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 ani............