Lang Andrew
Magic and Religion
IV. THE SACÆA AS A PERIOD OF LICENCE
Well, the Sacæa was such a period of licence. Each household was then ruled by a slave, the Zoganes, as Athenæus quotes Berosus. The royal household was not an exception. Now to rule the royal household, in the royal robes, and above all to take liberties with the royal harem (compare Fijian and Australian licence), is treason; one of the two crimes excepted from the Saturnalian amnesty in Tonquin. To overlook treason would be, for a Persian monarch, to set a dangerous precedent. Therefore the royal Zoganes, or slave-king of the five days' revel, unlike the Zoganes of private houses, would deserve death, technically speaking. At this point let me adopt Mr. Frazer's theory of a substitute. A criminal already condemned to death is employed instead of a harmless slave, as Zoganes of the royal household, and is then hanged.
In dozens of cases of summer gambols, in European folklore, 'the Whitsuntide representatives of the tree spirit' are put to a mock death.353 These are in one or two instances called 'kings.' The regular May Kings and May Queens seem to escape: the Grass King merely 'hands his crown to the mayor.'354 These mock slayings of folklore actors may (I think), like handing the crown to the mayor, merely mean that the actor's reign is over. This is not Mr. Frazer's opinion: the summer monarchs when killed in sport are killed, he thinks, as their precursors were really slain, for the god of vegetation. O vegetation, what crimes are wrought in thy name!
In any case the royal Zoganes, or criminal substitute for the slave-king of the royal household in Babylon, deserved a hanging, to discourage the precedent of treason set by him in the period of licence. Only in the king's house was the reign of the Zoganes high treason.
Now, before hanging him, it was actually necessary to demonstrate by symbolic action that he was no real king, but a common slave or criminal. He was reduced to his true level by being stripped of his royal robes, and by being whipped, a specially servile punishment. He was then hanged.
But to treat a real slave thus merely because, as in every other household, he played the Zoganes or slave as master, would be a shame. The man's only fault was the accident, thrust on him by custom, of playing lord in the royal household of a jealous monarch. So a criminal already condemned took the part, and, as the slave would have been, he was finally reduced to his level by being stripped of his royal robes and scourged, before suffering death; technically for treason, really for the crime on which he was originally condemned.
This mere guess at the origin of a unique custom has certain advantages. It explains (and I fail to see that Mr. Frazer explains) why the Sacæan mock-king (unlike the Saturn victim) was stripped of his royal robes and whipped. These sufferings proclaimed the man no king, but a slave. Again, his hanging was just what, as condemned on a capital charge, a low-born malefactor might expect. With the best will in the world, no Babylonian could follow Mr. Frazer and take a hanged felon for a god or a divine sacrifice. Why only one man was thus treated, though there was a Zoganes or slave-lord in every house, is explained by the fact that there was only one royal house, only one household in which the slave-lord's conduct was treason.
With paternal fondness I contemplate my own little guess. But, alas! we are not told that the other slave-lords at the Sacæa actually invaded the ladies of the house. So why should the slave-lord of the royal household be allowed to do so? How is my conjecture to weather this point of danger? Well, we are never told (as far as I am aware) that a subject in the East enfeoffed himself of private demesne by invading the harem of the man to whose estate he was a pretender. But in the case of royal demesne to invade the harem was the first step of a young pretender, like Absalom, 'for the purpose of making known and strengthening his claim to the throne,' says Movers.355
Remembering the tenacity of traditional usage, sanctioning deadly sexual crimes in some periods of licence, remembering that, in them, the 'primitive' Arunta deliberately break, as did the Jews at Purim, and the Fijians, the most sacred and stringent of their taboos, shall we not allow Sacæan custom to encroach, for the purpose of making the royalty of the king's Zoganes indisputable, on the king's harem? For in that way was Oriental royalty proclaimed and asserted. Sir Alfred Lyall says: 'We believe that a few unfortunate concubines would have been of no account at all for the due performance of a popular Babylonian masquerade, which might just as well mimic earthly kingship as symbolise divine mysteries.'
And now we see a simple and conceivable reason why the mock-king of the Sacæa invaded the king's harem, ruled all royally, was crowned, robed in the king's robes, and then, to restore his servile status and wipe away his royalty, was stripped of the royal robes, whipped as a slave was whipped, and hanged as a condemned criminal deserved to be.
My guess, unlike Mr. Frazer's hypothesis, colligates all the facts. It explains the stripping, which Mr. Frazer does not, I think, explain. It explains the scourging and hanging, which Mr. Frazer is obliged to account for as a mitigation of burning. It does not require us to believe (what is incredible) that of old the Persian kings were sacrificed annually. It accounts for the occurrence of the execution at a season of secular licence just as in Ashanti. It involves us in no double, and, to my thinking, contradictory theory, that the sufferer is both king's proxy and also a representative of Tammuz, or Marduk, or Humman, or Gilgamesh, or Eabani.
But my guess is only a guess, and is offered chiefly to prove that guessing is easy. We cannot be certain about any explanation of a custom so remote, so unparalleled, and reported on evidence so late and so dubious as that of Dio Chrysostom.
Some student may point out that, though I boast of my theory as colligating all the facts, I have left out the sacred harlot. But she was only the child of an hypothesis of Mr. Frazer's. A scientific hypothesis is not required to colligate more than the known facts in each case. And I am by no means certain that the facts given by our only authority, Dio, were facts of history.
X
CALVARY
It is, fortunately, not needful to dwell long on the disproval of Mr. Frazer's theory that his facts 'seem to shed fresh light on some of the causes which contributed to the remarkably rapid diffusion of Christianity in Asia Minor… The new faith had elements in it which appealed powerfully to the Asiatic mind… We have seen that the conception of the dying and risen god was no new one in these regions… A man whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god gave his life for the life of the world… A chain of causes which, because we cannot follow them, might in the loose language of daily life be called an accidents determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust on Jesus of Nazareth…' His death as the Haman of the annual mystery play of the dying god' impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father. In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died the death of a vulgar malefactor. It shed round the Cross on Calvary a halo of divinity,' &c.356
But all this halo could only be shed if the victim was recognised by the world as dying in the character of a god, and as rising again in the person of Barabbas, the Mordecai of the year. We know on the best historical evidence that there was no such recognition. 'To the Greeks foolishness, and to the Jews a stumbling block,' was the Cross, as St. Paul assures us. Moreover, we know that ribaldry, not reverence, marked the multitude at the Crucifixion. By Mr. Frazer's theory Barabbas represented the re-arisen god, 'The Son of the Father.' Was Barabbas revered? No; 'some pretended to salute his mock majesty, and others belaboured the donkey on which he rode.'357 Therefore, by Mr. Frazer's own explicit statement, the divine facts about Barabbas were not recognised. Yet he was the counterpart of the sacred Victim.
Mr. Frazer's theory demands, I think, the general recognition of the godhead of the yearly victim, who gave Christ's mission 'the influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died the death of a vulgar malefactor.'358
Yet Mr. Frazer himself assures us that the idea of the divinity of the victim may have been forgotten; that his 'sacrifice' might seem 'the execution of a criminal.' I cite the passage: 'The divine character of the animal or man is forgotten, and he comes to be regarded merely as an ordinary victim. This is especially the case when it is a divine man who is killed. For when a nation becomes civilised, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus, as in the Sacæan festival at Babylon, the killing of a god may come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.'359 Yet within eighty pages Mr. Frazer attributes the 'halo of divinity' to the happy accident which enabled the victim to die as a recognised representative of a dying god.360
Mr. Frazer puts forth his hypothesis 'with great diffidence.'361 He thinks that he may 'have perhaps been led by the interest and importance of the subject somewhat deeper than the evidence warrants.'362
That is certain. We have shown that the evidence, in our opinion, warrants none of the hypotheses; no, not one.
It is not proved that magic is older than religion.
It is disproved that general belief (as distinguished from local legend) in any age regards gods as mortal.
There is no evidence, or none is given, to show that a man has ever been sacrificed for the benefit of a god whom he incarnates.
There is no evidence that a real king was ever yearly sacrificed to benefit a god at Babylon, or in every city-state of early Italy, or anywhere. The idea is incredible.
The evidence for any sacrifice of mock-kings is, historically, of the weakest conceivable kind.
The deaths of the Sacæan mock-kings were infamous executions of criminals; they were not sacrifices, if they ever occurred at all.
The date of the festival at which, if at all, they perished cannot be made to fit in with Purim or Easter.
There is no evidence that the Jews borrowed the custom of killing a yearly human victim, or practised the habit.
If they did, it was a month after Purim.363
If they did, by Mr. Frazer's own statement the killing might be thought that of a vulgar malefactor,364 and could not cast on all or on any one of the victims a halo of divinity.
Finally, our own history, in the case of the Earl of Atholl (who pretended to the crown at the murder of James I. of Scotland) and in the case of Sir William Wallace (who was accused of saying that he would be crowned in Westminster Hall), proves that pretenders to royalty have been mocked by being indued with symbols of royalty. Wallace was crowned at his trial with laurel; Atholl was tortured to death with a red-hot iron crown. The Victim of Calvary was accused of aiming at a kingdom, and, like Wallace and Atholl, was crowned – with thorns. The preliminary scourging is illustrated by the tyranny of Verres in Sicily.
May we not conclude that Mr. Frazer's 'light bridges' of hypothesis have 'broken down'?365
'The importance and interest of the subject' have induced me to examine the hypotheses. But it was needless.
One point has been clear from the beginning. Even if the Sacæan victims were originally supposed to be gods, they could not bequeath a halo of divinity to Christ, unless, as late as the reign of Tiberius, their own godhead was still commonly recognised. Now it certainly was not recognised. When Mr. Frazer published the first edition of his 'Golden Bough,' he doubted that the Sacæan victim could, as civilisation advanced, be identified with a god. But, before publishing his second edition, Mr. Frazer evolved his theory of the origin or partial origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ, as inherited from the criminal slaves at the Sacæa. In his second edition, therefore, the godhead of the Sacæan victims is usually regarded as commonly recognised; though Mr. Frazer had doubted the possibility of this in his first, and preserves the doubt in his second edition. It is needless to say more.
Mr. Frazer, in vol. iii. 120, had already shaken his own theory as given in vol. iii. 195-198.366 I might have contented myself with comparing these two passages, but in the interest of the nascent science of religion it seemed desirable to point out what I am constrained to think the errors of method that now prevail. In the following essay criticism is applied to an hypothesis with which modern orthodoxy has no concern.
XI
THE GHASTLY PRIEST
The spirit of system, of finding master keys for all the locks of old religion and mythology, has confessedly been apt to misguide students. 'Macrobius was the father,' says Mr. Frazer, 'of that large family of mythologists who resolve all or most gods into the sun. According to him Mercury was the sun, Mars was the sun, Janus was the sun, Saturn was the sun, so was Jupiter, also Nemesis, likewise Pan, and so on through a great part of the Pantheon. It was natural, therefore, that he should identify Osiris with the sun…'367
Mythology has been of late emancipated from the universal dominion of the sun, but only to fall under that of gods of vegetation, whether of vegetable life at large, or of the corn spirit and the oak spirit in particular. What Mr. Frazer says about Macrobius, Macrobius would retort on Mr. Frazer, thus:
'According to him Mars was a god of vegetation, Saturn was a god of vegetation (of sowing), so was Zeus, also Hera, and so on through a great part of the Pantheon. It was natural, therefore, that he should identify Osiris with a god of vegetation – and Mr. Frazer does so.'
Far be it from me to say that Mr. Frazer is wrong, when his gods are gods of vegetation, or even that Macrobius is wrong, when his gods are gods of the sun. It appears to me that when a god had obtained a firm hold of public favour, the public might accept him as a god of this, that, and the other aspect or phenomenon of nature.
Still, the new school of mythology does work the vegetable element in mythology hard; nearly as hard as the solar element used to be worked. Aphrodite, as the female mate of Adonis, gets mixed up with plant life.368 So does Attis with Cybele, so does Balder,369 so does Death,370 so does Dionysus371 with undoubted propriety; so does Eabani, so does Gilgamesh, so does Haman, so does Hera,372 so does Iasion with Demeter,373 so does Isis,374 so does Jack-in-the-Green, so does Kupalo,375 so do Linus and Lityerses,376 so does Mamurius Veturius,377 so does Merodach or Marduk (if he represents Eabani or Gilgamesh), so does Mars,378 so does Osiris,379 so, I think, does Semiramis,380 so does Tammuz, so does Virbius,381 so does Zeus, probably;382 so does a great multitude of cattle, cats, horses, bulls, goats, cocks, with plenty of other beasts.
The solar mythologists did not spare heroes like Achilles; they, too, were the sun. But the vegetable school, the Covent Garden school of mythologists, mixes up real human beings with vegetation. Jesus Christ derives his divinity, or some of it, as we have seen, from a long array of criminals who were hanged partly as kings, partly as gods of vegetation. I do not feel absolutely assured that Judas Iscariot, at his annual burnings in effigy, escapes the universal doom any more than the ugly deformed person who was whipped and killed in old Attica. But an unexpected man to be a representative of a god of vegetation is the priest of the grove of Diana near Aricia. He is known to all from the familiar verse of Macaulay —
These trees in whose dark shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Why, Mr. Frazer asks, in effect, had the priest of the grove of Diana, near Aricia, to slay his predecessor, subject, in turn, to death at the hands of a new competitor for the office? First, let us ask what we know about this ghastly priest. Let us begin with the evidence of Virgil, in the Sixth Book of the 'Æneid' (line 136 and so onwards). Virgil says nothing about the ghastly priest, or, in this place, about Diana, or the grove near Aricia. Virgil, indeed, tells us much about a bough of a tree, a golden branch, but, as to the singular priest, nothing. But some four hundred years after Virgil's date (say 370 A.D.) a commentator on Virgil, Servius, tries to illustrate the passage cited from the 'Æneid.' He obviously knows nothing about Virgil's mystic golden bough, but he tells us that, in his own time, 'public opinion' (publico, opinio) placed the habitat of Virgil's bough in the grove haunted by the ghastly priest, near Aricia. It is, in fact, not known whether Virgil invented his bough, with its extraordinary attributes, or took it from his rich store of antiquarian learning. It may have been a folklore belief, like Le Rameau d'Or of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tale. Virgil's bough, as we shall see, has one folklore attribute in common with a mystic sword in the Arthurian cycle of romances, and in the Volsunga Saga. I think that Mr. Frazer has failed to comment on this point. If I might hazard a guess as to Virgil's branch, it is that, of old, suppliants approached gods or kings with boughs in their hands. He who would approach Proserpine carried, in Virgil, a bough of pure gold, which only the favoured and predestined suppliant could obtain, as shall be shown.
In the four centuries between Virgil and Servius the meaning and source of Virgil's branch of gold were forgotten. But people, and Servius himself, knew of another bough, near Aricia, and located (conjecturally?) Virgil's branch of gold in that district. Servius, then, in his commentary on the 'Æneid,' after the manner of annotators in all ages, talks much about the boughs of a certain tree in a certain grove, concerning which Virgil makes no remark. Virgil, as we shall see, was writing about a golden branch of very peculiar character. Knowing, like the public opinion of his age, something about quite other branches, and nothing about Virgil's branch, Servius tells us that, in the grove of Diana at Aricia, there grew a tree from which it was unlawful (non licebat) to break a bough. If any fugitive slave, however, could break a branch from this tree, he might fight the priest, taking his office if successful. In the opinion of Servius the temple was founded by Orestes, to the barbaric Diana of the Chersonese, whence he had fled after a homicide. That Diana received human sacrifices of all strangers who landed on her coasts. The rite of human sacrifice was, in Italy, commuted, Servius thinks, for the duel between the priest and the fugitive slave, Orestes having himself been a fugitive. The process is, first a Greek wanderer on a barbarous coast is in danger of being offered, as all outlanders were offered, to the local goddess. This rite was a form of xenelasia, an anti-immigrant statute. Compare China, the Transvaal, the agitation against pauper immigrants. Having escaped being sacrificed, and having killed the king in an unfriendly land, Orestes flies to Italy and appeases the cruel Diana by erecting her fane at Aricia. But, instead of sacrificing immigrants, he, or his successors, establish a duel between the priest and any other fugitive slave. Why? For the priest of the cruel Diana was not accustomed to be sacrificed, nor had he been a fugitive slave. Servius then, not observing this, goes off into an allegorising interpretation of Virgil's branch, as worthless as all such interpretations always are.
The story about Orestes appears to myself to be a late 'ætiological myth,' a story invented to explain the slaying of the slayer – which it does not do; in short, it is an hypothesis. The priesthood is open not to men flying the blood feud like Orestes, but only to runaway slaves. The custom introduced by Orestes was the sacrifice of outlanders, not of priests. The story has a doublette in Pausanias.383 According to Pausanias, Hippolytus was raised from the dead, and, in hatred of his father, and being a fugitive, he went and reigned at the Arician grove of the goddess.
For these reasons, apparently, Statius calls the Arician grove 'profugis regibus aptum,' a sanctuary of exiled princes, Orestes and Hippolytus.384 From Suetonius we learn that the ghastly priest was styled Rex Nemorensis, King of the Wood, and that the envious Caligula, thinking the priest had held office long enough, set another athlete to kill him.385 The title of 'king,' borne by a priest, suggests, of course, the sacrificial king at Borne. Also Mr. Frazer adduces African kings of fire and water, credited with miraculous powers over the elements. They kill nobody and nobody kills them. Then we have Jack-in-the-Green = May-Tree = the Spirit of Vegetation = the May King and the Queen of the May. 'These titles,' as Mannhardt observes, 'imply that the spirit incorporate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends far and wide.' Possibly so. Now, the King of the Wood, the ghastly priest, lived in the grove of Diana, who (among other things) has the attributes of a tree-spirit. 'May not, then, the King of the Wood, in the Arician grove, have been, like the King of the May … an incarnation of the tree-spirit, or spirit of vegetation?' Given a female tree-spirit, we should rather expect a Queen of the Wood; and we assuredly do not expect a priest of Diana to represent the supreme Aryan god, nay to incarnate him. But this Mr. Frazer thinks probable.386 Again, 'since the King of the Wood could only be assailed by him who had plucked the golden bough, his life was safe from assault as long as the bough, or the tree on which it grew, remained uninjured.'387
Here we remark the nimbleness of Mr. Frazer's method. In vol. i. 4 he had said: 'Tradition averred that the fatal branch' (in the grove near Aricia) 'was that golden bough which, at the Sibyl's bidding, Æneas plucked before he assayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead.' But I have tried to show that, according to Servius, this identification of two absolutely distinct boughs, neither similar nor similarly situated, was the conjecture of 'public opinion' in an age divided from Virgil's date by four hundred years.
In the space between vol. i. 4 and i. 231 the averment of tradition, as Mr. Frazer calls it, the inference of the curious, as I suppose, to the effect that Virgil's golden branch and the Arician branch were identical, has become matter of fact for Mr. Frazer. 'Since the King of the Wood could only be assailed by him who had plucked the Golden Bough,' he says; with what follows.388
But who has told us anything about the breaking, by a fugitive slave, near Aricia, of a golden bough? Nobody, as far as I am aware, has mentioned the circumstance. After an interval of four hundred years, the golden bough of Virgil is only brought by Servius into connection with the wood at Aricia, because Servius, and the public opinion of his age, knew about a branch there, and did not know anything about Virgil's branch of gold.
That branch is a safe passport to Hades. It is sacred, not to a tree-spirit named Diana, but to Infernal Juno, or Proserpine. It cannot be broken by a fugitive slave, or anybody else; no, nor can it be cut with edge of iron. None but he whom the Fates call can break it. It yields at a touch of the predestined man, and another golden branch grows instantly in its place.
Ipse volens facilisque sequetur,
Si te fata vocant.
Primo avulso non deficit alter
Aureus.
Virgil's bough thus answers to the magical sword set in a stone in the Arthurian legends, in a tree trunk in the Volsunga Saga, as Mr. H. S. O. Everard reminds me. All the knights may tug vainly at the sword, but you can draw it lightly, si te fata vocant, if you are the predestined king, if you are Arthur or Sigmund. When Æneas bears this bough, Charon recognises the old familiar passport. Other living men, in the strength of this talisman, have already entered the land of the dead.
Ille admirans venerabile donum
Fatalis virgæ, longo nunc tempore visum.
I have collected all these extraordinary attributes of Virgil's bough (in origin, a suppliant's bough, perhaps), because, as far as I notice, Mr. Frazer lays no stress on the many peculiarities which differentiate Virgil's bough from any casual branch of the tree at Aricia, and connect it with the mystic sword. The 'general reader' (who seldom knows Latin) needs, I think, to be told precisely what Virgil's bough was. Nothing can be more unlike a branch, any accessible branch, of the Arician tree, than is Virgil's golden bough. It does not grow at Aricia. It is golden. It is not connected with a tree-spirit, but is dear to Proserpine. (I easily see, of course, that Proserpine may be identified with a tree spirit.)389 Virgil's branch is not to be plucked by fugitive slaves. It is not a challenge, but a talismanic passport to Hades, recognised by Charon, who has not seen a specimen for ever so long. It is instantly succeeded, if plucked, by another branch of gold, which the Arician twig is not. So I really do not understand how Mr. Frazer can identify Virgil's golden bough with an ordinary branch of a tree at Aricia, which anybody could break, though only runaway slaves, strongly built, had an interest in so doing.
Still less do I think that Virgil meant to identify his branch of gold with mistletoe. He does the reverse: in a poetic simile he compares his bough to mistletoe. A poet does not compare a thing to itself!390 Mr. Frazer cites the Welsh for mistletoe —pren puraur, tree d'or pur. In places, also, mistletoe is used for divining rods, which may be employed by gold-hunters. What wood is not thus used?391 Like other magical plants, mistletoe is gathered at the solstices, when fern-seed is fabled to flame. Must not the golden bough, like the golden fern-seed, be an emanation of the sun's fire? The older solar mythologists would have had not a doubt of it.392
I must admit, then, that I cannot, at present, accept the identification of the branch of gold in Virgil with any branch you please on a certain tree at Aricia. Nor am I aware of any historical evidence that the grove there was an oak grove, or the tree an oak tree, or that the branch to be plucked was a mistletoe bough, or that any branch, for the purpose of the runaway slave, was not as good as another.
That Virgil's branch of gold was mistletoe, that the tree at Aricia was an oak, that the bough to be plucked by the person ambitious of being a ghastly priest was mistletoe, seems (if I follow Mr. Frazer accurately) to be rather needful to the success of the solution of his problem which he finally propounds. He takes, on his road, the Eddaic myth of Balder, which I do not regard as a very early myth; but on that point there is great searching of hearts among Scandinavian specialists. 'No one now,' writes a Scandinavian scholar to me, 'puts any of the Edda poems earlier than 900 A.D., and most of them, if not all, are probably later than that. We do not even know whether they were composed by Christians or pagans, as the Icelanders never lost their interest in the old mythology. It has never been sufficiently noticed that these poems are not religious in any sense; all that their poets cared for was the story. That it will ever be possible to say where the stories came from, I doubt very much: probably they represent the fusion of several quite different veins of legends, heathen and Christian. The Saga writers knew practically nothing about the old heathen worship, and Balder may never have been worshipped at all, or, if he was, it is rather hopeless to conjecture in what capacity.'
Such are the opinions of Mr. W. A. Craigie, whose writings on the Celto-Scandinavian relations of the Northern mythological literature are familiar to students. We return to Mr. Frazer's handling of the Balder story.
Balder, says the Edda, dreamed of death. A goddess made everything in nature swear not to hurt him, except a mistletoe plant, which she thought too young to understand the nature of an oath! Loki learned this, plucked the plant, and, when the gods were hurling things at Balder, asked the blind Hödur to throw the mistletoe. It pierced and slew Balder, and his funeral was of a kind which may, or may not, have been used before the period of inhumation in 'howes' or barrows. Balder's dead body was burned on board his ship, 'the hugest of all ships.'393 I had an impression that this was a not uncommon Viking form of incremation, but Mr. Craigie thinks that it had quite gone out before the historic period. In the legendary period he remembers but one case, in Ynglinga Saga.394 King Haki, being mortally wounded, had his ship piled with the bodies and weapons of the slain; a funeral pyre was erected on board and lit, and the body of Haki was borne forth to sea in the flaming vessel. 'The thing was famous long after.' The story may be borrowed from the Balder story or the Balder story from that of King Haki.
In any case Balder was not sacrificed, but cremated, and the 'huge ship,' of course, is a late Viking idea, an idea the reverse of primitive. Mr. Frazer, however, goes on, apparently assuming that in the original form of the myth Balder was sacrificed, to a theory about certain religious or ritual fires, which survive in folklore. These fires are lit by peasants at various seasons, but are best known at midsummer, while a pretence of burning a man is made, and this at a season when mistletoe is gathered as a magical healing herb, not as a weapon of death. He seems to think that Balder was the spirit of the oak, that human victims, representing the oak and Balder, were, of old, periodically sacrificed, and that people deemed that the oak could not be injured by axes before the mistletoe (in which, they thought, lay its life) was plucked off. Unluckily, I see no evidence that people ever did entertain this opinion – namely, that the oak was invulnerable till the mistletoe was plucked.395
