles of clothing were torn to shreds and scattered to the winds ; gold and silver were flung into the river, horses into an abyss ; the equipment of men and chargers was broken up piecemeal. In the conduct of these barbarians — ' extravagant ' he naturally considers it — Orosius sees ' a new and unusual mode of execration.' 2 To the Danish scholars of the nineteenth century, Worsaae in particular, belongs the credit of proving that here we have nothing either ' new ' or ' unusual ' ; only the simple performance of a rite familiar to the barbarian peoples of the North. In 1866 Worsaae thus explained the numerous finds of bronze weapons and ornaments

' Orosius, V. 16.

- '. . . nova quadam atque insolita execratione.'

£

50 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

in the turf-pits of Denmark, which actually are old lakes ; a year later he extended his theory to the Bronze Age.i ' In all the deposits from our turf-pits,' said Engelhardt at the Congress of Copenhagen (1869),- ' there is hardly a single object but is imperfect, and unfitted for subsequent use. . . . The fact is, all these deposits come from booty collected on the field of battle and the articles have been deliberately incapacitated during the process of offering them to the gods, to whom a sacrifice of this nature had been promised beforehand : the warriors kept nothing but the glory. The passages cited by Worsaae and Beauvois from a number of classical authors, together with Steenstrup's profound study of the animal bones found in the same strata as the antiqui- ties, and mixed with them, have thoroughly cleared up this point, which but lately seemed inexplicable.'

Worsaae 's theory was popularised in France by Alex- andre Bertrand, who wrote an article on the subject, under the title ' La Part des dieux.' 3 His monograph, like those of Worsaae which it recapitulates, is marred by several anachronisms ; indeed, the title — felicitous though it may seem — is itself one. In the days when Rome had evolved her polytheistic system, and religious customs of the kind we are dealing with had already a grey antiquity behind them, the classical writers believed that the spoils destroyed or abandoned were vowed to certain divinities or reduced to nothingness in their honour. Livy has several references to spoils burnt ' to

1 Worsaae, Mem. de la Soc. des antiquaires du Nord, 1S66, p. 61 ; cf. O. Tischler, Geddchtnissrede an Worsaae, 1886, p. 8.

- Congres d'archeol. prehistorique (Copenhagen), 1869, p. 200.

■' August 5, 1872. See Bertrand, Archeol. celtique et gauloise, ed. 2, p. 221. Cf. S. Miiller, Mem. de la Soc. des antiquaires du Nord, 1884- 1SS9, p. 225.

TARPEIA 51

Vulcan ' — spolia Vulcano cronantur.^ Elsewhere we find spoils vowed to Jupiter, Mars, Lua Mater, ' and the other gods to whom religion permits the consecration by fire of hostile spoils.' - It was to Mars, Minerva, Lua, and the rest of the gods that Aemilius Paulus solemnly addressed himself, when, after having the shields of brass trans- ported on his galleys, he heaped together the other arms of every description, lired the pile with his own hands, and invited the military tribunes to throw lighted torches upon it. In conforming to this archaic ritual, Paulus believed — or feigned to believe — that he was burning the Macedonian arms in honour of the gods ; in realit}^ he was following a venerable custom of earlier date than the constitution of the Roman Pantheon. Of all the divinities whom Livy names in similar circumstances, one only had not been hellenised in the time of Aemilius Paulus : this was Lua, whose name is related to lues, and means purely and simph' destruction. To vow to Lua is to destroy, and nothing else. To recognise the ' portion of the gods ' in sacrifices of this type is all the less legitimate because the accredited representatives of the gods, the priests, received nothing. If every offering to Vulcan had been necessarily burnt, his temple would never have contained anything but ashes. The portion of the gods was not the part destroyed, but, on the contrary, the part preserved ; and the victor could only have made his offering in the relatively late era when there were temples to hold it and priests to receive it. True, Livy relates that Romulus, after the defeat of x\cron, whom he killed and stripped of

• Liv. i. 37 ; viii. 10 ; xxiii. 46 ; xxx. 6 ; xli. 2 ; cf. Preller-Jordan,

Rom. Mythalogie, ii. p. 162.

' Liv. x. 29, ' lovi victori spolia cum vovisset . . . cremavit ' : ibid. xlv. 33, ' Marti, Minervae, Luaeque Matri et ceteris deis quibus spolia hostium dicare fas est succensi.'

52 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

his arms, consecrated the spoil of that chief in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, so called from the litter or feretrum used for the transport. i But, as a matter of fact, this temple, which Livy considers the oldest in Rome, does not appear in history till 328, when, four full centuries later, it received the spolia opima of the Veian king Volumnius — a trophy still visible in the time of Augustus. 2 The primitive Roman rite, as Virgil knew, was either to burn the enemy's spoils "' or to hang them on the trunk of an oak tree raised upon a hillock : ^ thus Aeneas ' reared on a mound a giant oak, shorn of its encircling boughs, and clothed it in shining arms,' ^

I am not aware of any text which indicates that the Romans, like the Teutons and Cimbrians, were in the habit of throwing their spoils into lakes and marshes, yet I believe they must have done so ; for not only did the Italian lakes receive a quantity of offerings in the shape of stipites, but, at the rebuilding of the Capitol by Vespasian, the haruspices, who were steeped in ancient custom, ordered the flame-scorched ruins of the old temple to be flung into the marshes to preclude their after use."

^ I.ivy, i- 10, 5. The etymology, of course, is absurd ; the one which connects Feretrius with ferire is more reasonable (Prop. v. 10, 46). Cj. the art. 'Jupiter' in Roscher's Lexikon, pp. 671, 674.

- Cf. Hermes, vol. xiii. p. 142.

^ Virg. Aen. xi. 193.

^ Lucan's oak, sublimis in agro, is ' sublime ' for this reason [Phars. i. 136).

'" ' Ingentem quercum decisis undique ramis

constituit tumulo fulgentiaque induit arma' {Aen. xi. 5).

'"' ' Ut reliquiae prioris delubri in paludes aveherentur ' (Tac. Hisl. iv. 53)-

TARPEIA 53

In the historical period, the Romans may well have vowed the spoils of the enemy to a particular deity beforehand, as did Fabius at the moment of his attack on the Samnites.i But when, by way of fulfilling their engagement, they destroyed the booty instead of pre- serving it, they were obeying a custom whose primitive character had been obscured by time. When, again, they saw the barbarians doing likewise, they imagined them to be offering sacrifices to their gods ; for they had lost the conception of a primitive state in which a sacrifice was something the poles removed from an offering to a given divinity. Yet, in one passage at least, Livy seems to have felt a doubt. In 176 B.C. the Ligurians took Mutina, seized an enormous amount of booty, and destroyed it. ' They killed the prisoners after hacking them to pieces, turned the temples into shambles rather than places of sacrifice," and finally, after a carnage of all living things, vented their fury upon inanimate objects. Vases of every kind were dashed against the walls — especially any that seemed made for use rather than ornament.' ^ Thus the Ligurians behaved precisely as did the Cimbrians and Teutons seventy years afterwards, butchering and battering everything with such a rage of destruction that Livy hesitates to term this massacre a sacrifice — trucidant veriiis quam sacrificant. And, indeed,

^ Livy, X. 29, 14-18.

- ' . . . cum foeda laceratione interficiunt . . . pecora in fanis trucidant verius passim quam interficiunt.'

•' Livy, xli. 18: ' Satiati caede animantium, quae inanima erant parietibus adfligunt, vasa omnis generis usui magis quam ornamento in speciem facta. ..." (An allusion to the destruction of the precious vases of Corinth by Mummius ?)

54 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

to call it a sacrifice would be an abuse of words : there is no question here of a gift-sacrifice, none of a sacrifice of expiation or communion ; it is simply and solely the execution of a sort of outlawry, herem, to use the expression of the Bible, which furnishes us with equivalent examples.

Before passing to those examples, which are ex- ceedingly instructive, I must touch briefly on the rite whose distinctive feature is that the hostile spoils are left heaped on the ground without being burnt. I have found no text attesting its practice in Italy ; but a very important passage in Caesar attributes it to the Gauls, whose civilisation at the time of the conquest offers more than one analogy to that of primitive Italy. ' Mars,' he says,^ ' is their arbiter of war ; and as a general rule, if they are resolved on battle, they promise him the spoils. After victory they sacrifice all animals that fall into their hands and deposit the remainder of their prizes in some one determinate place : in many districts the towering heaps of spoil on consecrated ground are very noticeable. It rarely happens that a Gaul so far defies his religion as to conceal a part of the booty in his house or to remove anj^thing from the general pile : the penalty for that offence is death, preceded by the crudest tortures.' Caesar rightly perceived that it was here a question of a religious law or custom, sanctioned by the most terrible penalties. Other texts tell us the Gauls sometimes burned the booty.- On occasion, also, they sank it in lakes or ponds — those, for instance, around Toulouse, where, in 105 B.C., the Romans under Q. Servilius Caepio

• Caesar, Bell. Gall. vi. 17.

- This must undoubtedly be Florus' meaning, when he says the Boii vowed the Roman arms to Vulcan (i. 20, 5). Cf. Waltzing, Rev. des itudes anciennes, vol. iv. p. 53.

TARPEIA 55

reaped an ample harvest of gold and silver. ' The commonly received opinion that these ponds served as treasuries for the Tectosages is obviously inadmissible. Not less so is the story that their riches were fruits of the pillage of Delphi ; though there is one grain of truth in the legend : the gold of Toulouse, aunim Tolosanum, was the result of military expeditions, and had been submerged on account of its sacred character. I have already remarked that the sanctity of the spoils threatened the gravest consequences to those who touched or appropriated the objects thus withdrawn from circulation. Hence, when Caepio and his army were annihilated in 105 B.C. by the Cimbrians, the disaster was ascribed to the sacrilegious theft of the Toulouse gold — -an opinion which must have originated in Gaul and afterwards have filtered through to Italy, where it was a commonplace that the treasure had been fatal, not only to the actual depre- dators, but even to their kith and kin. These are the normal effects of a violated taboo. 2

M. d'Arbois de Jubainville has recently commented on the following well-known excerpt from Diodorus, relative to the Celts : ^ ' Taking the heads of their fallen foes, and fastening them to their horses' necks, they leave to their servants the bloody spoils of the slain, and for their sole booty carry off the scalps amid songs of triumph and hymns of victory.' M. d'Arbois justly observes that there must have been many Germans amongst these servants ; and here we have a feasible explanation how the Celtic word for victor}^, *bheiidt,

' Strabo, iv. i, 13 ; Justin, xxxii. 3, g.

- At a later period the Gauls, like the Romans, preserved their booty in temples. Cf. Revue des itiidcs anciennes, vol. iv. pp. 280 sq.

^ Died. Sic. V. 24, 4. Cf. d'Arbois, Comptes rendus de I' Acad, des Inscr. 1907, p. 172.

56 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

became the German word Bcutc — booty. Diodorus omits to specify the Celtic tribe he alludes to ; and the habit he describes cannot have been general, as it contradicts the direct evidence of Caesar. However, it may be retained as an example, local perhaps, of a religious reminiscence vivid enough to deter the Gauls from carrying off the spoils of war. To say they were content with the mere glory of conquest, and nursed a chivalrous disdain for the material fruits of victory, is to be misled by the influence of exclusively modern ideas ; a lapse which was made by Engelhardt, who, in the passage quoted above, attributes a like disinterestedness to the Scandinavian warriors who threw their booty into the lakes. These are the domains of superstition, not of ethics. Only when superstition relaxed her grip, and the desire for material emoluments and tangible gains took the upper hand, did the dread of touching the booty give way to the lust of possessing it. This was the attitude of the Germans in Augustan days, when they slaughtered the officers of Varus' army, but did not hesitate to enrich themselves with the spoils.^ Tacitus, relating the avenging campaign of Germanicus, more than once remarks upon the avidity shown by the soldiers of Arminius 'who preferred robbery to blood.' ^ And yet these Germans had preserved the memory of their ancestors' habit of consecrating spoils by suspension, a method similar to the one long practised at Rome ; for the ensigns of Varus' legions were fixed by Arminius to old oaks in the Teutoburger Wald.'^

' Tacitus, ^ WW. i. 37 : ' Ferebantiir etspolia Varianaecladis, plerisque . . . praedae data.'

^ Ibid. i. 65: 'Hostium aviditas, omissacaede, praedam sectantium.' ^ Ibid. i. 59.

TARPEIA 57

VI

In order to confirm and clarify what has been said up to now with regard to the sacred character of spoils taken in warfare, and the religious objection of semi-barbarous peoples to their appropriation and subsequent use, there is no need to scour North America for examples ; the Bible is sufficient.

The theory of the interdict {herein), which condemns the spoil of the enemy to destruction, with a few reserva- tions dictated b}^ practical necessity, is found in two passages of Deuteronomy and Numbers : —

' When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it ... ; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee ; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them ; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: neither shalt thou make marriages with them ; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me.' ^

' Only the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead, everything that may abide the fire, ye shall make it go through the fire, and it shall be clean : nevertheless it shall be purified with the water of separa- tion : and all that abideth not the fire ye shall make go through the water.' -

And now for the practice, which naturally precedes all theory. We find it in the book of Joshua.-' The Hebrews had arrived before Jericho, only to find the gates shut. ' And the Lord said unto Joshua, See, I

' Deuteronomy vii. 1-4. - Numbers xxxi. 22, 23.

^ Joshua vi. 2 sqq.

58 CULTS. MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour. And ye shall compass the city all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days. And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams' horns : and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram's horn and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout ; and the wall of the city shall fall down fiat.' Joshua hearkened to the word of the Lord, traced a tnagic circle round the tow^n, and ' cut it off ' ; that is, virtually suppressed it. On the seventh day, when the seventh circuit had been made, and the priests lifted their trumpets, ' Joshua said unto the people. Shout ; for the Lord hath given you the city. And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the Lord : only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing lest ye make yourself accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it. But all the silver and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the Lord : they shall come unto the treasury of the Lord.' The walls fell, Jericho was taken, and the Hebrews applied the interdict, killing ' both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.' The}^ burnt the town and all it contained except ' the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron ' which they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. And Joshua adjured them in this manner : ' Cursed be the

TARPETA 59

man before the Lord, that riscth up and buildeth the city Jericho : he shaU lay the foundation thereof in his first-born, and in his youngest son shall be set up the gates of it.'

The curse put in Joshua's mouth appears to have borne fruit : for centuries none dare to rebuild Jericho. i The extensive excavations, recently carried out on the site by MM. Sellin and Niemann, have brought to light the remains of the walls and of two forts, along with a great number of broken articles, especially fragments of vases ; almost all of which, so the explorers maintain, go back to the Canaanitish period before the Hebrew supremacy. Once ' cut off ' by the magic operations described, Jericho ceased to exist. The savage destruction of the town and all its contents, animate and inanimate, is strangely reminiscent of Livy's account of the Ligurian frenzy at Mutina, and of the passage in which Orosius deals with the Cimbrians ; but the sequel is yet more instructive, for it throws light on the contagion immanent in objects stricken by the herem. Even though the book of Joshua, in its present form, may not be earlier than the Exile, the primitive stamp of thought everywhere apparent is enough to show that the bed-rock of the narrative

' The first book of Kings (xvi. 34) relates that, in the time of Ahab, Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt Jericho, but at the price of the lives of his two sons : ' he laid the foundation thereof on Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun.' This might seem the echo of a foundation-sacrifice, designed to buy off or blot out the herem ; but the text, such as it is, hints rather at an accident which cost the life of Kiel's two sons (Reuss, La Bible, vol. i. p. 485). Reuss remarks on the point : ' Jericho had long been rebuilt, and is mentioned as an existing and inhabited town in the story of David.' This inference is in no way to be drawn from the text cited (2 Samuel x. 5).

6o CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

belongs to the remote past, when a still rudi- mentary civilisation was wholly dominated by religious scruples.i

VII

In spite of the interdict a Hebrew by the name of Achan appropriated some of the objects that came from Jericho. The sanction of the violated taboo soon made itself felt : three thousand soldiers were put to flight by the inhabitants of Ai. Joshua bowed himself before the Ark and prayed to the Lord. Then the Lord said to Joshua : ' Israel hath sinned, and they have also trans- gressed my covenant which I commanded them : for they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff. Therefore, the children of Israel could not stand before their enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies, because they were accursed : neither will I be with you any more, except ye destroy the accursed from among you.' Thus the whole people was contaminated by the crime of an individual ; and this crime had to be expiated, for ' there is an accursed thing in the midst of thee, O Israel.' What follows is obscure, the text being doubtless corrupt ; but it seems as though, to discover the culprit, the Lord had pre- scribed a magic test — an appeal to the ordeal of casting lots. The lot fell upon Achan, who acknowledged his guilt : ' When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish

' The redactor of the book of Joshua makes Jahveh intervene in everything, just as the Roman historians spoke of the spoils as consecrated to the gods ; but ' the taboo of the spoils ' with all its consequences appears to have been much earlier than the constitution of Hebraic monotheism, as well as anterior to that of Roman polythe- ism. It belongs to the period of magic and djinn (polydemonism).

TARPKIA 6i

garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, and took them ; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it.' Joshua sent messengers to the tent of Achan, and the articles were recovered. Then, acting upon the express commands of the Lord, he seized Achan, together with the silver, the garment, the wedge of gold, his sons and his daughters, his oxen and his asses, his sheep, his tent and all his goods ; and, followed by all Israel, he led them to the valley of Achor. And Joshua said to him : ' Why hast thou troubled us ? The Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones. And they raised over him a heap of stones unto this day. So the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger. Wherefore, the name of that place was called, the valley of Achor {trouble), unto this day.'

Comparing this with the passage from Caesar, we now understand why a Gaul who purloined anything from the heap of spoils was put to a lingering death by torture. Not only did he defile himself by laying hands on the sacred and interdicted objects, but he exposed the whole community to the contagion of his own pollution. It was imperative, therefore, in the public interest, to strike terror into potential evil-doers by the most drastic examples and threats ; and the extermination of a criminal with every refinement of cruelty was held to "be the surest deterrent to his would-be imitators. This idea, that the pollution was contagious, crops up in the story of the theft of the Toulouse treasure by Caepio, who was killed by the Cimbrians, his army annihilated, and his very daughters, according to Strabo, reduced

62 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

to the vilest prostitution. The moral and intellectual outlook of the persons who circulated this edifying piece of history, sometime about the year lOO B.C., is little different from that of the redactor of Joshua, who calmly dilates on the sufferings of Achan, the stoning and burning of his sons and daughters, cattle and sheep, and the destruction even of his lifeless belongings, which might possibly be infected with the germ of uncleanness. Of course, the whole narrative may have been fabricated to account for the existence of a stone tumulus in a place called AcJioy, for the belief was general that a heap of stones invariably covered the body of a criminal who had been stoned to death. But the important point for the history of religion and morals is not that the events should have occurred precisely as they are related in the Bible, but that it should have been thought possible and probable for them to have so occurred.

A few years ago, M, I'abbe Paul Renard, Doctor of Theology, and professor of Holy Writ in the Grand Seminaire de Chartres, thus summarised the Achan episode : ^ ' His crime was the violation of the order of Joshua, who had expressly anathematised the town with all that it contained — both men and booty. This annihilation of the first town conquered in Canaan was a sort of religious consecration carried out, partly in acknowledgment of the sovereign rights of Jehovah, and partly to inspire a wholesome fear in the rest. Hence disobedience to the order became an act of sacrilege deserving the vengeance of God.'

This method of satisfying the requirements of modern ethics by an emasculation and distortion of the facts is a vexatious anachronism ; nor is the indignation expressed

' Vigouroux, Dictionnalre de la Bible, s.v. ' Akhan.'

TARPEIA 63

by the philosophers of the eighteenth century, on the perusal of these barbarous narratives, less contrary to the exigencies of the critical spirit. At a certain moment of their social evolution, the Hebrews, the Ligurians, the Cimbrians, and, no doubt, all other nations as well, have thought the same and acted the same. Their deeds, though they may fill us with horror, were only the logical outcome of their ideas ; and if we feel some pride in measuring the road travelled since then, we ought to reserve our censuie for those who would even now propose the conduct of prehistoric savages as a guide for our consciences and morals.

There are other examples of the laying down of an interdict in the Bible, and also of its violation. Thus Saul, despite the word of the Lord, who bade him smite the Amalekites and kill ' both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass,' stopped short after butchering the Amalekites, and kept the pick of their cattle. The Almighty rebuked his dis- obedience by the mouth of Samuel, and punished him for it. Saul's defence is interesting : 1 ' I . . . have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took the spoil, sheep and oxen, the chief of the things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in Gilgal.' As the excuse was not admitted, it follows that the enforcement of the interdict has nothing whatever in common with a sacrifice. Only things clean can be offered up to God, and the interdict is first and foremost an interdict of the unclean ; even the metal objects preserved must undergo a purification by fire and water before taking their place in the treasure-house of the Almighty. Here, in its simple and primitive form,

' I Samuel xv. 3 ; ii. 23.

64 CULTS, MYTHS. AND RELIGIONS

we have the rite of ' outlawry,' that ban on persons and things in time of war, which we meet — anaemic now, and half anthropomorphised — in the pages of the classic historians. When these tell us that a general, before the battle, vowed the fruits of his approaching victory to this or that divinity, the Biblical herem allows us to penetrate the underlying principle of the act : it was not a case of oblation or sacrifice, but of extermination.

VIII

Now that we have established the nature of the herein and its equivalents among other nations of antiquity, we come to the second part of our inquiry. What was the origin of a custom, so directly opposed to the material and immediate interests of the poor but passively obedient tribes which it forbade to act on the sensible, if secular, axiom : What is good to take is good to keep ?

There is a so-called orthodox explanation of this as- semblage of facts, much favoured by the ordinary commen- tator of the Bible. ' In certain cases,' wiites M. I'abbe Lesetre, ' in order to inspire the Israelites with a horror of idolatry, God commanded that all booty taken from the idolaters should be destroyed, with the exception of what could be purified by fire, — metal objects for instance. . . . These precautions had for aim both the physical hygiene and the moral purity of the Hebrews.' i The notion that the use of fire and water for the religious purifica- tion of metal articles from a looted town was inspired by a solicitude for ' physical hygiene ' may possibly be ingenious, but certainly does not merit discussion. As to the ' moral hygiene ' of the Israelites, it is open to question

1 Vigouroux, Dictionnaire de la Bible, art. ' Butin.'

TARPEIA 65

whether the massacre of children at the breast and women with child was peculiarly well calculated to promote it. Moreover, in such cases it is neither scientific nor even commonly honest to neglect the parallels furnished by the history of pagan nations. As the Biblical herem. is only a particular instance of a custom, once very widely spread if not universal, no historian — though he be an orthodox theologian — has any right to allege the good intentions of the Almighty and the precautions of Divine Wisdom against the contagion of idolatry.

A German scholar, Herr Schwally, who has recently studied the holy wars of ancient Israel, ^ thinks that ' the interdict imposed on booty was only an obstacle to in- dividual greed ; the consecration preserved the integrity of the loot.' He refers, in this connection, to the Polyne- sian use of the taboo for protecting the fruits before the harvest, and the products of the tribal fishing and hunting before their division. - In a word, the interdict is a manu- factured superstition invented to fill the place of police regulations which were then impracticable. Here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, we have an hypo- thesis which would not have been disavowed by the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth — ready as they always were to explain the apparently most fantastic customs as the deliberate inventions of religious legislators, whom they classified as benevolent impostors from the same mint as Voltaire's Mohammed. M. Fauconnet justly remarks on this view : ' The theory of the herem, proposed

• F. Schwally, Semitische Knegsaltcrthiimev, I. Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel, Leipzig, 1901. Cf. Fauconnet, Annee sociologiqtte, vol. V. pp. 602 sq.

' Fauconnet, loc. laud. p. 605. The analogy between the herem and the taboo had been already recognised by Rob. Smith {Religion der Ssmiten, p. iiS) : ' Ein solcher Bann ist ein Tabu, das durch die Furcht vor iibernatiirlichen Strafen veranlasst ist.'

F

66 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

by M. Schwally, must apparently be consigned to the same category as those other theories which would explain . . . the rules of exogamy by the drawbacks attend- ant on consanguineous marriages.' And, in fact, the anachronism and absurdity are not less. But I fancy M. Fauconnet's resignation is a little premature, when he says ' the causes which determined the consecration and destruction of the booty remain to be discovered.' To me they seem easy enough to fathom. With primitive man- kind, war is an essentially religious phenomenon. Peace itself, not only between clansman and clansman but between clan and clan or tribe and neighbouring tribe, is based exclusively on religious ideas and religious ties. To break those ties which protect man against man — to be authorised in violating, to the detriment of a given community, the sacred scruple of human blood — you must have another religious phenomenon of equal power. And the manifestation of this is the solemn outlawry of the enemy and all that is his. In the case of Jericho we have seen that the Ark of the Covenant was carried seven times round the walls, tracing a magic circle which ' cut off ' the enemy's town, and suppressed it — ideally, of course — before a single act of overt hostility had been committed. The magic proved operative, the walls dropped, and it only remained for the Israelites to destroy by fire and sword what they had already virtually annihilated. There was no question, I repeat, of a sacrifice ; for only things clean can be offered to the gods, and a formal purification was necessary before the gold and silver of Jericho could be placed in the divine treasury. On the contrary, everything on which an interdict is laid becomes impure — with an impurity that is dangerous, not only to the individual, but — witness the story of

TARPEIA 67

Achan — to the whole group of which he forms a part. From this point of view, destruction and extermination are not acts of anger and vengeance, but precautionary measures, similar, in due proportion, to those taken in our day, when an infected lazaretto is burnt and not a stick or a stone left. It is obvious, of course, that, in scenes of arson and massacre, ferocity and the wickedness of man's heart are more likely to run amok than to ab- dicate their claims ; but, neither in the case of the Hebrews, nor in that of the Ligurians and Cimbrians, can those passions explain the systematic destruction of cattle and even inanimate objects. Ferocity was the hand that struck, the brain which conceived and ruled was religion.

' Tantum rclligio potuit suadere malorum ! '

To conclude : the spoils of war were inoculated with a magic power for evil — a virus communicated by the conqueror's own wizardry. Logic and ' magical hygiene ' alike demanded their destruction ; but covetousness sighed at the waste, and before long self-interest and the practical needs of hfe began to temper the iron rigours of the excommunication. And, first, with regard to human hfe, only the adult males were slain ; women, girls, and children were reduced to slavery, until in the end the whole vanquished population shared the same fate and swelled the riches of the victor. As for animals and lifeless objects, recourse was had to two expedients. Either the clan, following a prescribed ritual, purified all it wished to keep and use ; or it surrendered a part in return for the privilege of retaining the rest. The priesthood — omnipotent in the sphere of magic — deter- mined alike the proportion that should be enfranchised to the conqueror, and the amount which must escheat

68 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

to the gods and remain forever untouched and unappro- priated. Of all the objects which the victor renounced, either to be destroyed by fire or water, or to be exposed in a holy place beyond the reach of harm, none preserved their inviolability so long as the exuviae — the arms and personal equipment of the vanquished. But another factor had to be reckoned with ; and, in the course of time, national pride and individual vanity converted into trophies of victory the weapons and harness, once gathered together and laid away through fear of the supernatural dangers which attached to them. When we look at the trophies of Dacian arms sculptured on the base of Trajan's column, it is not amiss to recall that these monuments of military glory are only the secular outcome, so to say, of a long process of evolution whose beginning was the sequestration of arms taken from the enemy — a seques- tration dictated by scruples eminently and exclusively religious.

The foregoing developments at last enable me to offer what I venture to think is a simple and convincing explanation of one of the strangest legends in the primitive history of Rome : I mean the death of Tarpeia.

IX

Livy's story is common knowledge. ^ The Sabines, under King Tatius, attacked the Capitol — the Roman fortress. The governor's daughter Tarpeia, seduced by the sight of the gold ornaments which they wore on the left arm, promised to betray the citadel in exchange. However, the moment she gave them entry, they buried her under their shields, ' either ' (says Livy) ' to create an

• Livy, i. II (after Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus).

TARPEIA 69

impression that they had taken the place by assault, or to discourage treason by a memorable example.' ^

Many variants of the tale have come down to us ; some transmitted directly, others mentioned, only to be discarded, by the historians in general and Dionysius and Plutarch in particular. Schwegler and, more recently, Ettore Pais have taken great, perhaps too great, pains to marshal and discuss the details. It will be enough for us to show that, by the testimony of the texts themselves, every incident of the story was doubtful and fluctuating, even in antiquity, with the exception of a single point, on which our authorities speak with one voice : Tarpeia had been crushed to death under the weight of the enemy's arms. I have had occasion to point out in some of my earlier articles that the same phenomenon recurs in several old legends whose theme is the violent death of a hero : the causes, remote or proximate, of the catastrophe are lost in a tangle of conflicting traditions or gross inconsistencies ; agreement exists only as to the actual circumstances of the death. The conclusion is forced upon us from the outset : these stories and the like have their origin in self-conscious combination, and the parent stem of the various aetiologies is the one tangible reality for us — a cult or a ritual.

A glance at the variants of the Tarpeian legend shows the following results : —

I. The majority of writers place the heroine in the reign of Romulus ; but the Greek poet Simylus would have it that she betrayed the Capitol to the Gauls under Brennus.-

' ' Obrutam armis necavere, seu ut vi capta potius arx videretur, seu prodendi exempli causa, ne quid unquam fidum proditori esset ' (Livy, i. II, 7). Analogous reflections in Plut. Rom. xvii. 7, and Prop. v. 4, 89.

- Ap. Plut. Rom. xvii.

70 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

2. Most historians make her a Roman, but some say that she was a Sabine. ^

3. According to some, her father, Tarpeius, was absent ; others describe him as a traitor put to death by Romulus. -

4. The custody of the citadel belonged, according to some, to Tarpeius ; according to others, to Tarpeia herself.^

5. Tarpeia was or was not a Vestal Virgin.^

6. According to some, she acted from cupidity ; '-> according to others, to entrap the Sabines by exacting the surrender of their shields ; ^ according to Propertius, she was in love with Tatius ; 7 according to Simylus, with Brennus ; ^ according to Antigonus of Carystus, she wished to be avenged upon Romulus.^

7. The Sabines (or the Gauls) killed her, either to foster the belief that they had penetrated into the citadel by force, or from disgust at her treason,^" or to punish her for deceiving them, or to escape parting with their golden ornaments, ^1 or because she refused to reveal the secrets of Romulus to Tatius, 1-

All are unanimous on the one point that Tarpeia was crushed under the arms and ornaments of the enemy.

' Antigonus of Carystus made her the daughter of Tatius (Plut. Rom. xvii.).

- Opinion of Sulpicius Galba ; combated by Plut. Rom. xvii.

^ Another opinion refuted by Plutarch [l.l.).

•• She was a Vestal Virgin according to Varro (L. Lat. v. 41), Proper- tius (v. 4, 18), and tha chronographer of 354 [Chron. Min. i. p. 144, 8). Those who say that she met the Sabines while going out to draw water seem to share the same opinion (Livy, i. 11 ; Val. Max. ix. 6, i, &c.).

^ Livy, i. II.

^ The version of L. Calpurnius Piso, adopted by Dionysius (ii. 50).

Prop. iv. 4, 39. ** Plut. Rom. xviii.

9 Ibid. ^" Livy, i. 11.

1' The version of Fabius (Dionysius, ii. 3S).

'- Chron. Min. i. p. 144.

TARPEIA 71

Almost all, in this connection, mention the great shields ; some add the golden bracelets and rings worn by the Sabines or Gauls. ^

There is one valuable piece of numismatic evidence. In the last century of the Republic, two Roman families claiming a Sabine descent placed the virgin Tarpeia upon their coins. On the reverse side of those struck by the Titurii, she is represented in the act of separating a Roman and a Sabine warrior ; the inference being that she was considered as one of those heroic dames who threw themselves between the two armies in order to end the struggle. On the coins of the Turpilii, she is a young girl, seen from the front, with both arms raised and only the upper part of her body emerging fom a heap of shields.-

Thus the opinion, that Tarpeia was a Sabine and not a Roman, had its adherents in the sixth century a.u.c. The explanation is possibly to be found in the incon- testable traces of a Sabine domination on the Capitol ; ^ where not only was the house of Tatius shown, ^ but it had been necessary to exaiiguratc and demolish several Latin chapels of his foundation, at the time when the temple of Jupiter was being built by Tarquin."' But it was sheer guesswork that translated Tarpeia into a Sabine or the daughter of Tatius himself ; positive knowledge

1 According to Plutarch {Rom. xvii.) Tatius was the first to throw his shield and bracelet on Tarpeia ; and the same version — given by Piso — is familiar to Dionysius (ii. 38). In a fragment of Appian {De Re§. 4), quoted by Suidas and perhaps incomplete, she is buried (Ka.Tix<^<^Ori) under ornaments of gold. A similar account, from the suspect Aristides of Miletus, is preserved by Plutarch [Par all. xv.).

- Babelon, Monnaies de la Rep. rom. ii. pp. 301, 498 ; Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 97.

^ Liv. i. 32 ; Tac. Ann. xii. 24 ; Dionys. ii. 50.

• Plut. Rom. 20 ; Solin. i. 21.

'"• Livy, i. 55. Cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. p. 484.

72 CULTS, MYTHS. AND RELIGIONS

of her there was none, beyond these three facts : a rock on the Capitol was called by her name, her tomb — • or cenotaph — was exhibited there, and yearly rites were celebrated in her honour. This follows unmistakably from the passage in which Dionysius subscribes to the version given in the Gracchan period by Calpurnius Piso, who held that Tarpeia had not betrayed the Romans, but attempted to deceive their enemies. ' The sequel of the incident,' says Dionysius, ^ ' demonstrates the truth of Piso's view ; for a magnificent tomb was erected to Tarpeia on the holiest of the Seven Hills, at the place where she met her death ; and every year — to repeat Piso — the Romans make libations and offer sacrifices to her. Now, it is certain that, had she perished in the act of selling her country to the enemy, neither those who killed her nor those whom she betrayed would have shown her any such respect, but rather have flung her carcass into the sewer.' Plutarch seems to imply that this tomb was a cenotaph, or, strictly speaking, an altar more than a tomb. ' Tarpeia,' he says,- ' was buried in this very place and the hill took its name Tarpeian from her, until King Tarquin consecrated it to Jupiter ; ^ when her remains were transferred elsewhere, and her name disappeared [koI rovvo/xa r/}? TapTrrjia'i i^eXLire). One trace, however, was left ; and the rock on the Capitol, from which condemned criminals arc hurled to their death, is still known as the Tarpeian Rock.' Now, if Tarpeia's remains had really been ' transferred

' Dionysius, ii. 38. " Phit. Rom. xvii.

^ Mr. Pais thinks the name Tarpeia identical with Tarquin, and considers the Vestal Tarpeia and the Vestal Tarquinia, who gave the plain of the Tiber to the Romans, to be one and the same person [Legends of Roman History, p. 105). The theory seems to me inadmissible.

TARPEIA 73

elsewhere,' vestiges of her cult would have been dis- covered somewhere in Rome. But the case is not so ; and the passage from Plutarch is probably the echo of a lost text which stated the negative results of a search for the maiden's bones. Finally, Festus puts it on record that current opinion recognised Tarpeia in an old statue in the temple of Jupiter built by Metellus [in aede Jovis Metellina).^ Unfortunately, he enters into no detail, and we can hardly suppose the image to have been similar to that on the Turpilian coins.

This latter, then, is our only document ; and we may take it as the starting-point in our attempt to determine what the ancients definitely knew — or believed them- selves to know — upon the subject, and to unravel the tangled skein of legends designed to account for one feature or another in the tale.

X

Tarpeia was the local divinity of the Tarpeian Rock ; and there she possessed an altar where her cult was annually celebrated. Tradition had it that she died on this spot, crushed to death by shields — Sabine in some versions, Gaulish in others, but in either case non-Roman. The engraver of the coin represented her agony, while she was still writhing under the weight of the arms accumu- lated upon her ; a moment later, and nothing would have been visible but a heap of shields in the form of a mound. Now, this mound of shields, which quite possibly was interspersed with a few rings, bracelets, and armlets of gold, is the root of the whole legend ; and after what has been said above, it is easy to account for its existence.

' Festus, p. 363, M.

74 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

At a period when temples were still to seek at Rome, and huts served for houses, the spoils of war, so far as they escaped destruction, must — like the Gaulish trophies noticed by Caesar — have been piled on some plot of con- secrated ground, where they were immune from touch. In these heaps of arms the trophy had its origin ; and Tacitus, speaking of that erected by Germanicus, could still call it a ' mound of weapons.' i But with the advent of temples and comparatively large dwelling-houses where the enemy's spoil might be hung, the primitive rite was forgotten, and the pile of shields on the Tarpeian Hill became an enigma. Now, with ancient as well as modern man, the sight of a heap of stones is certain to engender the belief that an important personage lies buried beneath — generally as a punishment for some crime. I could cite many examples from latter-day folk- lore ; but there is no dearth of classical texts. An epigram on the brigand Balista, attributed to Virgil, begins :

' Under this hill of stones Balista lies.' -

Achilles caused Pisidice of Methymna to be crushed under a heap of stones. ^ In the days which saw the compilation of the book of Joshua, the heap of stones under which Achan ■* slept was still pointed out, as well as another that covered the body of the King of Ai."' Possibly the fact that stoning to death was the usual penalty for the most serious crimes may have favoured the birth of these legends ; but similar tales are found where it is purely a question of ordinary earthen tumuli which might be

^ Tac. Ann. ii. 22: 'Congeriemarmorum struxit superbo cum titulo.' " ' Monte sub hoc lapidum tegitur Balista sepultus ' : Serv. ad Aen. vol. i. p. I, ed. Thilo.

^ Parthenius, Erot. xxi. 8. Joshua vii. 26. '" Ibid. viii. 29.

TARPETA 75

natural phenomena, defensive fortifications, or the sites of a cult, but are ahnost always regarded as the tombs of heroes or heroines, giants, fairies, and so forth. Speci- mens of this nomenclature, implying a whole legend, are met with in the Iliad.^

Popular imagination is essentially logical, even in its errors. The sight of a heap of shields, forming a tumulus on a place sacred to the cult of the eponymous heroine Tarpeia, was bound to suggest the idea that this heroine had been crushed to death under the shields. But why such a punishment ? Popular imagination is more than logical ; it is just, and requires that every penalty shall have its corresponding crime. In this case, the punishment must have been inflicted by foreign warriors, for the arms employed were foreign. But warriors spare unarmed women ; therefore Tarpeia could not have been killed in defence of the Capitol. There remained the hypothesis of treason — a conjecture facilitated by the knowledge that condemned traitors (as Plutarch does not fail to recall) were hurled from the Tarpeian Rock.- Why, then, it may be objected, does tradition not mete out the same fate to the arch-traitress herself ? The answer is that the legend of her treason was not formed independently, but was suggested, as we have seen, by the existence of a heap of shields, under which Tarpeia, the local nymph, was buried.

If at the time of the capture of Rome by the Gauls, there existed a mound of Sabine shields on some one point of the Capitol, those arms must have disappeared in the catastrophe of 390 and have been replaced, a little later, by Gaulish weapons. This explains, to my mind, the

' //. ii. 811-814.

- Plut. Rom. xvii. ; Syll. x. ; Livy, xxv. 7, 14, &c.

76 CULTS, MYTHS. AND RELIGIONS

curious variant of the legend, according to which Tarpeia falls in love with Brennus, betrays the Capitol to the Gauls, and is whelmed under their arms. Nor is this the only feature of the story which is connected both with the Sabines and the Gauls. The little gate of the Capitol— the Porta Pandana'^ — had always to be left open ; but our authorities differ as to whether this was a condition of peace imposed by the Sabine Tatius ~ or an exaction of Brennus the Gaul.-'

A detail which astonished Schwegler was the quantity and beauty of the gold ornaments attributed to the Sabines ; he suspected a confusion between them and the Gauls, whose weakness for decorative effect was notorious.* Mr. Pais counters the objection by pointing out that the armillae and rings of gold were equally appropriate to the Sabines, whose wealth in the precious metals was eulogised by Fabius Pictor, and whose arms, in 310 and 293 B.C., are described as glittering with gold and silver.^ However, as the ancient world was always impressed by the size of the Gaulish shields, I am inclined to fancy that the legend owes its inception to the sight of a pile of them intermixed with the gold ornaments worn by the Celts on their campaigns. But, as a tradi- tion, which we are justified in considering historical, reported a Sabine occupation of the Capitol long before the GaUic invasion, two rival legends — Gaulish and

' Paulus Diaconus, p. 220 ; cf. Varr. Ling. lat. v. 42 ; Solinus, i. 13 ; Arnobius, iv. 3.

- Festus, p. 363 : ' When making peace, Tatius insisted that the gate should always be open to the Sabines ' — ut ea Sabinis semper pateret.

^ Polyaen. viii. 25, i.

• Livy, vii. 10 ; Gell. ix. 11, 5 ; xiii. 3, 7 ; Pliny, xxiii. 5, 15, &c.

^ Pais, Ancient Legends, p. 298 ; cf. Plut. Cat. maior, ii. 2 ; Livy, ix. 40 ; x. 39.

TARPEIA ^^

Sabine — sprang up, the second of which won the more general acceptance, partly because it referred to a more distant period, and partly, perhaps, because the Sabine conquest evoked the less painful memories at Rome. Schwegler writes : ' The nature of the death assigned to Tarpeia has undoubtedly a local reason which cannot be divined,' ^ and Mr. Pais has, more recently, come to the same conclusion. I believe I have shown that the problem may be solved without allowing hypothesis to play too great a part.

XI

When it was a question of crystallising and fixing the literary form of the Tarpeian legends, the historians drew upon the treasury of Greek fable ; and there they found all the analogies they desired. In the first place, there was a whole string of stories dealing with fair and frail ladies who betrayed their relatives, or who delivered up their cities in order to pleasure the object of their affections." Other narratives wear a closer resemblance to the one which finally gained the day in the case of Tarpeia. The most interesting is that of Pisidice, daughter of the king of Methymna in the island of Lesbos. Achilles was besieging the town, when the princess, catching sight of him from the battlements, lost her heart, and sent out her nurse, offering to sell the town in exchange for his love. The hero promised all ; but, once master of Methymna, bade his soldiers stone the girl to death. In this connection, Parthenius • repeats the lines of some poet (perhaps ApoUonius Rhodius, as K. Miiller

• Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. vol. i. p. 487.

• Paris, op. laud. p. 299 ; cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. vol. i. p. 484.

•' Parthenius, Erotica, xxi.

78 CULTS. MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

conjectured), who sang the early history of Lesbos in hexameters. There is some reason to think the legend was already known to Hesiod,^ which, of course, excludes the idea that it might have been borrowed from that of Tarpeia. This is not the case with the story of Brennus at Ephesus, as related in the ' Parallelae ' — falsely attributed to Plutarch — on the strength of a soi-disant ' History of the Galatians ' {rakaTiKo) by Clitophon.- The Gaulish chief Brennus, while ravaging Asia, laid siege to Ephesus. There he succumbed to the charms of a young Greek girl, who promised to comply with his desires and betray Ephesus to boot, if she might have an equivalent in gold collars and ornaments. Brennus ordered his men to throw all the gold they had into the lap of this mercenary light-of-love ; they obeyed, and she was buried alive under the gauds. The story contrives to be both revolting and absurd : the girl could not promise her love-sick Gaul the town-keys over and above her favours ; there must have been an older and more rational version in which she fell in love with Brennus, as Pisidice with Achilles. But it is well known how little value can be attached to the extracts from authors, real or mythical, which fill the ' Parallelae Minores ' that pass under Plutarch's name. The story of Polycrite of Naxos inspires more confidence, as it was known already to Aristotle.^ Polycrite won the love of Diognetus, the chief of the Erythraeans besieging Naxos, and exploited her conquest by opening the camp- gates to her countrymen. After the slaughter, she returned in triumph to her native town, but was suffocated under the garlands showered upon her by her fellow-

1 Cf. Hofer, in Roscher's Lexikon, art. 'Peisidike,' p. 1793

2 Pseudo-Plut. Payall. Min. c. xv.

^ Cf. Hofer's article 'Polykrite,' in Roscher's Lexikon, p. 2650.

TARPEIA 79

citizens, who then erected a tomb in her honour. Though the circumstances are all different, this pretty story comprises four elements — a siege, a love intrigue, a betrayal, and the suffocation of the traitress — which are found in at least one version of the story of Tarpeia.

XII

Thus, once again, though by devious waj's, I have shown how a rite gave birth to a myth. Here the rite is a taboo of the spoils of war — the custom of upheaping them on consecrated ground, where to touch them was sacrilege. The myth is that of the local heroine — the genius loci (for there is no place without its genius, as Servius says) — suffocated under this pile of weapons to atone for some imagined crime. Euhemerism is right, every legend has its root in reality ; but if the legend is old, then the reality that gave it life is not an episode of history but a ritual — a cult-practice.

CHAPTER V

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS ^

The domestic animals — the dog, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the pig, the poultry of our farm-yards — are such old friends to the European that he rarely asks himself what were the circumstances which linked their fate to his ; in fact, it requires some effort of thought to realise that it was not always so linked. That effort had not been made by the redactor of Genesis. In his philosophy, dominion over animals is a God-given privilege of man's nature ; and the animals are accommo- dating enough to submit without a struggle. So docile are they that the first man watches them file before his face, and learns their names from the mouth of the living God (ii. ig). Immediately on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, Adam begins to till the soil : there is no hint of the long-drawn years when man lived by hunting alone, or by gathering the fruits of earth. Of the two sons of Adam, Abel is a shepherd, Cain a husbandman. True, we find a hunter, as well, in Genesis, the famous Nimrod ; but Nimrod was a powerful

' An address given, in 1902, at the Univcrsite Populaire (8inp arron- dissement, Paris). An extremely instructive development of the same subject is to be found in Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, pp. 113 sq.

80

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 8i

chief, and seems to have hunted for pleasure, Hke the kings of Assyria. There is nothing in the text to indicate that he did so as a means of Hvehhood. Then came the Deluge, and the Lord said to Noah : ' Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female : and of beasts that are not clean by twos, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female ; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.' Beasts and birds alike showed themselves complacent and entered the Ark, though the Biblical historian forgets to say how, for the eight long months of the Flood, Noah contrived to feed this menagerie, or accomplished the still more difficult feat of keeping the lion from the stag and making the wolf to lie down with the lamb. Quite lately, a leading light of the French clergy decided that the narrative need not be taken literally, a concession for which we owe him much thanks.

The Greek had less childlike ideas on the past of mankind. He knew perfectly well that men had been hunters before they were shepherds, and shepherds before they were agriculturists ; he had even names for the heroes or demigods to whom he attributed the credit of first taming wild animals or inventing the plough. During the whole of the Middle Ages — in fact, down to our own time — the authority of the Biblical narrative and the risk of disputing it were enough to deter scholars from any study of the origins of civilisation, alluring though the theme might be. The nineteenth century, however, made up for lost time. Archaeology has shown that the oldest human habitations, the caverns of the quaternary period, contain so far no trace of domestic animals. The tenants of the caves lived by the chase, and the

82 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

animals which they hunted were all wild. The proof lies in the fact that the bones found among the reHcs of their meals belong to animals of all ages, whereas pastoral and agricultural peoples refrain, as a rule, from killing young beasts.

The exploration of the lake dwellings of Switzerland and France, huts built on piles at a little distance from the water-edge, has demonstrated that domestic animals were known in the polished-flint age, which — after a long interval of transition — succeeded the quaternary era. Similarly, in Egypt and Babylonia, where the spade has exhumed dead civilisations which flourished from five to six thousand years before Christ, some of the domestic animals are missing, but others, notably the dog and the ox, are found from the very earliest periods.

How came man to conceive the idea of domesticating animals ? Before answering the question, we may ob- serve that there are huge tracts of territory in the world which were absolutely devoid of domestic animals until a period very near our own. There was not a single domestic animal in Australia, when that continent was discovered by the Dutch, and to this day the natives have neither flocks nor herds. When the New World was sighted by Columbus, America had only a single domestic animal, the llama, and that was confined to Peru. Cattle, dogs, and horses were all unknown. In North America the only wild cattle were bison, and the Indians had as yet made no attempt to domesticate them.

For domestic animals to exist in any country, that, country must obviously possess animals, in the wild state, which are susceptible of domestication. Now, in Australia, the kangaroo is indigenous but not domestic-

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 83

able ; and in neither of the Americas were there any horses, goats, or sheep for men first to tame and then domesticate.

But even if animals capable of being domesticated do exist, man is none the wiser. Nothing but experiment— or, rather, a long course of experiment — will open his eyes. But if he has no conception of domestication how could he, and why should he, try any experiment ? Accident might perhaps lead to the discovery of gold, copper, or iron ore, but it could not lead to the discovery of a domestic animal, for the fact that an animal is domestic presupposes its education by man.

Up to late years the difficulty was explained away on an assumption which at first sight looks satisfactory enough. Take the case of a savage who makes shift to live by the flesh of animals killed in hunting. One da}^ he happens to kill a wild cow which is suckling two calves of different sexes. The sentiment of compassion, which is natural to man, moves him to spare these little animals, and to give them to his children as playfellows. They grow up, pair, have young in their turn, and, at the end of a few generations, the habit of living in contact with man has transformed the breed into domestic animals.

It is a pretty romance, but a romance none the less ; and one that abounds in palpable impossibilities. In the first place, the savage who depends on his bow and spear has no food-reserves. He is not an agriculturist, but lives from hand to mouth, and very often suffers hunger owing to the lack of game. We have still people, in our civilised communities, who both suffer hunger and die from hunger. But what to-day is a social scandal was once virtually the rule. To the savage death from

G2

84 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

starvation was the normal end of existence, and his every faculty was strained in the one endeavour to procure his daily bread. Is it reasonable to suppose that a savage of this type, with a young bull and a young heifer hard at hand outside his hut, would not be tempted a hundred times to kill and eat them before they obtained the age of reproduction ? Any pleasure he might have derived from playing with them would soon cloy, and would certainly be inadequate to still the pangs of hunger. Will it be said that, hungry as he was, he spared them, in the hope that they would grow up, reproduce their species, and eventually make him the owner of a sub- stantial herd of cattle ? The idea is sheer folly : a savage cannot dream of a herd, like Perrette, when he does not know what a herd means — ^that tame animals can repro- duce themselves, and multiply under his eyes. Ignoti nulla cupido !

There is another reason which invalidates the theory of a transformation of pet animals into domestic animals. At the present day we are acquainted with peoples in South Africa, and elsewhere, who know nothing of agri- culture, and live entirely on their flocks and herds. If it were true that hunters became herdsmen for the sake of having more animals to eat, and those within easier reach, we should naturally expect the herdsman to be a great flesh-eater. Now, the exact opposite is the case. Hunters are essentially carnivorous ; herdsmen are fru- givorous, and feed only on the milk of their cattle and the butter and cheese which it yields. They are too fond of their animals to kill them save at the last extremity ; and they are especially careful never to destroy them while still able to breed, or, in the case of the females, to give milk. The Kaffirs only kill their cattle as a

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 85

sacrifice to the gods, or to celebrate a wedding. A close observer, Schweinfurth, says that the Dinkas in South Africa never kill a cow, and that, if one falls ill, she is separated from the rest of the herd and tended in a large hut constructed for the purpose. Should an epidemic or a raid thin the animals belonging to a Dinka tribe, all the members show the greatest sorrow. As similar phenomena have been observed among pastoral peoples elsewhere, it would seem that the herdsman — in other words, the man who has succeeded in domesticating animals — never dreams of eating them, his only thought being to keep them and increase their numbers.

It is not everyone who can study the savage in his native wilds ; but the young savage is always with us. Now what is it that we are obliged to impress on children ? I mean strong and healthy children. Is it to eat ? Certainly not, but rather not to eat too much. The natural instinct of man is to use, and abuse, food : the gourmand is first cousin to the cannibal. To persuade a savage, or a child to abstain from food which he likes, a strong deterrent must be urged, or, rather, the strongest of all deterrents, fear.

To return to our savage hunter. If no restraint were put upon his passion for destruction, subserving as it does an appetite sharpened by life in the open air, he would soon slaughter every creature in his neighbourhood ; depopulate forest, plain, and hill ; then move on, and continue the work of devastation. Unless a new factor intervened to stay the butchery, domestic animals could never come into existence, for the simple reason that all the wild animals would be bound to disappear after a few centuries of unintermittent massacre.

But they have not disappeared, either in Europe or

86 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Asia or Africa ; and we see that man has domesticated a certain number of species. Consequently there must have been a time when fear operated with sufficient effect to force him to kill with discrimination, and to strike a truce with particular kinds of animals.

That fear was religion. * Fear,' said the ancients, 'gave birth to the gods.' But the ancients had not sunk their plummet as deep as the moderns ; and it was a mistaken genealogy that made the gods the first- born of fear. The idea of gods in the image of man, or of one God uniting in himself all the powers of Nature, is comparatively modern. Not all communities have gods, but all have a religion ; religion is older than the gods, and it is she who is the daughter of fear.

Rehgion is the name given to a complex of scruples impeding the natural appetites of man, and curtailing the free exercise of his physical faculties. Thus it may be said with perfect truth that morality, law, and civilisation itself, are the outcome of religion. Without it man would never have learnt to put restraint upon himself, even when he most rebelled against the restraint : he would have remained forever a featherless biped. The point of view which questions the advantage of religion in already civilised communities is perhaps comprehensible ; but it cannot be doubted that non-civilised communities owe to religion their emergence out of barbarism.

One of the oldest and most widely diffused forms of religion is the reluctance to kill and eat some particular animal — a scruple which is still far removed from ex- tinction. Mohammedans and Jews eat no pork ; the Russian will not touch a pigeon ; Europeans — in general, at any rate — do not regard the dog as an edible animal ;

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 87

and, in many cases, horse-meat inspires an instinctive repugnance which was once an article of rehgion.

In America, Asia, and Oceania the study of present- day savages, and their reservations in kilHng and eating animals, has elicited a curious fact. The savage believes that a certain animal, the bear for instance, is the ancestor of his tribe, its sworn ally, and its protector. It is not an individual animal that is sacred in his eyes, but a whole species — a whole animal tribe, if we may use the expression. And, in fact, closer attention seems to show that it literally is a case of a solemn league and covenant, for offensive and defensive purposes, between two tribes, one composed of men and the other of animals. The first condition of a treaty is that the contracting parties shall spare each other. The savage observes the convention ; and the animals, when they are not carnivorous, do so in the nature of things. If they are carnivorous, the savage still imagines they spare his own clan ; for religion, the daughter of faith, is apt to become the mother of credulity,

Totemism — from the American word totem or otem, distinctive mark or sign — is the name given to that primitive form of religion whose essence is that a tribe of men considers itself linked by an enduring pact to a species of animals.

This totemism was the oldest form of all religions. Long before he had gods, the savage had his sacred animals to which he stood in the double relation of protector and protected. At the root of this phenomenon, there is not only the sympathy which an animal inspires in a savage and a child, there is also the curiosity and fear which an animal awakens. Children are still ex- tremely susceptible to both feelings. To the child, the

88 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

fear of a wolf is a more real thing than the fear of a policeman ; and he had far rather see the lions and tigers in the Zoological Gardens than watch the fine ladies in Hyde Park or the Allee des Acacias. Once admit that primitive man was totemistic and the domestication of animals is explained in the simplest and easiest manner. Imagine a nation of primitive hunters living in old France, a country whose indigenous animals included bulls, horses, goats, bears, and wolves — to go no further. These hunters are divided into clans or little tribes, every one of which claims a different animal as its ancestor. The wolf-clan believes itself to be descended from a wolf, and to have made a treaty of alliance with all wolves ; it cannot therefore, except in the case of legitimate self- defence, kill a wolf. The horse-clan thinks itself descended from a horse, and cannot kill one without committing a horrible crime — and so on. Each clan, as a matter of course, abstains from hunting and killing its patron animal. But that is not enough. Since the animals are the protectors of the clan, guide it in its wanderings, and give notice of impending danger either by cries or by signs of uneasiness, two or more of the species must always be kept with the clan by way of sentinels. These couples — which naturally have to be taken at the tenderest age possible — grow accustomed to man, and are soon perfectly tame ; while the young, born and bred in the very midst of the clan, become its friends. It must be clearly understood that all this will take place only when the animal chosen as totem possesses the attributes which make for domestication. Thus the bear may be tamed, but is not a domestic animal ; it can neither be trained to draw a cart, nor trusted to keep a disinterested eye upon the herds. A

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 89

few species of wolves or jackals, first tamed and after- wards domesticated, have given man his best friend, the dog ; still, the wolf-species, as a rule, is quite intractable, and has remained the consistent foe of humanity. On the other hand, the horse, the bull, thfc wild boar, and the goat, not to mention geese and the various kinds of fowl, have almost everywhere passed from independence to domestication.

In what part of the world was the domestication of animals first achieved ? We do not know. Possibly, in several places at the same time ; for it is the product of two factors, one of which — totemism^appears to have been universal, while the other — the presence of domesticable animals — was a condition satisfied in a multitude of countries, Asian, African, and European. Archaeology, however, furnishes an interesting sidelight. In the villages on the Danish coast (the oldest human habitations of the post-quaternary period) we find the bones of the common or domestic dog in the midst of a huge pile of relics — edible shell-fish, and the bones of deer, boars, and birds, killed and eaten by man. It is also noticeable that these animal bones are often gnawed, and that the incisions in them are due to dogs' teeth. But for dogs to gnaw the bones left from the m^eals of these village hunters and fishermen, they must have lived with them ; in other words, they were domestic dogs.

Thus, as far as the present state of our knowledge allows us to judge, the first animal domesticated in Europe was the dog ; the earliest indications of his existence are met with on the shores of Denmark ; and his domestication must date from the long period — some five or six thousand years — between the end of the

90 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

quaternary era and the civilisation of the pohshed flint age, such as we know it from the lake dwellings of Switzer- land. The question remains : What is the origin of the domestic dog ? Is it from the wolf, which inhabits both Europe and Asia, or from the jackal, which is almost confined to Asia ? The experts are still at variance. ^ Under any circumstances, it would be decidedly singular if the domestic dog came from Asia, and Asiatic tribes had taken the road, with their dogs, to catch shell-fish on the coasts of Denmark. Common sense inclines one to suppose that the dog is a descendant, domesticated by totemism, of some species of wolf which inhabited the dense forests of Europe at a time intermediate between the quaternary epoch and the present geological forma- tion. In any case, there are so many varieties of dogs that the gradual evolution of certain wolves and jackals into domestic dogs might have taken place in several parts of the world at the same or different times.

The most recent of these ' conquests of man,' to use Buffon's phrase, is none the less instructive because it is even yet incomplete : I refer to the domestication of the cat. The cat is still far from being as thoroughly domesticated as the dog. It abhors being chained up ; if it hunts, it hunts on its own account ; and its instincts of independence — of revolt, even — are often only too patent ! The domestic cat was practically unknown to the Greeks and Romans. The rarity of its appearances on the painted vases of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. confirms the silence of the written tradition. In Pompeii, where the remains of multifarious animals have been discovered under the rain of lapilli, the cat has so far been

' For a recent discussion, see L'Anthropologie, 1904, p. 41, where the whole question has been well summed up by M. U. Duerst.

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS f)i

sought in vain.' The only country where it abounded, and had done so from the remotest antiquity, was Egypt. There it was regarded as a sacred animal, especiahy in the nome of Bubastis, where cat-mummies may be counted by tens of thousands. To kill a cat was considered a monstrous crime. In fact, under one of the later Ptolemies, a Roman, who had unwittingly transgressed in this respect, was torn to pieces by the crowd, despite the efforts of the local authorities.-

The exportation of cats was strictly forbidden. IMore, from time to time an Egyptian commission travelled through the Mediterranean countries in order to buy and bring back every cat which had been lured out of Egypt. After the triumph of Christianity in Egypt, during the fourth century, these old laws naturally fell into desuetude. Simultaneously, the Greek monks began to leave the land of Pharaoh to travel and preach in Europe ; and with them went the cat. Its advent was well timed, for just then the rat — equally unknown to the ancient world — appeared from Asia in the train of the Huns ; so that in the fifth century cats and rats had their stricken fields no less than Attila and Theodoric. Thus the cat, a local totem in Egypt, tamed and domesticated in that country only, spread over Europe when Egyptian paganism had vanished and all the barriers reared by the old cult had been levelled with the ground."

The theory of the domestication of animals, which I have just expounded, was first broached by Mr. Frazer ; later it was taken up by Galton, and finally developed by Mr. Jevons in his Introduction to the ' History of Religion,'

' Compare Engelmann, Jahrbiich des Instituts, 1899, p. 136.

- Diodorus Siculus, i. 83, 8.

^ Cf. Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1900, p. 264.

92 CULTS, MYTHS. AND RELIGIONS

published in 1896. In France, I think, I was the first to advocate it, both in my lectures at the £cole du Louvre and in the press. It is equally applicable to the domestication of vegetables, the beginning of cultivated plant-life ; and it seems to me that, as a logical conse- quence of animal or vegetable totemism, the primitive form of all religion, it holds the field to the exclusion of every other hypothesis.

CHAPTER VI

THE KING SACRIFICED ^

Towards the close of the year 1900, there appeared a new edition of Mr. Frazer's celebrated work, * The Golden Bough.' The result was a sensation bordering on the scandalous. In a hitherto unpublished part of the third volume, Mr. Frazer, starting from the observations of Messrs. Wendland, Cumont, Parmentier, and others, pro- posed — though under every reservation — to recognise an element of myth and ritual in the tragedy of Golgotha. The sequel among English scholars has been a prolonged discussion, though the echoes of it have hardly reached France. The gravity of the question is such, and its connection with anthropology so close, that a fairly detailed summary of it will not be out of place here.

Many countries, at particular seasons, hold a festival similar to the Roman Saturnalia and marked by the same brief suspension of the usual civic and moral laws. These periods of exaltation and exuberant joy generally coincide with seed-time or harvest. At Rome, the

' L'Anthropologie, 1902, pp. 620-627. 93

94 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Saturnalia were supposed to commemorate the blissful reign of Saturn, an era when there was neither discord among men, nor distinction between class and class, nor constraint in any shape. Over this Golden Age there hung one sinister shadow — human sacrifice. But in the Roman Saturnalia, which lasted seven days, the hated rite had left no trace. The outstanding characteristic of the feast was the license granted to the slaves, who, for the nonce, became masters of the house. One of them, chosen by lot, took the style of king, and issued fantastic edicts to his subjects : one must dance, another sing, a third carry a flute-girl on his back, and so forth. In Roman eyes the whole proceeding was a burlesque of royalty.

In the provinces things ran the same course ; but here we meet features of an apparently more archaic cast. We have a detailed account of the Saturnalia, as celebrated by a troop of Roman soldiers encamped on the Danube, at Durostolum, in the reigns of Maximian and Diocletian. The description is preserved in a history of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, published by M. Cumont, in 1897, after a Greek manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale.i Thirty days before the feast the soldiers chose by lot a handsome youth, whom they dressed in royal robes and hailed as the representative of good king Saturn. Surrounded by a brilliant escort, he paraded the streets, with full authority to use and abuse his power, until, on the thirtieth day, he was compelled to kill himself on the altar of the Saturn whom he personified. In 303 the lot fell upon the Christian soldier Dasius, who refused

' Cumont, Analecta Bollandiana, vol. xvi., and Man, 1901, p. 66; Parmentier, Revue de Philologie, 1897, p. 143 ; A. Lang, Man, 1901, p. 83.

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to play a part in which he \v(nild have to stain himself with debauchery immediately before death. He was beheaded at Durostolum on Friday, November 20, which (adds the narrative) was the twenty-fourth day of the moon.

At Rome, during the classical period, the Saturnalian king was simply a stage monarch — an inoffensive clown ; but the story of St. Dasius appears to hint at an earlier day when he forfeited his life along with his crown, and the feast terminated in one of those human sacrifices, traces of which are vaguely preserved by our authorities.^ Further — and this is an essential point — the man-victim was the representative of a god.

The Carnival of Christian nations is neither more nor less than the Roman Saturnalia. In Italy, Spain, and France, where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most persistent, a salient feature of the Carnival is the making of a grotesque effigy, which personifies the feast, and, after a fleeting term of glory, is destroyed or burnt in public. This King of the Carnival is merely a survival of the god Saturn.

When the Roman year began on the ist of January, the Saturnalia were celebrated in December : earlier, when it used to open on the ist of March, they were held in February or the beginning of March ; and this remains the date of the Carnival. The feast of the Matronalia, in which the female slaves enjoyed the same privileges as the males during the Saturnalia, always

1 On the supposition, of course, that the rite of Durostolum was an old custom revivified. It is, however, quite possible that it was only a more barbarous form of an originally harmless practice. In the Roman empire, after the second century, there are many traces of moral brutalisation and mental retrogression — a phenomenon, which may, to a large extent, be explained by the invasion of oriental cults.

96 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

continued to be celebrated on the ist of March. It was the time of tillage and sowing, an obviously appropriate season for the cult of Saturn, who was pre-eminently an agricultural god {sata — crops).

Customs analogous to the Roman Saturnalia existed in Crete, Thessaly, Olympia, Rhodes, and elsewhere. The Greek Saturn was called Kronos ; and there are well-known traditions associating his cult with human sacrifice. Every year the Rhodians slew a man in his honour ; and, in the later periods, this man was a criminal condemned by common law — exactly as among the Celts in Caesar's lifetime. The procedure was to lead the victim outside the city, make him drunk, and then cut his throat. Even more curious was the feast of the Sacaea, which lasted for five days in Babylon. As in Rome, the servant was exalted above his lord ; and in every house a slave clothed in kingly attire, and wearing the title of Zoganes, exercised a short-lived power. Nor was this all. A criminal under sentence of death was robed as a king and authorised to act as such, even to the extent of enjoying the royal concubines. At the close of the festival, he was stripped of his fine linen, scourged, and either hanged or crucified. All these details were drawn by Athenseus and Dion from authors who wrote centuries before the Christian era.

The Babylonian festival of the Sacsea took place at the beginning of the year, about the 25th of March. It may, perhaps, be identified with one in honour of the great god Marduk, which is mentioned in the earliest Babylonian texts.

In 1891 Herr Zimmern recognised in the Sac?ea the origin of the Jewish feast of Purim {lots). The first mention of it is in the book of Esther, which was

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written after the return of the Jews from captivity and cannot be assigned to an earher date than the fourth century B.C. The book of Esther is a novel with a purpose, and the object is to supply a motive for the Purhn. This was a bacchanalian fete, which lasted two days, and was still, in the eighteenth century, celebrated with scandalous freedom and uproar. The story of Esther is well known. The king of Persia has a vizier, Haman, who has been offended by the Jew, Mordecai. The vizier prepares a gallows on which he hopes to hang his enemy, while he himself shall ride in state through the town, clad in the royal robes, wearing the royal crown, and mounted on the king's own horse. Thanks to Esther, the tables are turned : Ahasuerus hangs Haman, and the royal honours are paid to Mordecai. Here we have a reminiscence of the Sacaean Zoganes, divided (so to speak) between two actors ; one of whom hopes to play the part of the king, but is hanged, while the other, who does play the part, escapes the fate intended for him. The Babylonian affinities of the tale are still further accentuated by the names : for Mordecai is evidently Marduk, and Esther is connected with the Babylonian goddess Istar — the Astarte of the Greeks. An attempt has even been made to identify Haman with an Elamite god of the same name. Be this as it may, it is certain that the Jews, in celebrating the feast of Purim, were in the habit of first crucifying, then burning, an effigy of Haman. A law of the Theodosian Code forbade the crucifixion, as the use of the cross in such a ceremony was regarded as an insult to Christianity ; but in Jewish communities the custom of hanging or burning a representation of Haman has survived to our owti days. We know from Dion that the Babylonian Sacaea had

98 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

been introduced into Persia, and also that a feast similar to Purim was celebrated both at Babylon and in Persia. At the beginning of spring, a beardless man was perched on an ass and triumphantly paraded through the town. He carried a fan and complained of the heat, while the people threw snow or cold water upon him. In the course of his promenade, he stopped at the doors of the rich and levied contributions : in a word, the clown played the part of a young Sun-king till the end of the day. At sunset — unless he contrived to hide himself — he was beaten with sticks : in earlier times, no doubt, he was put to death. This cavalcade of the ' beardless king ' is suspiciously like the triumphal procession of Mordecai, as it is described in the book of Esther.

II

In an article in ' Hermes,' published in 1898, a German scholar, Herr Wendland, emphasised the points of similarity between the treatment of Christ by the Roman soldiers at Jerusalem, and the treatment of the Saturnalian King at Durostolum. The analogy, he considered, might explain the royal robe and crown which the soldiery put on Jesus, on the ground that he claimed to be King of the Jews.

The great difhculty is the date, as the Roman Saturnalia were held in December and Christ was put to death in the spring. It is not impossible, however, that the Roman garrison at Jerusalem may have con- formed to the ancient custom, placing the Saturnalia at the beginning of the year, which, under the old system, fell in March.

In any case, the resemblance of the Passion to the

THE KING SACRTFTCED 99

Sacaea is still more striking than its resemblance to the Saturnalia. Take St. Matthew's account (xxvii. 26-31) : ' Then released he Barabbas unto them : and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto Him the whole band of soldiers. And they stripped Him, and put on Him a scarlet robe. And when they had plaited a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head, and a reed in His right hand, and they bowed the knee before Him, and mocked Him, saying, " Hail, King of the Jews ! " And they spit upon Him, and took the reed, and smote Him on the head. And after that they had mocked Him, they took the robe from Him, and put His own raiment on Him, and led Him away to crucify Him,'

Now compare this passage with Dion Chrysostom's description of the treatment meted out to the king of the Sacsea :

' Taking one of the prisoners sentenced to death, they seat him on the throne, clothe him in royal vestments, and for several days permit him to drink and be merry, and to use the king's concubines. But at the end of his term, they strip off his garments, and scourge and crucify him.'

It is quite true — and Mr. Frazer freely admits it — that this may be only a coincidence. Still, the scarlet robe, the crown (for the theory, that the thorns were designed to increase the sufferings of Christ, is late), the reed-sceptre, and the mock homage to a majesty that was soon to be insulted and done to death — all this is remarkably like an act of ritual. Would a Roman governor, for one moment, have allowed his soldiers to act as buffoons before fulfilling their office as executioners ?

100 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Mr. Frazer again asks if Christ was not crucified in the character of Haman, in accordance with the above- mentioned ritual of the feast of Purim. But the feast of Purim fell on the fourteenth of Adar ; that is to say, exactly a month before Easter, which was the period of the crucifixion. In fact, we may say generally that Mr. Frazer has confused his theory by the introduction of Haman and Mordecai, to whom there is not the slightest allusion in the Gospel tradition.

The on"e thing certain is that the Gospel narratives would gain in clarity, if, at that particular time, it was customary to put a condemned criminal to death, after disguising him as a king. By the received account, Pilate was more sympathetic than hostile to Christ. Then why, all-powerful as he was, did he not spare him ? On the hypothesis suggested, the answer is easy : custom demanded a victim and all that Pilate could do was to leave the choice free between Ba.rabbas and Christ.

It must also be remembered that, according to the identically similar statements of the four Gospels, Pilate had the cross surmounted by an inscription, stating that the executed criminal was the King of the Jews (INRI, lesus Nazarenus Rex ludceorum). In the reign of so suspicious and jealous a sovereign as Tiberius, would "^a Roman governor have dared, even as a gruesome jest, to give the title king to a condemned malefactor, unless it was a formula sanctioned by custom and regularly employed on these occasions ?

The personality of Barabbas is singular. We are told that at the Easter festival it was usual for the governor to set free a prisoner nominated by the people. Pilate tried to persuade the mob to choose and spare Christ : they, on the contrary, clamoured for his death and the liberation

THE KING SACRIFICED loi

of a certain Barabbas, who was in prison for sedition and

murder. But why was it necessary to Hberate a prisoner

at all ? Mr. Frazer supposes that the man who was freed

was obliged to perambulate the streets in royal robes

and pla}^ the part of Mordecai, while the condemned man

plaj'ed the part of Haman. There is nothing to authorise

such a supposition ; but it is certain that the story,

as we have it in the Gospels, cannot be understood.

Another curious circumstance is that the name Barabbas

is composed of two Aramaic words meaning son and father :

Barabbas, therefore, is The Son of the Father — or exactly

what Christ believed himself to be. Barabbas was to

have been executed, Christ was executed in his stead ;

consequently, it must have been as Son of the Father that

he was nailed to the cross. Mr. Frazer is disposed to

think that Barabbas is not a name, but a surname given

to the victim chosen at this season ; perhaps, because

Easter in Syrian countries was originally accompanied

by the sacrifice of the first-born — a son dying for his

father. It will be seen we are on more than shifting

ground — a soil honeycombed by quagmires and abysms,

with will-o'-the-wisps alluring and misleading us on every

hand. But that is no reason why a modern investigator

should pass by and dismiss as insignificant all these

sidelights of myth and ritual.

To complicate matters still more, Herr Wendland has disinterred a story of Philo's. Philo, it is well known, was a Jewish philosopher who lived at Alexandria in the time of Christ. He relates that when Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, was invested by Caligula at Rome with the crown of Judaea, the young king passed through Alexandria on the way to his new capital. The populace there was antisemitic, and the Jewish kinglet offered

102 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

a fair target for their buffoonery. Accordingly, they seized a poor idiot by the name of Carabas, who used to wander the streets, stark naked, and pestered by the attentions of small boys. They put a crown on his head, gave him a reed for sceptre, clothed him in sham robes of state, and surrounded him with a guard of honour. To make it more obvious that their satire was levelled at the princeling Agrippa, the crowd shouted Marin I Marin ! — a Syriac word for ' Lord.' Here, again, we have a burlesque procession similar to that in which Christ figured — a fresh proof that the procession at Jerusalem was no whim of the moment, but on the con- trary, a normal feature of certain oriental customs. But who was this luckless Carabas ? The name is meaningless both in Hebrew and Syriac ; and yet it is certain that the mock-king, whom the Alexandrian rabble set up in opposition to the despised Jewish monarch, must himself have been a Jew. It is tempting to take Carabas as a clerical error for Barabbas, which would be, not a proper name, but the stock title of the stage-king who strutted his little hour in certain festivals of the same type as the Saturnalia and Sacaea.

Now comes another fact which intensifies the obscur- ity and makes confusion doubly confounded. ^ Origen, writing about the year 250 a.d., was familiar with manu- scripts of St. Matthew's gospel, which read (xxvii. 16) : ' And they had then a notable prisoner called Jesus Barabbas.' This strange text is still found in a number of Greek, Aramaic, and Syrian codices. In Mark the first mention of the name Barabbas is preceded by the words 6 \6y6fj,evo It is only fair, however, to mention the palace surrounded by sphinxes and griffins, which, according to Herodotus (iv. 79), was built by the Scythian king Scyles. Suvaroff claimed to have dis- covered a sphinx's head on the Kuban (Olenine, Tour in Tatirida, London, 1S02, p. 413). Cf. Ritter, Vorhalle, p. 226.

APOSTLES AMONG ANTHROPOPHAGI 153

on nothing more than a romance spun by sailors who were familiar w'ith the cannibal-haunted shores of the Black Sea, and that similar effusions — devoid as yet of any Christian element — must have had their vogue around the docks of Alexandria.'

Of all the nations that adopted Christianity, the Egyptians had the oldest collection of written tales. Not to mention those garnered by Herodotus, we have an appreciable number of others — translated by M. Maspero — in which we can recognise many a feature of those folk-stories which have never ceased to win their wa}' in the world. Some of them are certainly earlier than the year 1400 b.c.

Here there is an important observation to be made. One of the most curious episodes in the history of Andrew and Matthias is that of the unfortunates who have their senses drowned by a magic drug, are transformed into brutes, and remain for thirty days eating grass, until they are fit meat for their cannibal masters : Matthias himself is careful not to touch what is offered him. Now, this episode recurs in the third voyage extraordinary of Sindbad the Sailor, which is included in the Arabian collection of the Thousand and One Nights.-

Sindbad and his companions are shipwrecked upon an island peopled b}^ black savages, perfectly naked. ' Without saying a word,' Sindbad proceeds, ' they took possession of us and made us enter a great room, where

' M. I'abbe Lejay has pointed out to me the likeness between the story of Andrew and that of Circe in the Odyssey. It is possible to suppose that there was a grosser form of the latter legend, in which Circe fattened up the men whom she had changed into animals, so as to be able to eat them at her leisure.

- Mardrus' translation, vol. vi. p. 137. Gutschmid has already drawn attention to the parallel.

154 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

we found a king seated upon a lofty chair. The king ordered us to sit down, and they brought us dishes filled with food such as in our whole lives we had never seen. The sight of the food did not in the least excite my appetite, as it did that of my shipmates — who ate like gluttons. As for me, my abstinence saved my life. With the very first mouthfuls, a ravenous hunger laid hold of my comrades, and for hours they swallowed whatever was brought them, gesticulating like madmen and snuffing like animals. Whilst they were in this condition, the blackamoors fetched a vase filled with a sort of ointment, with which they rubbed their bodies all over. Its effect upon their stomachs was extraordinary : they swelled in every direction, until they were bigger than a distended water-skin ; and their hunger increased in proportion. I persisted in my refusal to eat the food, nor would I allow them to rub me with the ointment. And truly my restraint was wise : for I discovered that these men were eaters of human flesh and used these various means to fatten such as fell into their hands. I soon noticed a considerable diminution of my companions' intelligence, in direct proportion to the growth of their stomachs. They ended by being completely brutalised, and when they were sunk to the level of beasts in the slaughter-house, they were confided to the care of a shepherd who led them daily to graze in a meadow.'

This parallelism puts the common ground of the two stories beyond dispute : in both, human victims are reduced by their executioners to the condition of grass- eating ruminants. The analogy must be more than coin- cidence — the same forecastle yarn inspired the twin episodes in the Acts of the Apostle Andrew and in the Third Voyage of Sindbad.

APOSTLES AMONG ANTHROPOPHAGI 155

If we are to believe a goodl}' number of critics, the nucleus of the Thousand and One Nights is of Hindoo origin. Since Benfey, a numerous school of folklorists has sought to establish India as the starting-point of the popular stories which crop up in all three divisions of the ancient world and bear, on a close investigation, so startling a family-likeness. The theory arose in the days when it was heresy to doubt the high antiquity of Indian civilisation — days when many believed that India was the mother of the nationalities and languages of a part of Asia and Europe. The contrary has been proved to demonstration within the last thirty years, but the old prejudice still survives. But whatever antiquity we ma}' be disposed to attribute to the civilisations of Europe, it is certain that the civilisation of Egypt is still more ancient, and that we possess Egyptian stories of far earlier date than those of Brahminic India. More, we know that India, until a comparatively recent era, had neither shipping nor commerce ; whereas Egypt, in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, exported to India metals, wines, and manufactured articles, and brought back in return the products of the soil. It is more natural to ascribe the diffusion of stories to a commercial country' than to one where an export trade was non-existent. Everything, therefore, seems to indicate that Eg\'pt was the great story-teller of the world — that the Indian tales are of Eg^-ptian origin — and that the case is the same with the groundwork of the ever-charming Arabian Nights.

Thus, b}' two different trains of reasoning we arrive at the same conclusion. The legend of Matthias and Andrew is of Egyptian origin, because we find in it features peculiar to Egypt ; and it is of Egyptian origin.

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because it contains elements in common with a story of the Thousand and One Nights, which would seem to be derived from an Egyptian sailor's tale.

I could round off my demonstration by showing the important part played by Egypt in the constitution of the great cycle of legends which surround the first centuries of Christianity, but that would lead me too far. My main object has been to present to you one specimen of a literature which was once popular, is now forgotten, but can never be ignored by the student of religion. If I have inspired you with the desire to read any of the Apocr^'phal Acts of the Apostles, either in the Greek edition of Lipsius and Bonnet, or in the convenient English translation published by Walker at Edinburgh in 1890, I shall consider that this hour of your time and mine has not been ill spent.

CHAPTER X

THE BABYLONIAN MYTHS AND THE FIRST CHAPTERS OF

GENESIS 1

The problem of the origin of the world and man, to which anthropology, geology, and the kindred sciences are now systematically seeking a clue, confronted humanity the moment it became self-conscious. Cosmogonies — simple and poetic attempts at reading the riddle — have had their day among most nations, though only a feeble remnant has been handed down to us in written or verbal tradition. The study of cosmogonies, their sources, their borrowings and lendings in the course of the ages, is consequently a chapter of science, and by no means the least interesting one. Hebrew cosmogony, in particular, with the ascend- ancy which it has contrived to establish over nearly all the white races, has a distinct title to the anthropologist's attention. In fact, by the enormous influence which it has exercised on the development of the science, it is now part and parcel of the history of anthropology. The vicissitudes of that influence — retarding in certain respects, stimulating in others — have recently been outlined by Andrew \A'hite in several chapters of his invaluable

1 L' Anthropologic y 1901, pp. 683-688. 157

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work, ' A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology.' ^

It is common knowledge that the Bibhcal cosmogony comprises two documents of different date, known re- spectively as Jehovistic and Elohistic, because the Al- mighty is called Jehovah (Jahveh) in one and Elohim — a plural form — in the other. These documents were not so much fused as juxtaposed by an anonymous editor, writing certainly after the destruction of the kingdoms Israel and Judah by the Assyrians, possibly after the return from the Captivity in 536 B.C. Of late years it has been found feasible to distinguish the two versions and publish them separately, showing that each forms a continuous legend, totally irreconcilable with the other.'- For instance, by the Elohist's account, man and woman were created together ; according to the Jehovist man was created first, and later God gave him a companion. The Elohist has no mention of the Garden of Eden, nor of the Original Sin, — two features of prime importance in the Jehovist version. The facts are notorious, and it is needless to insist on them here. In a word — Geneses, not Genesis, is the correct term. The juxtaposition, in our Bible, of the Elohist and Jehovist versions has given rise to a mass of difficulties and flagrant contradictions which vanish on the instant if we admit the existence of two distinct traditions.

It has also been known since 1875 — thanks to the English Assyriologist George Smith— that poetical narra- tives, remarkably like the legends of the Hebrew Geneses, were current in Assyria and Babylonia as early as the second millennium before our era. Long fragments of

1 London, 1897, vol. i. pp. i, 209, 266, 284, 303.

- See Lenormant, Les ovigines de I'hisioire, vol. i. pp. i sqq.

THE BABYLONIAN MYTHS 159

these narratives, belonging to a pair of epics, ' The Creation ' and ' Gilgames,' have been deciphered from tablets found at Nineveh. The hrst translations proposed were inadequate ; but little by little, owing in a measure to the combined efforts of a generation of Orientalists, and in a measure to the discovery of new fragments, we have arrived at a sufficiently accurate idea of the old Babylonian cosmogonies. It goes without saying that their often startling resemblance to the Biblical legends has never been lost sight of. It constitutes the main theme of a book by M. I'abbe Loisy, who comes to his subject with the double authority of an Orientalist and an historian.^ We cannot do better than leave him to speak for himself,

' The relation between Chaldaean and Jewish traditions is not so simple as it seemed to be in the days when the Biblical legends were supposed to be derived entirely and directly from the religious literature of the Chaldreans. We can no longer take the first eleven or twelve chapters of Genesis as a whole and treat them as a monotheistic redaction of the Babylonian myths' (p. 7). . . . 'The Biblical accounts are not mere transcriptions. The Chaldaean legends unquestionably supplied much of the material for the Biblical legends, but the gaps between them presuppose much assimilation and transformation, much time, and probably many intermediaries to boot ' (p. 10). . . . 'If the relationship of the Bibhcal narra- tives to the Chaldaean legends is in many respects less intimate than was thought, it now appears to be more general. The Creation, and the Flood in particular, are still the most obvious points of resemblance ; but the

' A. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genise, Paris, Picard, 1901.

i6o CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

story of Adam and Eve, the earthly Paradise, the food of life, the explanation of death, — all of which have some- times been sought where they were not to be found, — are now found where there was no thought of seeking them ' (p. ii). . . . 'The Bibhcal texts have no literary de- pendence upon the Babylonian texts ; they do not even stand to them in a relation of direct dependence in the case of the special traditions they exhibit : but they rest on a similar — we might say a common — foundation, of Chaldaean origin, whose antiquity cannot be even approximately estimated. ... On the other hand, it appears certain that the period of Assyrian dominance, and the Captivity, quickened the recollection of the old traditions and supplemented them by fresh materials easy to graft on the ancient stem ' (p. loi). . . . ' The transformation of the Chaldaean into the Jewish legends was not the work of one or two men, but of many men and many generations. And, without entirely setting aside the influence exerted by written documents, we may well believe that the metamorphosis was complete in the oral tradition of the people before the legend was embodied in the Biblical narrative' (p. 171). . . . ' It would be a mistake to interpret this community of legendary material as a sign of Israel's inferiority. Free exchange has always been the rule in mythology. Its tales are the output of anonymous ingenuity ; and their value, for the most part, lies in the meaning attached to them by the borrower ' (p. 10). . . . ' In the Jewish tradition, neither the mythological nor the poetic form has been preserved. The epic poem reverts, and becomes a story in prose again ; but the story takes on a moral cast in order to adjust itself to the character of the one God' (p. 12). . . . 'Israel exploited these reminiscences in the interests of a highly

THE BABYLONIAN MYTHS i6i

moral cult of uncompromising principles. Instead of crystallising into a definitive form retaining the spirit and distinctive features of their original version, the old traditions were incorporated piecemeal, and left unassimi- lated, in a compilation destined to regulate faith and conduct. The Israelitish legend was submerged in the Law ' (p. 2ii).

The abbe formulates his conclusions with the clearness and elegance which might be expected from a writer of his distinction, though they are a poor substitute for the detailed arguments by which he supports them. Still, they serve to convey some idea of their own importance and the place which they are destined to take in the historic and exegetic science of our day. The path had already been prepared — especially since 1890 — by the profound researches of Messrs. Jensen, Jeremias, Gunkel, Jastrow, &c. In his critical summary of their results, M. Loisy lays no claim to originality. However, he has at least the honour of giving the first French account of one of the most interesting chapters in the history of ideas together with the consequences which it implies.

As the creation of cosmogonies answers to a need of the human mind — that of knowing the why and wherefore of the world — it is natural to suppose that at first they existed in large numbers, which were only gradually reduced by a process of selection. We may therefore conjecture that the tribes whose union constituted the Jewish people admitted other systems of cosmogony than those preserved in the pages of Genesis. Now — and this is a recent discovery of capital importance — there are in the Bible, if not in Genesis, undoubted traces of a third cosmogony, eliminated by the editors of the

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Pentateuch, but mentioned by the Prophets, the authors of the Psalms, and the writer of the Book of Job, as though it were a perfectly familiar conception. With that conception we are now well acquainted through the Babylonian texts. Here we have a fresh instance of a very old belief common to the ancestors of the Chaldseans and Jews of the first millennium before Christ, — a belief which held its ground in Chaldaea but left only sporadic traces in the religious literature of the Hebrews. When the high priest Joad says, in ' Athahe ' :

' He that can curb the fury of the wave. When treachery lifts her head, is strong to save,'

the allusion is to certain well-known passages of Scripture which -preserve an echo of the struggle of the Almighty against the great deep. These passages are made sun-clear by the Chaldaean history of the god Marduk, who, before creating or organising the world, had to gain the victory over Chaos and the unchained waters of Ocean. With Marduk, ' the gods are masters of the situation — free to arrange the world according to their will. Chaos is conquered, Tiamat has fallen. Their auxiliaries are reduced to captivity, condemned to eternal chains ' (p. 30). . . . ' Even after Marduk has pierced her heart and cloven her head ; after he has cut her body asunder ; after half her carcass has become the firmament, and half the earth ; Tiamat still lives and is still to be dreaded. Marduk alone can hold her in check, and prevent her from devouring men and oversetting the world.' For ' Tiamat is the ever living, ever menacing, sea ; the power of God the Creator is always necessary to tame her frenzy, and Marduk never ceases to redeem the world from chaos by his triumph over Tiamat ' (p. 86).

Now, if in Genesis the idea of a preliminary struggle

THE BABYLONIAN MYTHS 163

before the final creation has entirely disappeared, and the Creator is master from the beginning, yet the Chaldaean conception of chaos resisting the demiurge ' survived in Jewish legend and took as it were a new lease of life in the apocalyptic tradition ' (p. 99). The following are some of the texts which verify the foregoing statements and prove that, in a forgotten but once popular cosmogony, the God of Jewry was considered, not as the author but as the conqueror of the elements, which are sometimes personified under the names of Rahab and Leviathan — sea monsters of the same family as Tiamat. Job ix. 13 : 1

' God returneth not from his anger ; Before him bow down the auxiharies of Rahab. In his power he holdeth the sea in check, In his wisdom he whelmeth Rahab. At his breath the heavens are brightened ; His hand pierceth the fleeing serpent.'

Job vii. 12 (Job loquitur) :

' Am I the sea or a monster of the waters, That thou settest a barrier against me ? '

Job xxxviii. 8-14 (Jahveh loquitur) :

' Who shut up the sea with doors When it burst forth from its mother's womb . . . When I traced its frontiers And set doors and bars for it : Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther ; Here shall thy proud waves be stayed.'

Isaiah li. 9-10 (the prophet invokes the arm of

Jahveh) :

' Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, And wounded the dragon ? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea. The waters of the great deep ? '

' We reproduce M. Loisy's literal translations.

i64 CULTS, MYTHS, AND RELIGIONS

Psalm Ixxxix. :

' For who in Heaven is comparable with Jahveh, For who is hke unto Jahveh among the sons of the gods ? It is thou who rulest the pride of the sea, And who stillest the fury of its billows, It is thou who hast trampled upon Rahab as upon one

slain ; Thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm.'

Ezekiel (xxxii. 2-8) ' announces the punishment of the King of Egypt, by recalHng the history of the dragon of the waters who was hewn in pieces by the Creator. He compares Pharaoh to a sea monster over whom Jahveh casts his net, as Marduk had done over Tiamat ' (p. 87).

Again, ' Jeremiah, in one of his oldest oracles (iv. 23-26), draws his inspiration from a description of chaos, when he wishes to intimate the effects of the divine wrath. He represents the sea as curbed and quelled by Jahveh (v. 22). Amos (ix. 3) speaks of the monstrous serpent that dwells at the bottom of the sea' (p. no). This monster of chaos reappears in Christian literature : ' It is identified with Satan, and becomes the apocalyptic dragon whose final destruction shall assure the triumph of the Saints. The combat between Michael and the dragon in the Johannine Apocalypse (xii. 7-9) is the sequel of the combat between Jahveh and Rahab ' (p. 39).

Thus, by the simple comparison of Assyrian and Biblical texts, we have a flood of light thrown upon a conception which classic fable re-echoes in the legend of the war between Gods and Titans.

This restitution of a third cosmogony, foreign to Genesis and held by the prophets of Israel, forms the most interesting part of M. Loisy's work. But those — and we hope they will be many — who take the trouble to read it, will find it full of pregnant suggestions, coupled

THE BABYLONIAN MYTHS 165

with refutations, as discreet as they are firm, of recent or inveterate errors. We may quote a few examples.

To the apologists who try to reconcile the modern idea of evolution with Genesis, the abbe answers (p. 56) : ' There is not the slightest trace of evolution to be seen in the narrative, all things being struck off in their present forms by great successive batches — if the expression is allowable.' 1

Those, again, who explain the use of an embarrassing plural in Genesis by quoting different hypotheses which go back to the Fathers of the Church,- may be referred to the following judgment : ' The plural Let us make man is not a plural of majesty ; it is rather the indication of an older source in which the Creator was not alone but spoke to those around him.'^ The narrator has kept a grammatical form, the sense of which was clearer in a context that has not survived ' (p. 57).

The abbe has also a succinct answer for those who assign both a great antiquity and a peculiar moral value to the Hebrew tradition of the Deluge : * The Jehovist version of the Deluge is older ' — than Alexander the Great — ' but cannot go very far back, as the first stratum of Jehovist tradition has no mention of the Flood. It is also noticeable that the earliest Hebrew writer who alludes to it is the second Isaiah ' (p. 169). . . . 'Granting that the legend of a universal deluge is in itself a myth and

' Neither is there any question of evolution in the Babylonian myths, though Renan has spoken of their authors as ' the unknown Darwins.'

- Cf. Vigouroux, Dictionn. de la Bible, vol. i. p. 171.

^ That is to say an account of the creation in which the gods acted in concert. One of the orthodox explanations of the passage came unwittingl}' very near the truth : God the Father, at the moment of creating man, would have consulted the two other persons of the Trinity.

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cannot be anything else, it is not the form that seems the least marvellous which is most likely to be the oldest, but the one that is the most nakedly and unreservedly mythological ' (p. 169). ' The idea of a universal deluge is mythological per se, and without relation to any moral conception whatever. Indeed, we are forced to confess that the intervention of morality is responsible for a contradiction which stands out in the Bibhcal accounts. It was found necessary to explain why God no longer sends His floods upon the earth, though man is no better than of old : — and the explanation involves a tacit ad- mission that the punishment was equally exaggerated and useless ' (p. 136).

If we have multipHed textual quotations in this article, the reason is that it is difficult, impossible indeed, to touch with greater tact than M. I'abbe Loisy upon questions which even anthropologists agree in regarding as distinctly dehcate, — perhaps only because no one has yet known how to trace a rational limit between the domain of conscience and that of historic science. The work of demarcation has become imperative : for the old landmarks by which medievaUsm robbed history of half her heritage are now worm-eaten and level with the ground. 1