Lang Andrew
Magic and Religion
I. ESTHER LOVED BY MORDECAI
'A clear reminiscence' of the time when Esther was the goddess bride of Mordecai (her cousin) appears in modern Jewish plays in which Mordecai is the lover (I hope merely platonic) of Esther.298 And a very natural modern touch it is. The pair were cousins, and Esther was extremely pretty. In exactly the same way two little girls of my acquaintance dramatised 'Bluebeard,' and made the brother (who rescues Mrs. Bluebeard in the tale) the lover of Mrs. Bluebeard. She had preferred to marry Bluebeard for his money, on which, in this most immoral drama, Mrs. Bluebeard and her lover, her husband's slayer, lived happily ever afterwards. This is modern! The original tale does not run thus.
Again, Mr. Frazer says that the Babbis maintain that Xerxes only wedded a shadow Esther, 'while the real Esther sat on the lap of Mordecai.' A most natural shift to save Esther's character in a case of mixed marriages. So Stesichorus and Euripides, long before, gave a shadow Helen into the arms of Paris. The real Helen, meanwhile, saved her character by leading a life of remarkable purity in Egypt. These late shifts and evasions have no real bearing on the question of the original relations between Esther and Mordecai.
II. THE PERSIAN BUFFOON
Mr. Frazer now harms his cause, perhaps, by proving that just as, in Esther, Mordecai had a royal ride, so, in Persia, a beardless, and if possible one-eyed buffoon rode in mock royalty through the streets, collecting money or goods, exactly like our Robin Hood before and even after the Scottish Reformation.299 It was une quête; examples are endless. After his second round he fled, for the people might beat him if they caught him, obviously in revenge, I think, for his robberies. But Mr. Frazer, as usual, supposes the right to beat the buffoon to 'point plainly enough to the harder fate' of the sacrificed mock-king. No date is given for this Persian custom, but, if it existed when the Jews were in Persia, did it coexist with sacrifice of a mock-king? If not, if it was a substitute for that obsolete cruelty, why are the Jews supposed to have borrowed the cruelty no longer practised? This is a question of dates, which may be implied, but are not given, though I understand Mr. Frazer to mean that the buffoon's ride is later than the origin of Purim.300
On the other hand, Lagarde, one of the most learned of Orientalists, thinks that the ride of the beardless was already customary at the time when the stories about Esther and Purim were composed. The Persians, says Lagarde, had the Feast of Farwardîgân, a feast of jollity, the rich making presents to the poor, as at Purim. They had also the Feast of the Massacre of the Magi (Magophonia), and, thirdly, they had the popular diversion of the Bide of the Beardless. Now the authors of the Esther legend 'had these three colours on their palette, and with these three painted, not a portrait of one feast, but a kind of mixed caricature for the Jewish carnival.'301 The Magophonia lent the colours of the massacre, Farwardîgân lent the jollity and the presents, the ride of the beardless lent the procession of Mordecai.
In that case, and if Lagarde is right, the Jews found at Babylon, not a slaying of a mock-king, but the ride of the beardless. So they did not borrow the slaying of a mock-king, but introduced into the Esther legend an incident of a ride suggested by the ride of Mordecai, which Mr. Frazer calls 'a degenerate copy of the original,' namely the reign and death of the mock-king.302
Whether Lagarde's view be correct or not, this part of the evidence is far too sandy a foundation for a theory about a matter of solemn importance. The Jews could not borrow the hanging of a victim from the Sacæa, if in their exile they only found the ride of the beardless one, as in Lagarde's theory – not that he mentions the Sacæa.
Mr. Frazer, at all events, sees a connection between Purim and the ride of the beardless. But the latter is popular, not official, in spite of the fact that the king takes most of the goods facetiously robbed. As popular, the ride is more primitive, he thinks, and shows its meaning better than the Sacæa does. So Mr. Frazer says 'if there is any truth in the connection thus traced between Purim and the "Ride of the Beardless One," we are now in a position to finally unmask the leading personages in the Book of Esther,' and show how Marduk and Humman got into the plot.
Purim is not only the Sacæa, sacrifice and all, but is also connected with the 'Ride of the Beardless One,' in which there was no sacrifice. How this, if true, enables us 'to finally unmask' the characters in Esther, is not at first very clear. Apparently the buffoonery of the beardless one, who complained of the heat while the populace snowballed him in March, was a magical ceremony, to make hot weather by pretending that the weather, in fact, was hot.303 Therefore, the hypothetical rites of
Haman
Vashti
Mordecai
Esther
represent, in the first pair, the decaying; in the second pair, the reviving, energies of vegetation, past and present. One pair mates and the male, at least, is slain; the other pair mates and survives, to encourage vegetable life.
By the hypothesis the first pair (Haman and Vashti) originally lived as man and wife for a whole year, 'on the conclusion of which the male partner' (Haman) 'was put to death.' Of course, even if Haman was the mock-king slain at the Sacæa (which we do not grant), his mock-kingship was very brief. However, it lasted for a year, Originally, we may conjecture.' The later fortunes of Vashti are wrapped up in mystery. But I cannot refrain from quoting one of my author's most eloquent passages on this obscure subject. We do not hear that Vashti was put to death, in fact we do not hear anything about her at all from our one authority; but I the nature of maternity suggests an obvious reason for sparing her a little longer, till that mysterious law, which links together woman's life with the changing aspects of the nightly sky, had been fulfilled by the birth of an infant god, who should in his turn, reared perhaps by her tender care, grow up to live and die for the world.'304
As Vashti, except for her profession, was not an habitual criminal, let us hope that she was spared to look after the baby. Her issue, if any, and if male, was apparently an hereditary criminal, for otherwise he would not be hanged: the victims were always condemned criminals. The cruelty of thus deliberately breeding such a criminal class, for the mere purpose of hanging them, is shocking to the modern mind. We wish to know whether the Jewish Hamans were also born and bred up to the business. Mr. Frazer does not tell us that this was the case, or what became of Vashti's female issue.
The ride of Mordecai in royal raiment is connected with and explained (if I follow my author) by the ride of the Persian beardless buffoon. To be sure the buffoon rode naked on an ass; Mordecai rode 'in royal apparel of blue and white, with a crown of gold.' But the buffoon is clearly later than the origin of Purim in Mr. Frazer's opinion, though not in that of Lagarde. 'So long as the temporary king was a real substitute for the reigning monarch, and had to die sooner or later in his stead, it was natural that he should be treated with a greater show of deference…'305
But Mordecai, who rode royally, was the man who did not die: Haman died. Therefore Mr. Frazer has to guess that the Mordecai of one year died as the Haman of the next.
Ah me, there are so many guesses!
In any case, Mordecai is nothing but 'a slightly altered form of Marduk or Merodach,' as is now 'generally recognised by Biblical scholars.' Nevertheless, a real historical Jew called Mordecai occurs, as we saw, in Ezra and Nehemiah: so the name was a Jewish name, odd as it appears.306 Now Mordecai, by the theory, has to be whipped and hanged finally; and that seems an odd compliment to Merodach, or Marduk, who, as supreme Babylonian god, is presiding over the gods, while his human substitute is being slain infamously. But, remember, when whipped and hanged, the Mordecai of 1900, so to speak, has become the Haman of 1901. And 'some high authorities are disposed to accept the theory of Jensen that Haman is identical with Humman or Homman, the national god of the Elamites.'307
III. A HELPFUL THEORY OF MY OWN
If these high authorities are right, I at last see my way clear! Haman, or the victim of the Sacæa, is now neither the representative of the King of Babylon, nor of Tammuz, nor of both at once, nor of Marduk, nor of Eabani, nor of Gilgamesh. He is now (if Nöldeke or Jensen is right) the representative of a conquered and hostile god, Humman of the Elamites. Tout va bien! The human representative of a hostile and defeated god may well have been whipped and hanged in derision. I shall grant that Humman was also the Elamite god of vegetation, Tammuz or the like (what else could he be?), and so had to fall as the leaves fall, and also had to spring up as the flowers do; and this both in June-July308 and also in March-April.309
If all this is the case, if the Sacæan victim is Haman, and represents Humman, and if Humman is a defeated Elamite god, and if Purim is adapted from a Babylonian feast of rejoicing for 'victory gained by the Babylonian gods over the gods of their neighbours the Elamites,' as Nöldeke thinks possible,310 then all is comparatively plain sailing. But this is only if we follow Jensen, which I do not understand Mr. Frazer to do. Indeed, Jensen is only responsible for identifying Haman with Humman. Jensen does not identify him with the Sacæan victim. It is Mr. Frazer who does that.
The theory, if Haman is Humman, and is also the victim, has now put on an aspect which I can almost accept. If Haman stands for Humman, and if Humman is a vanquished god of the hostile Elamites, then we solve that hard problem, namely why the human representative of a king or friendly god was whipped and hanged, and mocked at the Sacæa. The victim, I shall show, did represent the rightful king, but also personated the vanquished deity of a race long inimical but now subdued. So his harsh treatment was, if vulgar, not unnatural.
But all this depends on following Jensen, which we are not to do. Mr. Frazer seems to hold that though according to 'the view of Jensen, which some high authorities are disposed to accept, Haman is identical with Humman or Homman, the national god of the Elamites,'311 yet originally this was not really the case.
Let us suppose it to have been the case, and I can suggest an excellent solution. Fatigued by the task of producing sons who had to be sacrificed yearly as his substitutes, the king of early Babylon at one time annually sacrificed as his proxy an Elamite captive, who, to deride Elamite religion, was also the human representative of the Elamite god, Humman, and therefore was called Humman, or Haman. Just so the Aztecs sacrificed captives as representatives of their own gods.312 But, as relations between Elam and Babylon grew more peaceful, Elamite captives were scarce. The king of Babylon then substituted for an Elamite war-prisoner a condemned criminal, who still represented the Elamite Humman, or Haman, but also, as in the original hypothesis, represented the king of Babylon. We must next conjecture that Humman himself was a god of vegetation; indeed, I can hardly suppose that any god whatever did not represent the principle of vegetable life. So Humman must not only die but have a resurrection, as vegetable gods often do.
Now, thanks to my hypothesis, all is clear, and every difficulty is removed. We once more see that the kings of Babylon were sacrificed regularly every year. Let us say that they were burned, as victims usually were. Indeed, Movers thought that 'at the Sacæa also the man who played the god for five days was originally burnt at the end of them.'313 Mr. Frazer himself suggests that, in the progress of philanthropy, the man who used to be burned was merely scourged and hanged or crucified by way of 'a later mitigation of his sufferings.'314 Or perhaps he was hanged first, and burned afterwards, as in our good old-fashioned punishment for treason, whereby many Jesuits were cut down alive, and many Jacobites, their bowels being burned before their living eyes.315 But to burn a man only half hanged and still capable of feeling pain would not mitigate his sufferings.
My own theory pleases me better. When tired of being sacrificed yearly, the Babylonian king provided a substitute in a son, or other member of the royal family, with what sad and ruinous results to the dynasty I have already shown. Let us suppose that the princely substitutes were also really sacrificed by burning. But here the merit of my theory comes in, and, I hope, shines forth. Wearied of sacrificing princes of his house, the king substitutes Elamite prisoners of war. There is no objection to whipping and hanging them, except the frivolous objection that they at once cease to be sacrifices, and we can overcome that difficulty by supposing that they were hanged first, and burned afterwards, or 'wirryit at are stake' (like George Wishart in St. Andrews), and then burned. This makes it needless to regard whipping and hanging as a 'mitigation.'
The next step is, when Elamite wars cease, and Elamite captives are not procurable, to substitute a condemned criminal, who, he also, like the Elamite prisoners, is called Humman, and represents both the king of Babylon, and Humman, an Elamite god of vegetation, who, like Tammuz, has his resurrection. We thus get:
1. Babylonian king. Incarnates the god of vegetation. Is therefore sacrificed annually to keep the god provided with a succession of fresh and sturdy subjects to be incarnated in. The king is burned.
2. His sons or nephews are treated in the same way, for the same reasons, annually. The king escapes.
3. An Elamite war-prisoner becomes the king's substitute. He also represents the Elamite god of vegetation. In mockery of the Elamites and their god he is scourged and hanged. Observe the Aztec analogy, though to be sure the Aztec captive, representing an Aztec god, is merely sacrificed. But he represents a friendly god.
4. The substitute is next a condemned criminal. He also is whipped and hanged. Like the Elamite war-captive he represents the king of Babylon, and dies for him. He also dies as the Elamite god of vegetable life, and, as such, has a resurrection, in the shape of Mordecai, who represents the Babylonian supreme god, Marduk (not Tammuz or another), and is not hanged till next year, when he becomes Haman or Humman, represents the king of Babylon, represents the Elamite god of vegetation, and is whipped and hanged, after enjoying (as king) the caresses of the royal harem, and as Humman the embraces of a sacred harlot, Vashti, who personates Ishtar. After being hanged (and perhaps burned) he has a pseudo-resurrection in the Marduk of that year, the Humman of the next. And so on, both at the Sacæa and at Purim.
This hypothesis appears to be in many ways an advance on any one of Mr. Frazer's hypotheses. It allows us to keep up the Jewish Haman as personating Humman; which seems necessary, for how otherwise is Haman to be explained? We are, moreover, enabled to understand how a victim who represented a vanquished Elamite god, also, and at the same time, represented a victorious Babylonian king. Humman being, by my hypothesis, an Elamite kind of Tammuz, all our anxieties about the appearance of Marduk and Humman, where Tammuz had previously done duty, disappear. Purim, which had been a Tammuz feast (if we accept Jensen's solution) and also a feast where a man died for the king, and then a feast of triumph for the victory of the Babylonian gods, and 'a wholly secular merrymaking,' though, if Purim is a Jewish Tammuz feast, it had been, according to Ezekiel (who perhaps knew best), a religious rite of a false religion, now becomes all these things at once, though some may doubt how Purim could be, simultaneously, both religious and secular. But I would not abandon my theory merely because it involves a contradiction in terms. Add to all this that we can now have a Tammuz death and resurrection in June-July, and another in March-April, and all is translucent. At the summer festival we burn a dummy;316 at the vernal feast we hang a man.317
Admirably as my hypothesis colligates the facts, it is not the hypothesis of Mr. Frazer. Though he thinks that 'we can hardly deny the plausibility of' Nöldeke's theory that the Sacæa is a triumph for the victory of the Babylonian over the Elamite gods, and that Purim is an adaptation of the Sacæa,318 Mr. Frazer does not accept that idea. Nöldeke is plausible, but not sound; and this is ruinous to my hypothesis of the Elamite war-prisoner, slain as Humman, merely in a stage of evolution between the sacrificed prince and the hanged criminal. We have seen how admirably my humble suggestion worked out all round, but it must be abandoned if Nöldeke is wrong.
Mr. Frazer thinks that the Sacæa and Purim did not (as in Nöldeke's scheme) mean originally a triumph of Babylonian over Elamite gods. No Elamite prisoner was hanged (as I had sagely conjectured) at any stage of the evolution of the Sacæa. What occurred was this: At the Sacæa there were originally two divine pairs, let us say Vashti and Haman to represent the dying, Esther and Mordecai to represent the renascent, forces of vegetation. There was nothing Elamite in the business originally. But 'it would be natural enough that in time an unfavourable comparison should be drawn between the two pairs, and that people, forgetting their real meaning and religious identity, should see in their apparent opposition a victory of the gods of Babylon over the gods of their eternal foes the Elamites. Hence, while the happy pair retained their Babylonian names of Marduk and Ishtar, the unhappy pair, who were originally nothing but Marduk and Ishtar in a different aspect, were renamed after the hated Elamite deities Humman and Vashti.'319
Thus the plausibility of Nöldeke's theory, that Purim was adapted from rejoicings for a victory of the Babylonian gods over those of Elam,320 proves to be no more than merely plausible. We are thus driven back to Jensen's solution: that the fast and the rejoicings of Purim are a festival of Tammuz, or of a god or hero of his type, and they cannot, then, have been borrowed in Babylon, for the Jews had the Tammuz ritual before the exile. And yet321 Purim was probably borrowed at Babylon. It must, apparently, be meant that only the hanging of a mock-king was really borrowed. The victim may thus represent both the king of Babylon and also the god of vegetation whom we are to suppose to be incarnated in the king (?)322 But why should the Jews borrow that, and why did the prophets and legislators hold their peace, and how do we know that the majesty of Babylon incarnated a god of vegetation?
As I sometimes understand Mr. Frazer's whole theory, it is this.323 The victim of the Sacæa represents the king, who represents Marduk, Humman, Tammuz, or some other deity. He gets his royal robes from the king; his whipping and hanging from the commuted burning alive of the king; his divinity from the king plus the god; his resurrection from the king plus Tammuz or Eabani, granting that Eabani had a resurrection, which I cannot find in Dr. Jastrow's account. But to do a resurrection plausibly we need another man to take the part of the re-arisen victim, king, and god. Now the victim for the year is really, or is called, Marduk, in one shape; his representative in the resurrection is Marduk in another shape; each man being provided with a consort, representing Ishtar, though I have yet to learn that she was the wife, or mistress, either of Marduk or Eabani. But the populace, not understanding the two Marduks and two Ishtars, preferred to call the Marduk who died Humman, after an Elamite god, and his sacred lady of pleasure Vashti, after a possible, but dubious, Elamite goddess. The Marduk who did not die was still called Marduk till next year, and his consort till next year was called Ishtar.
All this occurred at the Sacæa, which are Zakmuk (though Jensen does not appear to see it), and at Purim (which Jastrow and Nöldeke do not identify with Zakmuk), and in March, not, as chronology has it, in July. By pushing the proceedings forward only a month, from Purim to Passover, we can connect them with the Crucifixion, and account for 'the halo of divinity.' The theory seems too ramified.
It may very naturally be thought that I am introducing these complexities and these difficulties by dint of wilfully or unconsciously misrepresenting Mr. Frazer's argument. But the argument, I sincerely think, is really a very tangled one. It seems plain that originally the victim was only conceived of by Mr. Frazer as dying to save the life of the king, who otherwise would have been slain as a god, on Mr. Frazer's hypothesis of religious regicide, as he could not be trusted 'to remain in full bodily and mental vigour for more than a year.'324 The king was 'slain in his character as a god,' who could not be trusted for more than a year. Nothing was said to indicate that the mock king incarnated any special known god; say Tammuz. That conjecture appeared later,325 and the date of the sacrifice was in June-July. Nothing was said, even now, about the victim's sacred harlot. The victim was content with the royal harem. As late as iii. 152 'the central feature of the Sacæa seems to have been the saving of the king's life,' by the slaying of the victim, and, to that main end of the rite, no sacred harlot was necessary. But the date had now been moved from midsummer to early spring, and into the neighbourhood of the feast of Purim. The religious character of the Sacæa period of wailing and rejoicing in sympathy with a god (Tammuz) now seemed to be overlooked, for Mr. Frazer says that the Sacæa 'was a wild Bacchanalian revel …' and that Purim was the same: men and women disguising themselves, drinking, and behaving wantonly.326
But Purim was connected, through the Book of Esther, with Haman, Mordecai, Vashti, and Esther; and now arose the idea of making Haman, the victim, have a double who represented him in his resurrection. The Elamite god Humman and the Babylonian god Mordecai crept in through the Book of Esther, and through the very perilous effort to identify the Sacæa with Zakmuk, and both with Purim. The Book of Esther also introduced two female characters, and parts had to be found for them in the Sacæa, though our only authority mentions, in connection with the Sacæa, no female characters whatever, except the ladies of the royal harem. By analogy and conjecture, as to Semiramis and her lovers, parts were next found for the female characters of the Book of Esther as sacred harlots, representing the goddess of love. The consequent amours are supposed to stimulate the crops, and, in this part of the theory, the conjecture that the victim really dies to save the life of the king does appear to be rather dropped out of sight, though this idea is the real starting-point of the whole speculation. There is a come and go between the victim as king, with the royal harem, and the victim as Tammuz, with the sacred harlot. Conjectures about the victim as the Elamite Humman, or as the Babylonian Marduk, or as Marduk representing Eabani, or representing Gilgamesh, flit like the weaver's shuttle through the strangely woven warp and woof of the argument. Throughout we ask in vain for any proof that the King of Babylon was ever, at any time, in any text, regarded or spoken of as an incarnation of Tammuz, or of Marduk, or of Humman, or of Gilgamesh, or of Eabani – which the speculation requires.
Meanwhile the known, or at least the alleged, facts are the mock royalty, whipping, and death of the man who yearly lorded it as king for five days in the Persian palace, at the Sacæa, a period of licence, when every house had its slave-king. The extraordinary complexities in a matter really very simple are caused by identifying the Sacæa with Purim and Zakmuk, in the teeth of chronology; and by introducing into the Sacæa, without any historical evidence, the characters of a Hebrew historical romance about the origin of Purim. The tendency also to find gods of vegetation everywhere adds its bewildering enchantment, till the spirit of system discovers gods of vegetation in the criminals who, on very slender evidence, are said to have been yearly whipped and hanged. Nay, even the hypothetical male issue of the criminal, by a hypothetical harlot, becomes a hypothetical 'infant god,' is brought up as a criminal, and ends as a mock-king and a divine victim.
Mr. Frazer's whole argument, of course, clashes with the higher criticism of Wellhausen, who avers that the Jews could keep no feasts in the exile, and there learned 'the lesson of religious isolation.' On the other hand, the Jews, by Mr. Frazer's theory, did keep a feast, and a very abominable feast, and, far from learning the lesson of religious isolation, borrowed the most execrable heathen cruelties, accompanied by ritual debaucheries. So Wellhausen must greatly err in his opinions, which are much revered by the clergy of this island.327
