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192 Quoted by Harnack, op. cit. ii. 119.

In this materialistic conception of sin there is an obvious confusion between cause and effect, between the sin and its punishment. Sin is looked upon as a substance charged with injurious energy, which will sooner or later discharge itself to the discomfort or destruction of anybody who is infected with it. The sick Chinese says of his disease, “it is my sin,” instead of saying, “it is the punishment of my sin.”193 Both in Hebrew and in the Vedic language the word for sin is used in a similar way.194 “In the consciousness of the pious Israelite,” Professor Schultz observes, “sin, guilt, and punishment, are ideas so directly connected that the words for them are interchangeable.”195 The prophets frequently and emphatically declare that there is in sin itself a power which must destroy the sinner.196 So, too, as M. Bergaigne points out, there is in the Vedic notion of sin, “la croyance à une sorte de vertu propre du péché, grâce à laquelle il produit de lui-même son effet nécessaire, à savoir le châtiment du pécheur.”197 Sins are thus treated like diseases, or the germs of diseases, of which patients likewise try to rid themselves by washing or burning, or which are described in the very language often applied to sins as fetters which hold them chained.198 All kinds of evil are in this way materialised. The Shamanistic peoples of Siberia, says Georgi, “hold evil to be a self-existing substance which they call by an infinitude of particular names.”199 According to Moorish ideas, l-bas, or “misfortune,” is a kind of infection, which may be contracted by contact and removed by water or fire; hence in all parts of Morocco water- and fire-ceremonies are performed annually, either on the ʿâshur-eve or at midsummer, l-ʿanṣara, for the purpose of purifying men, animals, and fruit-trees.200 And just as the Moors, on these occasions, rid themselves of l-bas, so, in modern Greece, the women make a fire on Midsummer Eve, and jump over it, crying, “I leave my sins.”201

193 Edkins, Religion in China, p. 134.

194 Holzman, ‘Sünde und Sühne in den Rigvedahymnen und den Psalmen,’ in Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychologie, xv. 9.

195 Schultz, op. cit. ii. 306. Cf. Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, p. 124 sqq.

196 Ibid. ii. 308 sq.

197 Bergaigne, Religion védique, iii. 163. Cf. Rig-Veda, x. 132. 5.

198 Oldenberg, op. cit. p. 288.

199 Georgi, Russia, iii. 257.

200 The various methods of transferring or expelling evil, which abundantly illustrate the materialistic notions held about it, have been treated by Dr. Frazer with unrivalled learning (The Golden Bough), iii. 1 sqq. I have little doubt that the fire- and water-ceremonies, once practised all over Europe on a certain day every year, belong to the same group of rites. “The best general explanation of these European fire-festivals,” says Dr. Frazer (ibid. iii. 300), “seems to be the one given by Mannhardt, namely, that they are sun-charms or magical ceremonies intended to ensure a proper supply of sunshine for men, animals, and plants.” But it should be noticed that in Europe, as in Morocco, a purificatory purpose is expressly ascribed to them by the very persons by whom they are practised (see Frazer, op. cit. iii. 238 sqq.), that they alternate with lustration by water (see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ii. 588 sqq.). On the other hand, in Dr. Frazer’s exhaustive description of these ceremonies I fail to discover a single fact which would make Mannhardt’s hypothesis at all probable. Dr. Frazer says (op. cit. iii. 301), “The custom of rolling a burning wheel down a hillside, which is often observed at these times, seems a very natural imitation of the sun’s course in the sky.” To me it appears as a method of distributing the purificatory energy over the fields or vineyards. Notice, for instance, the following statements:—In the Rhon Mountains, Bavaria, “a wheel wrapt in combustibles, was kindled and rolled down the hill; and the young people rushed about the fields with their burning torches and brooms. … In neighbouring villages of Hesse … it is thought that wherever the burning wheels roll, the fields will be safe from hail and storm” (ibid. iii. 243 sq.). At Volkmarsen, in Hesse, “in some places tar-barrels or wheels wrapt in straw used to be set on fire, and then sent rolling down the hillside. In others the boys light torches and whisps of straw at the bonfires and rush about brandishing them in their hands” (ibid. iii. 254). In Münsterland, “boys with blazing bundles of straw run over the fields to make them fruitful” (ibid. iii. 255). Dr. Frazer says (ibid. iii. 301), “The custom of throwing blazing discs, shaped liked suns, into the air is probably also a piece of imitative magic.” But why should it not, in conformity with other practices, be regarded as a means of purifying the air? According to old writers, the object of Midsummer fires was to disperse the aerial dragons (ibid. iii. 267). It would carry me too far from my subject to enter into further details. I have dealt with the matter in my article ‘Midsummer Customs in Morocco.’ in Folk-Lore, xvi. 27–47.

201 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ii. 623.

Closely connected with the primitive conception of sin, is that of a curse. In fact, the injurious energy attributed to a sinful act, is in many cases obviously due to the curse of a god. The curse is looked upon as a baneful substance, as a miasma which injures or destroys anybody to whom it cleaves. The curse of Moses was said to lie on mount Ebal, ready to descend with punishments whenever there was an occasion for it.202 The Arabs, when being cursed, sometimes lay themselves down on the ground so that the curse, instead of hitting them, may fly over their bodies.203 According to Teutonic notions, curses alight, settle, cling, they take flight, and turn home as birds to their nests.204 It is the vulgar opinion in Ireland “that a curse once uttered must alight on something: it will float in the air seven years, and may descend any moment on the party it was aimed at; if his guardian angel but forsake him, it takes forthwith the shape of some misfortune, sickness or temptation, and strikes his devoted head.”205 We shall later on see that curses are communicated through material media. In some parts of Morocco, if a man is not powerful enough to avenge an infringement on his marriage-bed, he leaves seven tufts of hair on his head and goes to another tribe to ask for help. This is l-ʿâr, a conditional curse, which is first seated in the tufts, and from there transferred to those whom he invokes. Similarly, a person under the vow of blood-revenge lets his hair grow until he has fulfilled his vow. The oath clings to his hair, and will fall upon his head if he violates it.206

202 Deuteronomy, xi. 29.

203 Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, i. 29. Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, p. 139, n. 4.

204 Grimm, op. cit. iv. 1690.

205 Ibid. iii. 1227. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland ii, 57 sq.

206 The same practice prevailed among the ancient Arabs (Wellhausen, op. cit. p. 122), and some other cases are recorded by Dr. Frazer (op. cit. i. 370 sq.). I cannot accept Wellhausen’s explanation (op. cit. p. 124) that the hair is allowed to grow for the purpose of being sacrificed when the vow is fulfilled.

Generally, a curse follows the course which is indicated by the curser. But it does not do so in every case, and it has a tendency to spread. In ancient India207 and among the Arabs208 and Hebrews,209 there was a belief that a curse, especially if it was undeserved, might fall back on the head of him who uttered it. The same belief prevailed, or still prevails, among the Irish;210 so, also, according to an English proverb, “curses, like chickens, come home to roost.” According to Plato, the curse of a father or mother taints everything with which it comes in contact. Any one who is found guilty of assaulting a parent, shall be for ever banished from the city into the country, and shall abstain from the temples; and “if any freeman eat or drink, or have any other sort of intercourse with him, or only meeting him have voluntarily touched him, he shall not enter into any temple, nor into the agora, nor into the city, until he is purified; for he should consider that he has become tainted by a curse.”211 Plutarch asks whether Jupiter’s priest was forbidden to swear for the reason that “the peril of perjury would reach in common to the whole commonwealth, if a wicked, godless, and forsworn person should have the charge and superintendence of the prayers, vows, and sacrifices made on behalf of the city.”212 The Romans believed that certain horrid imprecations had such power, that not only the object of them never escaped their influence, but that the person who used them also was sure to be unhappy.213 Among the Arinzes, an oath is reckoned a terrible thing:—“They do not suffer a person, who has been under the necessity of expurgating himself in so dreadful a manner, to remain among them: he is sent into exile.”214 According to Bedouin notions, a solemn oath should only be taken at a certain distance from the camp, “because the magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body of Arabs, were it to take place in their vicinity.”215 “To take an oath of any sort,” says Burckhardt, “is always a matter of great concern among the Bedouins. It seems as if they attached to an oath consequences of a supernatural kind. … A Bedouin, even in defence of his own right, will seldom be persuaded to take a solemn oath before a kadhy, or before the tomb of a sheikh or saint, as they are sometimes required to do; and would rather forfeit a small sum than expose himself to the dreaded consequences of an oath.”216 Exactly the same holds good for the Moors. The conditional self-curse is supposed in some degree to pollute the swearer even though the condition referred to in the oath be only imaginary, in other words, though he do not perjure himself. This, I think, is the reason why, among the Berbers in the South of Morocco, persons who have been wrongly accused of a crime, sometimes entirely undress themselves in the sanctuary where they are going to swear. They believe that, if they do so, the saint will punish the accuser; and I conclude that at the bottom of this belief there is a vague idea that the absence of all clothes will prevent the oath from clinging to themselves. They say that it is bad not only to swear, but even to be present when an oath is taken by somebody else. And at Demnat, in the Great Atlas, I was told that when a person has made oath at a shrine, he avoids going back to his house the same way as he came, since otherwise, at least if he has sworn false, his family as well as himself would have to suffer.

207 Atharva-Veda, ii. 7. 5.

208 Goldziher, Abhandlungen, i. 38 sq.

209 Ecclesiasticus, xxi. 27.

210 Wood-Martin, op. cit. ii. 57 sq.

211 Plato, Leges, ix. 881.

212 Plutarch, Questiones Romanae, 44.

213 Idem, Vita Cassi, 16.

214 Georgi, op. cit. iii. 54 sq.

215 Burckhardt, Bedouins and Wahábys, p. 73.

216 Ibid. p. 165.

If a curse is infectious, it is naturally liable to contaminate those who derive their origin from the infected individual. The house of Glaucus was utterly extirpated from Sparta, in accordance with the words of the oracle, “There is a nameless son of the Oath-god who has neither hands nor feet; he pursues swiftly, until, having seized, he destroys the whole race, and all the house.”217 So, too, the Erinyes visited the sins of the fathers even on the children and grandchildren;218 and the Erinyes were originally only personifications of curses.219 It is said in the Ecclesiasticus:—“A man that useth much swearing shall be filled with iniquity, and the plague shall never depart from his house. … If he swear in vain, he shall not be innocent, but his house shall be full of calamities.”220 Casalis remarks of the Basutos, that “the dreadful consequences that the curse of Noah has had for Ham and his descendants appear quite natural to these people.”221 The Dharkâr and Majhwâr in Mirzapur, believe that a person who forswears himself will lose his property and his children;222 but as we do not know the contents of the oath, it is possible that the destruction of the latter is not ascribed to mere contagion, but is expressly imprecated on them by the swearer.223 Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, “any accident that happens to a man, who has been known to take a false oath, or to his children or grandchildren, is carefully recorded in memory, and attributed to this sole cause.”224 Among the Karens the following story is told:—“Anciently there was a man who had ten children, and he cursed one of his brethren, who had done him no injury; but the curse did the man no harm, and he did not die. Then the curse returned to the man who sent it, and all his ten children died.”225 The Moors are fond of cursing each other’s father or mother, or grandfather, or grandfather’s father, such a curse being understood to involve their descendants as well. The Rev. R. Taylor says of the Maoris, “To bid you go and cook your father would be a great curse, but to tell a person to go and cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it included every individual who has sprung from him.”226

217 Herodotus, vi. 86. Cf. Hesiod, Opera et dies, 282 sqq.

218 Aeschylus, Eumenides, 934 sqq.

219 Aeschylus (Eumenides, 416 sq.) expressly designates the Erinyes by the title of “curses” (ἀραὶ), and Pausanias derives the name Erinys from an Arcadian word signifying a fit of anger. Cf. von Lasaulx, ‘Der Fluch bei Griechen und Römern,’ in Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen an der Julius-Maximilians-Universitaet zu Würzburg im Sommer-Semester 1843, p. 8; Müller, Dissertations on the Eumenides of Aeschylus, p. 155 sqq.; Rohde, ‘Paralipomena,’ in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1895, p. 16 sq.

220 Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 11. Cf. ibid. xli. 5 sqq.; Wisdom of Solomon, iii. 12 sq., xii. 11.

221 Casalis, Basutos, p. 305.

222 Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, ii. 287; iii. 444. Cf. ibid. i. 132.

223 Among these tribes it is usual to swear by “putting a bamboo on the head,” or “touching a broad-sword, touching the feet of a Brâhman, holding a cow’s tail, touching Ganges water.” But among many of the other tribes described by Mr. Crooke, persons swear on the heads of their children (ibid. i. 11, 130, 172; ii. 96, 138, 339, 357; iii. 40, 113, 251, 262; iv. 35), or with a son or grandson in the arms (ibid. ii. 428), and in such cases the death of the child would naturally be expected to follow perjury as a direct result of it. Among the Kol, the usual form of an oath is, “May my children die if I lie” (ibid. iii. 313).

224 Marsden, History of Sumatra, p. 240.

225 Mason, in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xxxvii. pt. ii. 137.

226 Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 208.

Thus, from the conception that sins and curses are contagious it follows that an innocent person may have to suffer for the sin of another. His suffering does not necessarily relieve the sinner from punishment; sin, like an infectious disease, may spread without vacating the seat of infection. But, as we have seen, it may also be transferred, and sin-transference involves vicarious suffering. At the same time, this kind of vicarious suffering must not be confounded with vicarious expiatory sacrifice. As a general rule, the scapegoat is driven or cast away, not killed. The exceptions to this rule seem to be due to two different causes. On the one hand, the scapegoat may be chased to death, or perhaps be pushed over a precipice,227 for the sake of ridding the community as effectively as possible of the evils loaded on the victim. Thus the Bhotiyás of Juhár take a dog, make him drunk, “and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and stones, and believe that by so doing no disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year.”228 On the other hand, the transference of evil may be combined with a sacrifice. But of such a combination only a few instances are recorded, and most of them are ambiguous. Considering further that in these cases, or at least in the best known of them, the act of transference takes place after the victim has been killed, it seems to me extremely probable that we have here to do with a fusion of two distinct rites into one, and that the victim is not offered up as a sacrifice in its capacity of a scapegoat, but, once sacrificed, has been made use of as a conductor for all the evils with which the people are beset.

227 According to the Mishna, the Hebrew scapegoat was not allowed to go free in the wilderness, but was killed by being pushed over a precipice (Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 418). See also the ambiguous passage in Servius, In Virgilii Aeneidos, iii. 57.

228 Atkinson, ‘Notes on the History of Religion in the Himálaya of the N.W. Provinces,’ in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, liii. pt. i. 62.

In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.229 A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king’s house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, “Wickedness! wickedness!” so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice was to take away the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a merciless manner “as if the weight of all their wickedness were thus carried away”; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. “Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God’s laws during the past year. … Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year—such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications, adulteries, witchcrafts, incests, slanders, &c.—were expected to pay in twenty-eight ngugus, or £2 0s. 7½d., as a fine; and this money was taken into the interior, to purchase two sickly persons, to be offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes—one for the land, and one for the river.”230 As will be seen in a following chapter, human sacrifices to rivers are very common in the Niger country. In the cases mentioned by the English missionary, the idea of vicarious expiation is obvious. But I find no evidence of actual sin-transference.

229 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 109 sq.

230 Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, p. 344 sq.

Dr. Frazer further mentions a custom which, according to Strabo, prevailed among the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus.231 In the temple of the Moon they kept a number of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man thrust a sacred spear into his side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which the victim fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony.232 Dr. Frazer maintains that “the last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hand on the animal’s head.”233 So it may be, although, in my opinion, the purificatory ceremony described by Strabo also allows of another interpretation. The victim was evidently held to be saturated with magic energy; this is commonly the case with men, or animals, or even inanimate things, that are offered in sacrifice, and in the present instance the man was regarded as holy already, long before he was slain. To stand on the corpse, then, might have been regarded as purifying in consequence of the benign virtue inherent in it, just as, according to Muhammedan notions, contact with a saint cures disease, not by transferring it to the saint, but by annihilating it or expelling it from the body of the patient. But whether the ceremony in question involved the idea of sin-transference or not, there is no indication that the sacrifice of the slave was of an expiatory character. The same may be said both of the Egyptian sacrifice of a bull, mentioned by Herodotus, and of the white dog sacrifice performed by the Iroquois. The Egyptians first invoked the god and slew the bull. They then cut off his head and flayed the body. Next they took the head, and heaped imprecations on it, praying that, if any evil was impending either over those who sacrificed or over the land of Egypt, it might be made to fall upon that head. And finally, they either sold the head to Greek traders or threw it into the river234—which shows that the real scapegoat, the head, was not regarded as a sacrifice to the god. Among the Iroquois, also, the victims were slain before the sins of the people were transferred to them. According to Hale’s and Morgan’s accounts of this rite, which have reference to different tribes of the Iroquois, no mention of sin-transference is made in the hymn which accompanied the sacrifice.235 Only blessings were invoked. This was the beginning of the chant:—“Now we are about to offer this victim adorned for the sacrifice, in hope that the act will be pleasing and acceptable to the All-Ruler, and that he will so adorn his children, the red men, with his blessings, when they appear before him.”236 Mr. Morgan even denies that the burning of the dog had the slightest connection with the sins of the people, and states that “in the religious system of the Iroquois, there is no recognition of the doctrine of atonement for sin, or of the absolution or forgiveness of sins.”237

231 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 112 sq.

232 Strabo, xi. 4. 7.

233 Frazer, op. cit. iii. 113.

234 Herodotus, ii. 39.

235 Hale, in American Antiquarian, vii. 10 sqq. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 217 sq.

236 Hale, loc. cit. p. 10.

237 Morgan, op. cit. p. 216.

I think we can see the reason why, in some cases, a sacrificial victim is used as scapegoat. The transference of sins or evils is not looked upon as a mere “natural” process, it can hardly be accomplished without the aid of mysterious, magic energy. Among the Berbers of Ait Zelṭn, in Southern Morocco, sick people used to visit a miracle-working wild olive-tree, growing in the immediate vicinity of the supposed grave of Sîdi Butlîla. They there relieve themselves of their complaints by tying a woollen string to one of its branches; in case of headache the patient previously winds the string three times round the top of his head, whilst, in case of fever, he spits on the string, and, when tying it to the tree, says, “I left my fever in thee, O wild olive-tree.” He believes that he may thus transfer his disease to this tree because there is baraka, “benign virtue,” in it; he would not expect to be cured by tying the string to any ordinary tree. This illustrates a principle of probably world-wide application. In Morocco, and, I presume, in other countries where disease-transference is believed in, rags tied to a tree are a sure indication that the tree is regarded as holy. Similarly I venture to believe that the transference of sins and evils to a scapegoat is generally supposed to require magic aid of some kind or other. Among the Hebrews, it took place on the Day of Atonement only, and the act was performed by the high-priest.238 Among the Iroquois, it was by “a kind of magic” that the sins of the people were worked into the white dogs;239 and that the animals themselves were held to be charged with supernatural energy, appears from the fact that, according to one account, the ashes of the pyre on which one of them was burnt were “gathered up, carried through the village, and sprinkled at the door of every house.”240 Considering, then, that sacrificial victims, owing to their close contact with the deities to whom they are offered, are held more or less sacred, the idea of employing them as scapegoats is certainly near at hand. But this does not make the sacrifice expiatory. In fact, I know of no instance of an expiatory sacrifice being connected with a ceremony of sin-transference. Hence the materialistic conception of sin hardly helps to explain the belief that the sins of a person may be atoned by another person being offered as a sacrifice to the offended god.