one more element of some importance yet remains in the complex conception of the human or animal victim, or slain god, which we must briefly examine before we can proceed with advantage to the evolution of christianity; i mean the doctrine of piacular sacrifice—or, in other words, of the atonement.

“without shedding of blood,” says the author of one of the earliest christian tractates, “there is no remission of sin.” this is a common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is regarded, not merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or incarnate god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed. “behold the lamb of god,” says the baptist in the legend, “which taketh away the sins of the world.”

this idea, i take it, is not primitive. sin must be regarded as a late ethical intruder into the domain of religion. early man for the most part takes his gods joyously. he is on the best of terms with them. he eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. they join in his phallic and bacchanalian orgies. they are not great moral censors, like the noble creation of the hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” they are creatures of like passions and failings with himself,—dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen. angry they may be at times, 348no doubt; but their anger as a rule can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered goats and bulls. under normal circumstances, they are familiar housemates. their skulls or images adorn the hearth. they assist at the family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or wine made to them with a smiling countenance. in short, they are average members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and merry-makings of their relatives.

thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most primitive religions. it is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the gods, makes itself slowly visible. in many cases, later glosses seem to put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. but in more consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of communion or feasting together. sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the hecatombs of the homeric poems, as in many works of hellenic and semitic literature.

in particular, the piacular sacrifice seems to have crystallised and solidified round the sacred person of the artificial deity. “the accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people,” says mr. frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.” “surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” says one of the hebrew poets, whose verses are conjecturally attributed 349to isaiah, about one such divine scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of god, and afflicted. he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes are we healed. jahweh hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”

the ideas here expressed in such noble language were common to all the later man-gods of the more advanced and ethical religions.

mr. frazer is probably right in connecting the notion of the scapegoat, human or animal, with the popular barbaric idea of the transference of evils. thus, in popular magic of all nations, diseases of every sort, from serious fevers and plagues, down to headache, toothache, warts, and sores, are transferred by some simple ceremony of witchcraft to animals, rags, or other people. i will quote examples but briefly. epilepsy is made over to leaves and thrown away in the malay archipelago. toothache is put into a stone in australia. a bechuana king gave his illness to an ox, which was drowned in his stead, to secure his recovery. mr. gomme quotes a terrible story of a scotch nobleman who transferred his mortal disease to his brother by a magical ceremony. “charms” for fever or for warts generally contain some such amiable element of transferring the trouble to a string, a rag, or a piece of paper, which is flung away to carry the evil with it to the person who next touches it. numerous cases of like implication may be found in the works of mr. gomme and mr. hartland, to which i would refer enquirers after further evidence.

closely connected with these notions of transference are also the occasional or periodical ceremonies undertaken for the expulsion of evils from a village or a community. devils, demons, hostile spirits, diseases, and other misfortunes of every sort are frequently thus expelled with gongs, drums, and other magical instruments. often the boundaries of the tribe or parish are gone over, a 350perlustration is performed, and the evil influences are washed out of the territory or forcibly ejected. our own rite of beating the bounds represents on one of its many sides this primitive ceremony. washings and dippings are frequent accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in peru, it was also bound up with that common feature of the corn-god sacrament—a cake kneaded with the blood of living children. the periodical exorcism generally takes place once a year, but is sometimes biennial: it has obvious relations with the sacrifice of the human or animal victim. in europe, it still survives in many places as the yearly expulsion of witches. the whole subject has been so admirably treated by mr. frazer that i have nothing to add to his excellent exposition.

putting these two cardinal ideas together, we arrive at the compound conception of the scapegoat. a scapegoat is a human or animal victim, chosen to carry off, at first the misfortunes or diseases, later the sin and guilt of the community. the name by which we designate it in english, being taken from the derivative hebrew usage, has animal implications; but, as in all analogous cases, i do not doubt that the human evil-bearer precedes the animal one.

a good example of this incipient stage in the evolution of the scapegoat occurs at onitsha, on the quorra river. two human beings are there annually sacrificed, “to take away the sins of the land”—though i suspect it would be more true to native ideas to say, “the misfortunes.” the number two, as applied to the victims, crops up frequently in this special connexion. the victims here again are “bought with a price”—purchased by public subscription. all persons who during the previous year have committed gross offences against native ethics are expected to contribute to the cost of the victims. two sickly people are bought with the money, “one for the land and one for the river.” the victims are dragged along the ground to the place of execution, face downward. the crowd who accompany 351them cry, “wickedness! wickedness!” so in siam it was customary to choose a broken-down woman of evil life, carry her on a litter through the streets (which is usually a symbol of kingship or godhead) and throw her on a dunghill or hedge of thorns outside the wall, forbidding her ever again to enter the city. in this eastern case, there is mere expulsion, not actual killing.

in other instances, however, the divine character attributed to the human scapegoat is quite unmistakable. among the gonds of india, at the festival of the god of the crops, the deity descends on the head of one of the worshippers, who is seized with a fit, and rushes off to the jungle. there, it is believed he would die of himself, if he were not brought back and tenderly treated: but the gonds, more merciful here than in many other cases, take him back and restore him. the idea is that he is thus singled out to bear the sins of the rest of the village. at halberstadt in thuringia an exactly similar custom survived till late in the middle ages. a man was chosen, stained with deadly sin, as the public scapegoat. on the first day of lent he was dressed in mourning, and expelled from church. for forty days, he wandered about, fed only by the priests, and no one would speak to him. he slept in the street. on the day before good friday, however, he was absolved of his sins, and being called adam, was believed to be now in a state of innocence. this is a mitigated and christianised form of the human sin-offering.

again, the albanians of the eastern caucasus kept a number of sacred slaves in the temple of the moon, many of whom were inspired and prophesied. when one of these men exhibited unusual symptoms of inspiration, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain, and maintained for a year in luxury, like the mexican corn-god. this fact immediately brings the human scapegoat into line with the annual human gods we have already considered. at the end of a year, he was anointed with unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and led forth to be sacrificed. 352the sacrifice was accomplished as a purificatory ceremony.

mr. frazer, to whom i owe all these examples, connects with such rites the curious ceremony of the expulsion of the old mars, the mamurius veturius, at rome. every year on the 14th of march (near the spring equinox), a man, called by the name of a god, was clad in skins—the significance of which rite we now know—and after being beaten with long white rods, was expelled the city. from one point of view, this personage no doubt represented the god of vegetation of the previous year (for the mars was originally an annual corn-god). but from another point of view, being now of no further use to the community, he was utilised with true old roman parsimony as a scapegoat, and sent to carry away the offences of the people. indeed, there seems to be some reason for believing that he was driven into the territory of the hostile oscans. in this case we perceive that an annual god is made the sin-offering for the crimes of a nation.

in greece, we get similar traces of the human scapegoat. at ch忙ronea in boeotia, the chief magistrate at the town-hall, and every householder in his own house, as we learn from plutarch (who was himself a magistrate there) had on a certain day to beat a slave with rods of agnus castus, and turn him out of doors, with the formula, “out, hunger! in, health and wealth!” elsewhere the custom retained more unpleasant features. at marseilles, when the colony was ravaged by plague, a man of the poorer classes used voluntarily to offer himself as a sin-offering or scapegoat. here we have once more the common episode of the willing victim. for a whole year, like other annual gods, he was fed at the public expense, and treated as a gentleman—that is to say, a kingly man-god. at the end of that time, he was dressed in sacred garments —another mark of godship—decked with holy branches, the common insignia of gods of vegetation, and led through the city, while prayers were offered up that the sins of 353the people might fall on his head. he was then cast out of the colony. the athenians kept a number of outcasts as public victims at the expense of the town; and when plague, drought, or famine befell, sacrificed two of them (note the number) as human scapegoats. one was said to be a substitute for the men, and one for the women. they were led about the city (like beating the bounds again) and then apparently stoned to death without it. moreover, periodically every year, at the festival of the thargelia, two victims were stoned to death as scapegoats at athens, one for the men, and one for the women. i would conjecturally venture to connect this sacred number, not merely with the african practice already noted, but also with the dual kings at sparta, the two consuls at rome, and the two suffetes at carthage and in other semitic cities. the duality of kings, indeed, is a frequent phenomenon.

i can only add here that the many other ceremonies connected with these human scapegoats have been well expounded and explained by mannhardt, who shows that they were all of a purificatory character, and that the scourging of the god before putting him to death was a necessary point of divine procedure. hence the significance of the agnus castus.

briefly, then, the evidence collected by mannhardt and frazer suffices to suggest that the human scapegoat was the last term of a god, condemned to death, upon whose head the transgression or misfortunes of the community were laid as substitute. he was the vicarious offering who died for the people.

it is only here and there, however, that the scapegoat retains to historical times his first early form as a human victim. much more often, in civilised lands at least, we get the usual successive mitigations of the custom. sometimes, as we have seen already in these cases, the victim is not actually killed, but merely expelled, or even only playfully and ceremonially driven out of the city. in other instances, 354we get the familiar substitution of the condemned criminal, or the imbecile, as in the attic thargelia.’ the greeks of asia minor used actually to burn their atonement-victim, and cast his ashes into the sea; but the leucadians merely threw down a condemned prisoner from a cliff, and lightened his fall by fastening live birds to him, while they kept boats below to save him from drowning, and carry him well beyond the frontier. in the vast majority of cases, however, we have the still more common substitution of a sacred animal for a human victim; and this appears to be in large part the origin of that common religious feature, the piacular sacrifice.

occasionally we get historical or half-historical evidence of the transition from a human victim to a divine or quasidivine animal. thus, the people of nias offer either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the land; but formerly, a man was bound to the same stake with the buffalo, and when the buffalo was killed, the man was driven away, no native daring to receive him or feed him. the sacrificial camel of the ancient arabs, presumably piacular, is expressly stated to be a substitute for a human victim. the favourite victims of the saracens were young and beautiful captives: but if such were not to be procured, they contented themselves with a white and faultless camel. the step hence to the habitual immolation or driving forth of a divine animal in place of a divine or quasi-divine man is a very small one. in malabar, the cow is a sacred beast, and to kill or eat a cow is a crime like murder. nevertheless, the brahmans transfer the sins of the people to a cow or cows, which are then driven out wherever the brahmans appoint. the ancient egyptians used to sacrifice a bull, and lay upon its head all the evils which might otherwise happen to themselves and their country; then they sold the bull’s head to the greeks, or flung it into the river. (contrast this effort to get rid of the accursed head with the careful preservation and worship of the sacred one.) the best-known case of all, of course, is the hebrew scapegoat, which was 355the sacred animal of a shepherd people, turned out to die of hunger or thirst in the desert, and bearing on its head the sins of the people. (contrast the scapegoat with the paschal lamb, and compare with the goats and sheep of the last judgment.) when cholera rages among the aboriginal tribes of india, they take a goat or a buffalo—in either case a female, the most sacred sex in indian sacrifice, and black all over, like apis and mnevis; they turn it out of the village, with magical ceremonies, and do not allow it to return within their precincts. in many other similar poojahs, the victim is a goat. mr. frazer has collected, here as elsewhere, a vast number of valuable and illustrative instances.

as a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst. sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned, and sometimes slaughtered. and in later and less perfect forms of piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning had ousted it. indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the various elements of the complex problem. people had got accustomed to certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial, and piacular, all at once. thus dr. robertson smith writes of ancient egypt: “bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” compare the annual mourning for adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament, and atonement in the mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of the christian year, easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the solemn mourning of good friday.

now, i do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these 356very mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. often enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of public expiation are evidently present. usually, too, the victim is slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god, and its blood poured forth for him. thus, in the hebrew ritual both of the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar, “before jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has a special significance. in the semitic held, as dr. robertson smith observes (and i would add, in most others), “the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred victim.” but the identity of god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the sheep-aphrodite was worshipped in cyprus with an annual mystic and piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to us.

on the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, i will not attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. most sacrifices seem in the last resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. most seem to be sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. i do not even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by consideration of numerous mixed examples, i have always placed each particular fact in its best and most effective position for illustration. the elements of the problem are so involved and so closely interosculating. for instance, i do not doubt that the great phoenician and carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which i was compelled at first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor do i doubt that the greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was a mitigation or attenuation 357of such gigantic human holocausts as these, or as those attributed to the british druids. asclepiades states expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for human sacrifice; and so, in the elohistic account of the origin of burnt sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of isaac, the dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, abraham, intends to offer as a royal victim to his tribal god. abraham says that the god himself will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers itself. so at the great temple of astarte at eryx, where the victims were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the altar. at the dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity. (compare, of course, the hebrew shewbread.) i need not pursue this line of thought any further. it must be obvious that many sacrifices at least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. nor need i point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of pauline theology.

i would like to add, however, that the ideas here formulated must give a new meaning to many points we could not at first understand in ceremonies mentioned in our earlier chapters. i will take only one example—that of the place of samoyed sacrifice which baron nordenski么ld saw on vaygats island. we can now divine the meaning of the heap of reindeer skulls piled around the rude open-air shrine; for reindeer are the sacred and the-anthropic animals of the northern races; while the preservation 358of their heads at the hypothral altar of the elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and oracular meaning. we can also guess why remains of a fireplace could be seen by the side, at which the sacrificial and sacramental meal was habitually prepared; and why the mouths of the idols were smeared with blood, in order to make the older gods or ghosts participators in the festival. indeed, any reader who has followed me thus far, and who now turns back to the earlier chapters of this book, will find that many details appear to him in quite a different light, and will see why i have insisted beforehand on some minor points which must have seemed to him at the time wholly irrelevant.

many other curious ceremonies that seem equally meaningless at first in narratives of travel will also come to have a significant meaning when thus regarded. for instance. mr. chalmers tells us that among the new guinea natives of particular districts, “pigs are never killed but in the one place, and then they are offered to the spirit. the blood is poured out there, and the carcase is then carried back to the village, to be divided, cooked, and eaten. pigs’ skulls are kept and hung up in the house. food for a feast, such as at house-building”—a most pregnant hint—“is placed near the post where the skulls hang, and a prayer is said. when the centre-post is set up, the spirits have wallaby, fish, and bananas presented to them, and they are besought to keep that house always full of food, and that it may not fall when the wind is strong.” if we recall other cases elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that the pigs in these instances are killed as sacred victims at the grave of the chief family ancestor; especially when mr. chalmers also tells us that “each family has a sacred place where they carry offerings to the spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they greatly fear.” when sickness, famine, or scarcity of fish occur, it is these spirits that have to be appeased. and if we recollect once more that in so many cases the central post of the hut is based on a human or animal victim, both 359in new guinea and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that to this household god or foundation-ghost the offerings at the central post are presented. finally, the skulls of the pigs which are kept in the house and hung on the post remind us on the one hand of the skulls of ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on the other hand of the skulls of theanthropic victims kept by the people of india at their festivals, or fastened by early greeks and romans on their temples. “they cook the heads of their slain enemies,” says mr. chalmers again, “to secure clean skulls to put on sacred places.” adequately to develop the hints thus suggested, however, would require another book as long as the present one.

yet here is just one more such hint, from the same author, too pregnant to be omitted.

“when the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation, and call over the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding: ‘there is your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let it be plentiful. if it does not grow well and plentiful, you all will be full of shame, and so shall we.’

“when they go on trading expeditions, they present their food to the spirits at the centre-post of the house, and ask the spirits to go before them and prepare the people, so that the trading may be prosperous.

“when sickness is in the family, a pig is brought to the sacred place of the great spirit” (probably the chief ancestral ghost), “and killed. the carcase is then taken to the sacred place of the family, and the spirits are asked to accept it. sins are confessed, such as bananas that are taken, or cocoanuts, and none have been presented, and leave not given to eat them. ‘there is a pig; accept, and remove the sickness.’ death follows, and the day of burial arrives. the friends all stand round the open grave, and the chief’s sister or cousin” (the primitive priestess) “calls out in a loud voice, ‘you have been angry with us for 360the bananas we have taken (or cocoanuts, as the case may be), and you have, in your anger, taken this child. now let it suffice, and bury your anger.’ the body is then placed in the grave, and covered over with earth.”

here we have in brief a perfect epitome of savage theology, savage ceremonial, and savage atonement. i could enlarge not a little on its numerous implications.

a single quotation from mr. savage landor’s work on the hairy ainu of japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic barbaric theology. “if they have any belief at all,” he says, “it is an imperfect kind of totemism, and the central point of that belief is their own descent from the bear. this does not include the smallest reverence for their ancestor. they capture their totem and keep it in captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to it. when the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated and baited by all the men present.” like the khond meriah and the tortures of martyrs. “it is tied to a stake” or stauros or accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks, shot at with blunted arrows,” like st. sebastian, “bruised with stones,” like st. stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish and raison d’etre of a festival, where all the members of the tribe partake of its flesh. the owner of the hut in which the feast takes place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside with the others at the east end of his hut. the skin is made into garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” here, i need hardly say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of theanthropic substitution.

it is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal points: first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected as a convenient vehicle for the 361sins of the people; and second, that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” these two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but especially in that eastern mediterranean world where christianity was first evolved. indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the writers of the earliest christian tractates, the apostolic epistles, take them for granted as self-evident—as principles of which every intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency.