The origin and development of the moral ideas — A Closer Reading

cordance with the words of the oracle, "There is a nameless son of the Oath-god who has neither hands nor feet; he pursues swiftly, until, having seized, he destroys the whole race, and all the house."[217] So, too, the Erinyes visited the sins of the fathers even on the children and grandchildren;[218] and the Erinyes were originally only personifications of curses.[219] It is said in the Ecclesiasticus:--"A man that useth much swearing shall be filled with iniquity, and the plague shall never depart from his house. . . . If he swear in vain, he shall not be innocent, but his house shall be full of calamities."[220] Casalis remarks of the Basutos, that "the dreadful consequences that the curse of Noah has had for Ham and his descendants appear quite natural to these people."[221] The Dharkâr and Majhwâr in Mirzapur, believe that a person who forswears himself will lose his property and his children;[222] but as we do not know the contents of the oath, it is possible that the destruction of the latter is not ascribed to mere contagion, but is expressly imprecated on them by the swearer.[223] Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, {61} "any accident that happens to a man, who has been known to take a false oath, or to his children or grandchildren, is carefully recorded in memory, and attributed to this sole cause."[224] Among the Karens the following story is told:--"Anciently there was a man who had ten children, and he cursed one of his brethren, who had done him no injury; but the curse did the man no harm, and he did not die. Then the curse returned to the man who sent it, and all his ten children died."[225] The Moors are fond of cursing each other's father or mother, or grandfather, or grandfather's father, such a curse being understood to involve their descendants as well. The Rev. R. Taylor says of the Maoris, "To bid you go and cook your father would be a great curse, but to tell a person to go and cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it included every individual who has sprung from him."[226]

[Footnote 217: Herodotus, vi. 86. _Cf._ Hesiod, _Opera et dies_, 282 _sqq._]

[Footnote 218: Aeschylus, _Eumenides_, 934 _sqq._]

[Footnote 219: Aeschylus (_Eumenides_, 416 _sq._) expressly designates the Erinyes by the title of "curses" ([Greek: a)rai\]), and Pausanias derives the name Erinys from an Arcadian word signifying a fit of anger. _Cf._ von Lasaulx, 'Der fluch bei Griechen und Römern,' in _Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen an der Julius-Maximilians-Universitaet zu Würzburg im Sommer-Semester_ 1843, p. 8; Müller, _Dissertations on the Eumenides of Aeschylus_, p. 155 _sqq._; Rohde, 'Paralipomena,' in _Rheinisches Museum für Philologie_, 1895, p. 16 _sq._]

[Footnote 220: _Ecclesiasticus_, xxiii. 11. _Cf._ _ibid._ xli. 5 _sqq._; _Wisdom of Solomon_, iii. 12 _sq._, xii. 11.]

[Footnote 221: Casalis, _Basutos_, p. 305.]

[Footnote 222: Crooke, _Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh_, ii. 287; iii. 444. _Cf._ _ibid._ i. 132.]

[Footnote 223: Among these tribes it is usual to swear by "putting a bamboo on the head," or "touching a broad-sword, touching the feet of a Brâhman, holding a cow's tail, touching Ganges water." But among many of the other tribes described by Mr. Crooke, persons swear on the heads of their children (_ibid._ i. 11, 130, 172; ii. 96, 138, 339, 357; iii. 40, 113, 251, 262; iv. 35), or with a son or grandson in the arms (_ibid._ ii. 428), and in such cases the death of the child would naturally be expected to follow perjury as a direct result of it. Among the Kol, the usual form of an oath is, "May my children die if I lie" (_ibid._ iii. 313).]

[Footnote 224: Marsden, _History of Sumatra_, p. 240.]

[Footnote 225: Mason, in _Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal_, xxxvii. pt. ii. 137.]

[Footnote 226: Taylor, _Te Ika a Maui_, p. 208.]

Thus, from the conception that sins and curses are contagious it follows that an innocent person may have to suffer for the sin of another. His suffering does not necessarily relieve the sinner from punishment; sin, like an infectious disease, may spread without vacating the seat of infection. But, as we have seen, it may also be transferred, and sin-transference involves vicarious suffering. At the same time, this kind of vicarious suffering must not be confounded with vicarious expiatory sacrifice. As a general rule, the scapegoat is driven or cast away, not killed. The exceptions to this rule seem to be due to two different causes. On the one hand, the scapegoat may be chased to death, or perhaps be pushed over a precipice,[227] for the sake of ridding the community as {62} effectively as possible of the evils loaded on the victim. Thus the Bhotiyás of Juhár take a dog, make him drunk, "and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and stones, and believe that by so doing no disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year."[228] On the other hand, the transference of evil may be combined with a sacrifice. But of such a combination only a few instances are recorded, and most of them are ambiguous. Considering further that in these cases, or at least in the best known of them, the act of transference takes place _after_ the victim has been killed, it seems to me extremely probable that we have here to do with a fusion of two distinct rites into one, and that the victim is not offered up as a sacrifice in its capacity of a scapegoat, but, once sacrificed, has been made use of as a conductor for all the evils with which the people are beset.

[Footnote 227: According to the Mishna, the Hebrew scapegoat was not allowed to go free in the wilderness, but was killed by being pushed over a precipice (Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 418). See also the ambiguous passage in Servius, _In Virgilii Aeneidos_, iii. 57.]

[Footnote 228: Atkinson, 'Notes on the History of Religion in the Himálaya of the N.W. Provinces,' in _Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal_, liii. pt. i. 62.]

In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.[229] A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king's house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, "Wickedness! Wickedness!" so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice was to take away the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless manner "as if the weight of all their wickedness were thus carried away"; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. "Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God's laws during the past year. . . . Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year--such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications, adulteries, witchcrafts, incests, slanders, &c.--were expected to pay in twenty-eight _ngugus_, or _£_2 0_s._ 7½_d._, as a fine; and this money was taken into the interior, to purchase two sickly persons, to be {63} offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes--one for the land, and one for the river."[230] As will be seen in a following chapter, human sacrifices to rivers are very common in the Niger country. In the cases mentioned by the English missionary, the idea of vicarious expiation is obvious. But I find no evidence of actual sin-transference.

[Footnote 229: Frazer, _op. cit._ iii. 109 _sq._]

[Footnote 230: Crowther and Taylor, _Gospel on the Banks of the Niger_, p. 344 _sq._]

Dr. Frazer further mentions a custom which, according to Strabo, prevailed among the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus.[231] In the temple of the Moon they kept a number of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man thrust a sacred spear into his side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which the victim fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.[232] Dr. Frazer maintains that "the last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hand on the animal's head."[233] So it may be, although, in my opinion, the purificatory ceremony described by Strabo also allows of another interpretation. The victim was evidently held to be saturated with magic energy; this is commonly the case with men, or animals, or even inanimate things, that are offered in sacrifice, and in the present instance the man was regarded as holy already, long before he was slain. To stand on the corpse, then, might have been regarded as purifying in consequence of the benign virtue inherent in it, just as, according to Muhammedan notions, contact with a saint cures disease, not by transferring it to the saint, but by annihilating it or expelling it from the body of the patient. But whether the ceremony in question involved the idea of sin-transference or not, there is no indication that the sacrifice of the slave was of an expiatory character. The same may be said both of the Egyptian sacrifice of a bull, mentioned by Herodotus, and of the white dog sacrifice performed by the Iroquois. The Egyptians first invoked the god and slew the bull. They then cut off his head and flayed the body. Next {64} they took the head, and heaped imprecations on it, praying that, if any evil was impending either over those who sacrificed or over the land of Egypt, it might be made to fall upon that head. And finally, they either sold the head to Greek traders or threw it into the river[234]--which shows that the real scapegoat, the head, was not regarded as a sacrifice to the god. Among the Iroquois, also, the victims were slain before the sins of the people were transferred to them. According to Hale's and Morgan's accounts of this rite, which have reference to different tribes of the Iroquois, no mention of sin-transference is made in the hymn which accompanied the sacrifice.[235] Only blessings were invoked. This was the beginning of the chant:--"Now we are about to offer this victim adorned for the sacrifice, in hope that the act will be pleasing and acceptable to the All-Ruler, and that he will so adorn his children, the red men, with his blessings, when they appear before him."[236] Mr. Morgan even denies that the burning of the dog had the slightest connection with the sins of the people, and states that "in the religious system of the Iroquois, there is no recognition of the doctrine of atonement for sin, or of the absolution or forgiveness of sins."[237]

[Footnote 231: Frazer, _op. cit._ iii. 112 _sq._]

[Footnote 232: Strabo, xi. 4. 7.]

[Footnote 233: Frazer, _op. cit._ iii. 113.]

[Footnote 234: Herodotus, ii. 39.]

[Footnote 235: Hale, in _American Antiquarian_, vii. 10 _sqq._ Morgan, _League of the Iroquois_, p. 217 _sq._]

[Footnote 236: Hale, _loc. cit._ p. 10.]

[Footnote 237: Morgan, _op. cit._ p. 216.]

I think we can see the reason why, in some cases, a sacrificial victim is used as scapegoat. The transference of sins or evils is not looked upon as a mere "natural" process, it can hardly be accomplished without the aid of mysterious, magic energy. Among the Berbers of Ait Zel[t.]n, in Southern Morocco, sick people used to visit a miracle-working wild olive-tree, growing in the immediate vicinity of the supposed grave of Sîdi Butlîla. They there relieve themselves of their complaints by tying a woollen string to one of its branches; in case of headache the patient previously winds the string three times round the top of his head, whilst, in case of fever, he spits on the string, and, when tying it to the tree, says, "I left my fever in thee, O wild olive-tree." He believes that he may thus transfer his disease to this tree because there is _baraka_, "benign virtue," in it; he would not expect to be cured {65} by tying the string to any ordinary tree. This illustrates a principle of probably world-wide application. In Morocco, and, I presume, in other countries where disease-transference is believed in, rags tied to a tree are a sure indication that the tree is regarded as holy. Similarly I venture to believe that the transference of sins and evils to a scapegoat is generally supposed to require magic aid of some kind or other. Among the Hebrews, it took place on the Day of Atonement only, and the act was performed by the high-priest.[238] Among the Iroquois, it was by "a kind of magic" that the sins of the people were worked into the white dogs;[239] and that the animals themselves were held to be charged with supernatural energy, appears from the fact that, according to one account, the ashes of the pyre on which one of them was burnt were "gathered up, carried through the village, and sprinkled at the door of every house."[240] Considering, then, that sacrificial victims, owing to their close contact with the deities to whom they are offered, are held more or less sacred, the idea of employing them as scapegoats is certainly near at hand. But this does not make the sacrifice expiatory. In fact, I know of no instance of an expiatory sacrifice being connected with a ceremony of sin-transference. Hence the materialistic conception of sin hardly helps to explain the belief that the sins of a person may be atoned by another person being offered as a sacrifice to the offended god.

[Footnote 238: _Leviticus_, xvi. 21.]

[Footnote 239: Seaver, _op. cit._ p. 160.]

[Footnote 240: Beauchamp, _loc. cit._ p. 239.]

A sacrifice is expiatory if its object is to avert the supposed anger or indignation of a superhuman being from those on whose behalf it is offered. In various cases the offended god is thought to be appeased only by the death of a man. But it is not always necessary that the victim should be the actual offender. The death of a substitute may expiate his guilt. The expiatory sacrifice may be vicarious.

We shall see, in a subsequent chapter, that, as a general {66} rule, human victims are sacrificed for the purpose of saving the lives of the sacrificers: before the beginning of a battle or during a siege, previously to a dangerous sea-expedition, during epidemics, famines, or on other similar occasions, when murderous designs are attributed to some superhuman being on whose will the lives of men are supposed to depend. But these sacrifices are not always expiatory in nature. A god may desire to cause the death of men not only because he is offended, but because he delights in human flesh, or because he wants human attendants, or--no one knows exactly why. It is impossible to find out in each particular case whether the sacrifice is meant to be an expiation or not; it is not certain that the sacrificers know it themselves. Yet in many instances there can be no doubt that its object is to serve as a vicarious atonement.

In Eastern Central Africa, "if a freeman were to set fire to the grass or reeds beside a lake, and cause a great conflagration close to the chosen abode of the deity, he is liable to be offered up to the god that is thus annoyed," but if he be the owner of many slaves he can easily redeem himself by offering one of them in his place.[241] The Ojibways, it is said, were once visited with an epidemic, which they regarded as a divine punishment sent them on account of their wickedness; and when all other efforts failed, "it was decided that the most beautiful girl of the tribe should enter a canoe, push into the channel just above the Sault, and throw away her paddle."[242] In B[oe]otia, a drunken man having killed a priest of Dionysus Aegobolus, and a pestilence having broken out immediately after, the calamity was regarded as a judgment on the people for the sacrilege, and the oracle of Delphi ordered them to expiate it by sacrificing to the god a blooming boy.[243] In his work on the Jews, Philo of Byblus states that "it was the custom among the ancients in cases of great dangers, that the rulers of a city or a nation, in order to avert universal destruction, should give the dearest of their children to be killed as a ransom offered to avenging demons."[244] The idea that sins could be expiated by the death of one who {67} had not deserved it, was familiar to the Hebrews. It was said that "the death of the righteous makes atonement."[245] The passage in Isaiah liii. 12 was interpreted of Moses, who "poured out his soul unto death[246] and was numbered with the transgressors (the generation that died in the wilderness) and bare the sin of many "that he might atone for the sin of the golden calf.[247] Ezekiel suffered "that he might wipe out the transgressions of Israel."[248] And of the Maccabaean martyrs it is said, "Having become as it were a vicarious expiation for the sins of the nation, and through the blood of those godly men and their atoning death, divine providence saved Israel which had before been evil entreated."[249] In these cases, of course, there was no sacrifice in the proper sense of the term, but they obviously illustrate the same characteristic of the divine mind. In fact, the death of Christ, by which he atoned and obliterated the sins of all ages, was conceived as a sacrifice, or spoken of in sacrificial figures.[250]

[Footnote 241: Macdonald, _Africana_, i. 96 _sq._]

[Footnote 242: Dorman, _Origin of Primitive Superstitions_, p. 208.]

[Footnote 243: Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.]

[Footnote 244: Eusebius, _Praeparatio Evangelica_, i. 10. 40 (Migne, _Patrologia_, Ser. Gr. xxi. 85).]

[Footnote 245: Moore, in Cheyne and Black, _Encyclopaedia Biblica_, iv. 4226.]

[Footnote 246: _Exodus_, xxxii. 32.]

[Footnote 247: _S[=o][t.][=a]h_, 14 A, quoted by Moore, _loc. cit._ col. 4226.]

[Footnote 248: _Sanhedrin_, 39 A, quoted _ibid._ col. 4226.]

[Footnote 249: _4 Maccabaeans_, xvii. 22, quoted _ibid._ col. 4232.]

[Footnote 250: See Moore, _loc. cit._ col. 4229 _sqq._]