VII The Sacæa
We are still trying to find an historical case of a man who is sacrificed in the character of a god and a king. The argument next introduces us to the Sacæa at Babylon, when the mock-king was hanged, the Persian feast, which, as we saw, M. Parmentier, following Herr Meissner, is inclined to identify with the ancient Babylonian Zagmuk, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim.
This identification, this theory that Zakmuk, Sacæa, and the Jewish Purim are all the same feast, is essential to Mr. Frazer’s theory. But, before his theory was published, Meyer, in the new volume of his ‘History of Antiquity,’ had declared that the identification is impossible, philologically and as a matter of fact (Geschichte des Alterthums). It would be interesting to know the meaning of the word Sacæa, or Sacea, or Sakia, which Hyde translates ‘convivial drinking, drinking healths’ (compotatio, propinatio).77 We remember the Persian butler, called a Sáki, in Omar Khayyam:
The eternal Sáki from the bowl has poured
Myriads of other bubbles, and will pour.
If the wine-pourer, the Sáki, of Omar is etymologically connected with the Sakæa, or Sacæa, then the feast means a wine-party. The Greeks, however, connected the Sacæa with the Sacæ, an Oriental tribe of the great race stretching from the Black Sea to Dacia. Indeed, in Strabo’s time, the feasters at the Sacæa dressed as Scythians (Sacæ) and drank, as Horace tells us that the Scythians were used to drink. This occurred at Zela, a town of Pontus, where a love goddess, in Persian Anaitis, of the type of the Babylonian Ishtar, was adored. Mr. Frazer even conjectures that her high priest, or a substitute, ‘who played the King of the Sacæa,’ was yearly sacrificed here, perhaps as Tammuz.78 No record of the fact has reached us.
The interesting point about this derivation of Sacæa from the tribe of the Sacæ is that the festival was believed, says Strabo, to commemorate a great victory of the Persians over the Sacæ. In precisely the same way the Persian feast of the Magophonia was supposed to commemorate a victory over and massacre of the Magi.79 Purim, again, was held to commemorate a triumph of the Jews over the Persians and a massacre of the Persians. In three cases, then, Sacæa, Magophonia, and Purim, a feast which was a secular drinking bout, preserve the memory of a bloody victory. I do not observe that Mr. Frazer notices this coincidence.
But manifestly this kind of feast is not a feast of the death of a mock-king, still less, if possible, a religious festival of the death and resurrection of a vernal god.80 Yet there really was (if we accept rather poor evidence) not a sacrifice but an execution of a mock-king, a criminal, at the Sacæa, as held in Babylon. I quote our authorities. First comes Athenæus, who is writing about feasts of unreason, at which, in various regions, the slaves are waited upon by their masters.81 He says nothing of the execution of a mock-king. He remarks: ‘Berosus, in the first book of his “History of Babylon,” says that on the sixteenth day of the month Lous there is a great festival celebrated at Babylon, which is called Sakeas, and it lasts five days; and during these days it is the custom for the masters to be under the orders of their slaves, and one of the slaves puts on a robe like the king’s, being called Zoganes, and is master of the house. And Ctesias also mentions this festival in the second book of his “History of Persia.”’ (Ctesias nourished rather earlier than Berosus, who is about 200 B.C.)
Thus Athenæus is silent about the execution of a mock-king, though doubtless he had the book of Berosus before him. And Dio Chrysostom, who does speak of the execution, and he alone does so, says nothing about Berosus, or any other authority. I cite the observations of Dio Chrysostom. He puts them into the mouth of the cynic, Diogenes, who is lecturing Alexander the Great, to tame his pride; and who tells illustrative anecdotes, some of them absurd, much as Mr. Barlow was used to instruct Masters Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. Dio, then, makes Diogenes say that at the Sacæa ‘they take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat him upon the king’s throne, and give him the king’s raiment, and let him lord it and drink, and run riot and use the king’s concubines during these days, and no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip, and scourge, and crucify (or hang, ἐκρέμασαν) him.’82 He dies, not as a victim, by sacrifice, but as a criminal, by a cruel and degrading form of capital punishment.83 According to Dio any condemned criminal would serve the turn. But Mr. Frazer suggests that perhaps the profession of victim was hereditary.84
Such is the story which Dio makes Diogenes tell Alexander, in a humorous apologue against royal pride. ‘You will soon be growing a crest like a cock,’ says Diogenes in Dio’s essay. I cannot think that evidence found only in a literary tour de force, and put into the mouth of a professed humourist, proves historically that the mock-king was actually hanged once a year, at a feast described by Athenæus, Strabo, and Hesychius, who never mention so strange an affair as the hanging. The reader will not find that Mr. Frazer suggests all these doubts. Indeed, the student who avoids footnotes will believe that the tale of the hanging is ‘according to the historian Berosus, who, as a Babylonian priest, spoke with ample knowledge.’85
Now, granting that there really was a yearly execution at Babylon of a criminal, a mock-king, why was he put to death? We know what Mr. Frazer’s theory needs. It needs historical examples of men who, by being sacrificed as victims, obtain a divine character, as representing the god to whom they are sacrificed. The theory also demands that these victims shall be arrayed and crowned as kings. It is desirable, too, that they should perish about our Eastertide, and that they should be supposed to rise again. The solitary example of a Saturnalian victim in Mœsia did not fulfil these conditions. He was arrayed as a king, indeed, and was sacrificed, if we believe the legend of St. Dasius; but he was not stripped and scourged, and he died, not at Easter, but in November: if he had not refused the part thrust on him he would have died in December. There was no word about his resurrection. It was found necessary to suggest that originally the Saturnalian victim died in February-March, but this was not proved.
The other historical case, the mock-king of the Sacæa, also does not fulfil the conditions required. He is robed, and crowned, and scourged, but he is not sacrificed. We have no hint of a resurrection; none of a religious character attaching to the feast; none of a divine character attaching to the victim. The feast is traditionally a revel commemorative of a victory: the victim is a condemned criminal. As to the date of the death, Mr. Frazer has two contradictory theories. By the first (which is correct) the victim died probably in June-July (if not, certainly in September). By the second, the month date of the death is fixed (provisionally) in March-April. Let me add that, to suit Mr. Frazer’s theory, the victim must not only have been divine at the origin of the institution, but must have been recognised as divine at the time of the Crucifixion of our Lord: otherwise our Lord’s death, in the character of the victim, could lend him no ‘halo of divinity.’
1 Spencer and Gillen, Natives of Central Australia.
2 G. B. i. 80, 81.
3 G. B. ii. 81.
4 Etudes Traditionistes. A. L.
5 G. B. i. 157.
6 G. B. ii. 1-5.
7 Modern Mythology, ‘Myths of the Origin of Death.’
8 Spencer and Gillen, p. 476.
9 Mariner, ii. 127.
10 Making of Religion, chapters xi.-xiii.
11 G. B. ii. 1.
12 Prim. Cult. ii. 308, 1871; ii. 340, 1873. In the edition of 1891, Mr. Tylor, in accordance with his altered ideas, dropped his denial of borrowing, and said that Torngarsuk was later identified with the devil—a common result of missionary teaching, just as Saints under Protestantism became, or their statues became, ‘idols.’
13 G. B. ii. 1. Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, Hanover, 1806, 1807, i. p. 48.
14 E. I. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, p. 112.
15 “Le Jeune”, Relations des Jésuites, 1633, p. 16; 1634, p. 13.
16 Callaway, Religion of the Amazulu, pp. 26, 27.
17 Thevet, Singularités de la France Antarctique, ch. 77. Paris, 1855. Andouagni is a creator, not addressed in prayer. See ‘Science and Superstition,’ pp. 10, 11.
18 Hymns in Maspero, Music de Boulaq, pp. 49, 50.
19 Religion of Babylon and Assyria, p. 483.
20 G. B. iii. 198.
21 G. B. ii. 3, 4, citing L. W. King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology, p. 8 (1899).
22 G. B. iii. 154.
23 Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 307. Boston, U.S., 1898.
24 Jastrow, p. 311.
25 G. B. ii. 2.
26 G. B. i. 77.
27 G. B. i. 77, 78.
28 G. B. ii. 1.
29 G. B. ii. 6.
30 G. B. ii. 56; i. 151 et. seq.
31 G. B. i. 80-82.
32 The mortals who incarnate gods are catalogued in G. B. vol. i. pp. 139-157. Not one is said to be put to death.
33 G. B. i. 80, 81.
34 G. B. ii. 6-8.
35 G. B. ii. 8-57.
36 G. B. i. 236.
37 G. B. ii. 11.
38 Emin Pasha in Central Africa, p. 91.
39 G. B. i. 155; compare ii. 10.
40 Callaway, Religion of the Amazulu, p. 122.
41 Here the facts of Dos Santos are confused. In volume i. p. 155 we read: ‘The King of Quiteva, in Eastern Africa, ranks with the deity;’ ‘indeed, the Caffres acknowledge no other gods than their monarch, and to him they address those prayers which other nations are wont to prefer to heaven’ (Dos Santos, Pinkerton, xvi. 682, 687, seq.). If the Caffres have no gods, a god cannot be incarnate in their king. But, elsewhere in Dos Santos (ii. p. 10), there is no ‘King of Quiteva’ (as in i. p. 155). Quiteva is no longer a district, but we read ‘contiguous to the domains of the Quiteva;’ a title like ‘the Inca,’ in fact, as Dos Santos tells us the Quiteva is ‘the King of Sofala.’ Is Sofala also known as Quiteva, and the King of Sofala as ‘the Quiteva’? The King of Quiteva ‘ranks with the deity’—though the Caffres have no deity for him to rank with (ii. 155). But when the Quiteva becomes ‘King of Sofala’ (ii. 10), the neighbouring prince who kills himself is ‘the Sedanda,’ who is not said to ‘rank with the deity.’ And Dos Santos assures us that the Caffres have a God, unworshipped!
42 Prophecies of the Brahan Seer, Mackay, Stirling, 1900.
43 G. B. ii. 18.
44 G. B. ii. 18-24.
45 G. B. i. 139-157.
46 G. B. ii. 8-24.
47 G. B. iii. 197.
48 G. B. ii. 24, 26.
49 G. B. iii. 194.
50 Spencer and Gillen, Glossary, s.v. Alatuja and pp. 9-11.
51 G. B. iii. 178.
52 Ibid.
53 G. B. ii. 26.
54 G. B. ii. 26.
55 G. B. ii. 30.
56 G. B. ii. 24.
57 Macrobius himself is an author of the fourth or fifth century of our era. Macrobius, i. x. 2; Livy, ii. xxi. 2.
58 Cumont, Revue de Philologie, July 1897, vol. xxi. p. 149, citing Mommsen, C.I.L. I2 p. 337, and Marquhardt, Staatsverw. iii.2 587.
59 Lucian, Saturnalia, 2.
60 Macrobius, i. vii. 31-33.
61 The reason was probably a mere ‘blind’ for wife-murder.
62 G. B. iii. p. 140.
63 Analecta Bollandiana, xvi. pp. 5-16.
64 G. B. iii. p. 143.
65 G. B. iii. p. 144.
66 G. B. iii. p. 142.
67 G. B. ii. p. 144.
68 Later (Rev. de Philol., xxi. 3, pp. 152, 153), M. Cumont dates the Greek at about 500-600 A.D., because there were then apprehensions, as in the MS., of the end of the world. But so there were in 1000 A.D.
69 December 16-23. So also thinks M. Parmentier, Rev. Phil. xxi. p. 143, note 1. M. Parmentier says that we must either suppose the victim to have been selected by lot a whole month in advance (of which practice I think we have no evidence), or else cast doubt on the whole story, except the mere martyrdom of Dasius. But the latter measure M. Parmentier thinks too sceptical.
70 Porphyry, De Abstinentia, ii. 56; Lactantius, i. 21.
71 G. B. iii. 147.
72 G. B. iii. 148.
73 G. B. iii. 147, note 2; 148, note 2.
74 G. B. ii. 253, 254.
75 G. B. ii. 254.
76 G. B. ii. 147.
77 Hyde, De Bel. Pers. p. 267.
78 G. B. iii. 163, 164.
79 Strabo, p. 512.
80 Herodotus, iii. 79.
81 Athenæus, xiv. p. 639, c.
82 Dio, Oratio iv., vol. i. p. 76, Dindorf.
83 Mr. Frazer, in his text, attributes the statement to Berosus, a Babylonian priest of about 200 B.C. In fact, we do not know Dio’s authority for the tale (G. B. ii. 24, note I). Mr. Frazer admits this in his note. Ctesias may be Dio’s source, or he may be inventing. On the other hand, Macrobius, a late Roman writer, says that the Persians used to regard ‘as due to the gods the lives of consecrated men whom the Greeks call Zanas’ (Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii. 7, 6). But what Zanæ are the learned do not know: whether the word means ζωγανας, or the Zanes at Olympia (Pausanias, v. xxi. 2; G. B. ii. 24, note I). Moreover, Macrobius may have drawn his facts from Dio. But Dio says nothing about ‘consecrated men.’
Notes
84 G. B. iii. 186.
85 G. B. ii. 24.
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