For the provenance of this paper, see the headnote to the previous essay, “The Concept of Sacrifice.” Frye received an “A” for the paper, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 13.
The discovery by anthropology of the fertility cult rite among agricultural primitives is a comparatively recent one, but fraught with the highest importance for future developments in religion, art, and in general the symbolic aspects of culture. The term “fertility cult” is usually held to designate whatever religious practices are specifically associated with the sympathetic magic which aims at promoting the fertility of the soil, and, consequently, exists only among agriculturalists or among dwellers in the forest, where the lives of the people are bound up with the fate of the vegetation.
Our problem is to trace the influence of fertility cults on the Hebrews. The Hebrews proper being nomads, we should not expect to find anything germane to our problem there; but the Canaanites and the other peasant dwellers of the land conquered by the Hebrews would be subject to the same organic laws as other agricultural peoples. Thus, the program of Hebrew religious history is that of the conflict between Yahweh, the nomadic god of the tribe, and Baal, the generic name of the agricultural or fertility gods of the surrounding nations; a struggle of unity and monotheism against localization and polytheism, of ethics against magic, love against fear, the devotional against the orgiastic.
Plato in his Symposium states that the primary force of coherence, the Eros, is driven to reproduction through its necessity for self-preservation and self-perpetuation.1 In the same way among primitives the gregarious instinct for social cohesion finds immediate and instinctive expression in some act designed to secure the perpetuation of the social cohesion. Now to the primitive the social “life” cannot be an abstraction, but a concrete embodiment with a virility of its own, resident obviously in the man who is himself the incarnation of social unity—the king. The primary rite, then, is to keep the king’s power undiminished and permanent, in the only way in which that can be done—by handing on the succession to his eldest son as soon as his strength begins to fail him. For with his strength is bound up that of the tribe, and if a young and vigorous man is not always head of the tribe, the tribe suffers decay in consequence. Hence, the king is surrounded with the most elaborate precautions and taboos, for, should he make a single false step, untold disaster will befall the tribe.
But, of course, the king has to die eventually, and it would be a sinful waste of divine energy for the tribe not to absorb the strength in him which is the strength of the tribe. So the king, as soon as his powers fail, is promptly killed and eaten among the most rudimentary of primitives; his body is divided among his ex-subjects and worshippers, his blood drunk among them to establish a blood brotherhood, his fat rubbed over his successor doubly to reassure a transmission of virility. It is easy to see how with the rise of civilization among agriculturalists these crude and disgusting materials of a cannibalistic repast would be sublimated into bread for flesh, wine for blood, anointed oil for rubbed fat, with the symbolic basis retained.2
The slaying of the divine king, however, is apparently a universal practice among primitives, not confined to agriculturalists, and we are here concerned with the fertility aspect of it. For with these peoples we have the special problem added, not only to maintain social solidarity, but to ensure the fertility of the soil and an abundant crop.
Now the primary instinct for self-preservation and perpetuation of life brings with it a perception of recurrence. No one lives for ever; but life is transmitted from father to son and is, thus, recurrent. What is true of the human world is just as true of the natural world: the heavenly bodies and the seasons are recurrent. And with vegetation we have, of course, the annual death at the beginning of winter and revival in the spring. With agricultural primitives the perception of seasonal rhythm synchronizes with the instinct to eat the divine king in a ritual sacrifice, so that the latter rite becomes either a harvest or vintage festival or a spring festival—generally the former. But this correspondence between the human and natural worlds does not extend only to this, but to its reverse—the humanizing of the natural. “Vegetation,” like “society,” is too abstract a conception for the primitive: there must be a spirit of vegetation, a divine and dying god of natural as of human life.
Thus, all agricultural primitives develop much the same myth of a young (because flourishing and vigorous) god of vegetation slain annually in the fall and reviving in the spring. This spirit, being nourished by the soil, exists to that soil in the relation of son or daughter to mother. Each fall the god is conceived as slain by emasculation (the thigh wound of Adonis is a later euphemism), his sterility in death being bewailed by the women, representing the earth mother, along with certain charms of sympathetic magic, such as throwing pots of flowers into the water. Sometimes, in sympathy with the rhythm of the seasons, the divine king is slain in the fall when the god dies, and his successor does not take control until the spring: a peculiar feature of government preserved by the Romans and written into the American Constitution. In any case, the god or goddess dies and is mourned in all countries, only the names being changed. The most famous of all such fertility gods is the Syrian Adonis, whose mother-lover was Aphrodite. The god was called Tammuz in Babylonia, Osiris, beloved by Isis, in Egypt, Dionysus in some parts of Greece, Hyacinthus in Sparta, Attis, son of Cybele, in Phrygia; but the myths were so similar, and the rites so identical, that under the theocrasia of Roman imperialism they became inextricably confused. Adonis gradually extended his sway over Greece, and Attis over Rome, but with the rise of Christianity they disappeared, leaving only Adonis as a purely literary memory, until science began to unravel the symbolism latent in the art which developed from the fertility cults. In Greek mythology there are dying goddesses as well, of whom Proserpine or Persephone, beloved by Demeter (whose name, earth mother, shows most clearly her origin), Iphigenia, and Kore are the best known. The idea has also left its traces on the figures of Orpheus and Pan.3
Any bright red vegetation was associated with the spilt blood of the god: the red anemone with that of Adonis, and the red silt brought down by the Adonis river; the pomegranate with that of Dionysus; and the hyacinth, “that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe,”4 with that of the spirit whose name it bears. To understand how natural and unforced such an idea would be we have only to think of the spontaneous growth of the symbolism of the “poppies” in the Great War. Some of the gods, among which the Philistine Dagon must be included, were explicitly corn-gods; others, like Dionysus, were wine-gods; still others, like the Teutonic Balder the Beautiful, were tree-gods. According to the principles of sympathetic magic, in order to ensure fertility of soil, unrestrained sexual licence on the part of the tribe should prevail during the ritual period of harvest and vintage, and, sometimes, a period of abstention was observed in the spring, which latter, being far more encouraged by Christianity, has survived in Lent. Of the essentially orgiastic nature of the fertility cult ritual there seems no reasonable doubt. The god who controls the rains on which depends the life of the people is essentially a god of caprice and haphazard, only too likely to be indifferent. With most agricultural peoples there grows a pernicious tendency to compel the attention of the god by some action which, by virtue of its sensational horror and wickedness, will be certain to stimulate action. Hence, mutilation and murder, both ritual and spasmodic, form a large and sinister part of the ceremonies.
The barbaric ferocity of the slaying of the divine king could naturally not survive the first impact of civilization, and the king at first provided a substitute in his eldest son, then, as the rule relaxed, an annual victim of some kind, captive, slave, youth chosen by lot, even sometimes a volunteer. From slaying this mock-king civilization advanced eventually to holding a carnival, with the sham king as the presiding clown, or, as he was called in England, the “lord of misrule.” The clown would be given a triumphal procession, and sometimes some rough treatment afterwards, but the general atmosphere would be one of good humour and horseplay.
With this softening down on human sacrifice the sacrificial victim becomes an animal. The tendency to associate the corn-spirit with some animal lurking near it is very strong, and the particular animal chosen is largely a matter of accident. Thus, the myth that Adonis was killed by a boar means that Adonis was frequently worshipped in the form of a boar, the opposition between animal and god being paralleled by a transition in the attitude toward the animal itself; from being sacred it comes to be regarded as unclean. These ideas of sacredness and uncleanliness are the obverse and reverse of the same thing, connected by the idea of taboo. Scientists tend to believe that all the “unclean” animals in Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Hinduism were originally sacred. The association of Dionysus and Pan with the goat is also well known.
This was the type of religion rampant in Palestine, in all probability, before the advent of the Hebrews. There is no reason to suppose that the dying-god myth was not in Canaan when it was everywhere else. But just to what extent the rites permeated into the life of the Hebrews the redaction of the Old Testament records, chiefly by P,5 has prevented us from knowing. That an extensive permeation did take place is evident, and is symbolized by a curious piece of irony: the name Jehovah, which is a synthesis of the consonants of Yahweh and the vowels of Adonai, lord, which is only another form of Adonis. Dan, one of the twelve tribes, is a name also cognate with Adonis. We have, however, to read a bit between the lines if we are to obtain what we are looking for.
It is possible that we have blurred, refracted, and distorted forms of many fertility rites. The extremely unpleasant story with which the Book of Judges closes, which related how the tribe of Benjamin was replenished, may describe a fertility festival.6 Something of the search for the lost spirit in the darkness of the underworld which we find in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice may have crept into the story of Lot’s wife.7 There are strong traces of a sun mythology attached to a culture hero in the Samson cycle,8 and solar and chthonic rites are never, as we shall presently show, to be clearly separated. Possibly the hanging of the five Gibeonite kings on trees in Joshua 10 may be, like all hanging, a reminiscence of sacrifice in tree worship.9 The wanderings of the children of Israel are perhaps collateral with the initiatory search for Kore in imitation of Demeter, a prominent feature in the Greek mysteries. Certainly there were sacred trees, which the Phoenicians called asherim; these were usually evergreens, which preserve the life spirit of vegetation through the winter and are invoked at the winter solstice as harbingers of fertility, as in our Christmas festival. Abraham’s oaks at Mamre were presumably sacred. But there is one fairly clear instance of a fertility sacrifice: the story of Jephthah’s daughter. The redactor has made this look as much as possible like a simple story of fufilment of a vow, but the crucial passage in Judges 11:38–40 makes it clear that the unfortunate girl was sacrificed in the role of a Hebrew equivalent of Iphigenia.10
The orthodox Yahwist party never relaxed its opposition to all fertility cults. The ascetic stern virtues of the nomadic Hebrews were cited by innumerable Cato censors11 as proof of the moral degeneracy and effeminacy of the exotic customs. Those with higher moral standards set by the more rigorous life were outraged at Canaanite licentiousness, from our point of view with considerable justification. The tendency toward the worst possible gesture in sacrifice which we have mentioned was expressed in child sacrifice. Some investigators think that the Old Testament records an era in which child sacrifice was gradually giving way to animal sacrifice, and that the story of the origin of the Passover [Exodus 12:1–36] and Abraham’s substitution sacrifice of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah [Genesis 22:1–18] illustrate for the Hebrews that animal sacrifice was more desirable to Yahweh than child sacrifice, the implication being that child sacrifice was the ultimate rite, so powerful as to be sure of efficacy when used as a last resort. The vehement assurances of the prophets that Yahweh does not want the blood of murdered children undoubtedly reflect a popular superstition that the animal sacrifice was a makeshift for the god’s supreme demand. The influence of the Canaanites is obvious, whose obscenities are too notorious to dwell on here. Again, the sexual licence of the ritual orgies was shunned by the Yahwists as something dirty and disgusting both physically and morally. Westermarck and Edward Carpenter have both shown that among many peoples this sexual licence and sacred prostitution are balanced by a tendency to set apart homosexuals for special offices such as the priesthood, and the extensive development of homosexuality among all people who have concentrated strongly on the purely reproductive aspect of normal intercourse is very frequent.12 Moral delinquency, effeminacy, child sacrifice, whoredom, sodomy: this is a formidable indictment to bring against any religion, and the prophets of monotheism, from Elijah to St. Paul, made the most of it.
The Yahwist reaction gathers strength, of course, with the division of the kingdom and the revolt of Israel against the syncretizing tendencies of Solomon.13 It seems fairly certain that Yahweh was worshipped as a bull, a stock symbol of fertility and strength, and that the well-developed Egyptian and Mesopotamian pantheons were represented in the Temple. But Yahweh’s prestige as the tribal god gave him a powerful advantage in the struggle for national unity against the Philistines, as opposed to the localizing tendencies of Baal worship. The Canaanites were peasants, which meant that their worship, besides being agricultural, was largely an affair of the household. The “baal” was in nearly every case simply a local genius or presiding spirit of any given house, tree, river, mountain, or other natural object. The disintegrating influence such a worship would exert on the spirit of national unity is obvious, and the prophets carried on a bitter and unceasing fight against it, the great saga recording Elijah’s contest with the Baal worshippers [1 Kings 18:1–40] being the theme of an epic struggle completed only by Christianity. More and more the prophets struggled to make the issue a clear-cut one between the acceptance of morality and the rejection of obscenity. It is largely the heat of such a struggle that engenders the asceticism characteristic of so much monotheism in its earlier developments.
With the Exile, however, the fight, so far from gaining success, actually lost, owing to the increment of exotic influences. From the indignant descriptions in Isaiah 57 and Ezekiel 6 it is evident that the fertility cult had become unrestrained in Palestine during its Captivity. Ezekiel (8:14) sees the women bewailing Tammuz in the very gates of Jerusalem. And in postexilic times a development of the fertility cult had become settled into the Judaistic ritual in the inauguration of the feast of Purim, with its quasi-historical aetiological myth, the Book of Esther.14
We have said that with the advance of civilization the slaying of the divine king had become sublimated into the slaying of a captive substituting for the king. Mexico in Aztec times never got beyond this stage. But in Mesopotamia and Rome the captive became simply a temporary clown, brought in to inaugurate a period of carnival in which, as symbolic of his mock kingship, servants ordered around their masters, and a general air of substitution prevailed. In this event, so far from slaughtering a wretched captive, a condemned criminal would actually be released to serve as clown. This festival was called the Saturnalia with the Romans and the Sacaea with Babylonians, and the Jewish Purim is essentially the same thing. Esther may or may not be a historical reminiscence, but in any case Esther and Mordecai are in all probability Ishtar and Marduk, the great Isis and Osiris of Babylon. The Haman who wanted to hang Mordecai and got hanged himself is the luckless sham king, with his triumphal procession frustrated and given to the real king. The Purim feast was acknowledged to be one of relaxation of emotions, and even as late as the Middle Ages Jews on Purim day would kidnap and hang or crucify a Christian child in the character of Haman.
Now we have enough evidence for an exceedingly plausible and interesting hypothesis: was Jesus crucified in the character of Haman? There is nothing shocking in the idea, except insofar as it illustrates the symbolic in addition to the historical mockery of the Christ and his rejection of men. Here was a captive, charged with proclaiming himself King of the Jews. He had had a triumphal procession through Jerusalem, like the clown-king; he had overthrown the seats of the money-changers in the Temple, quite in character with a Saturnalia. What more obvious than to crucify him in the same role? Hence, the crown of thorns and the mocking salutation of “Hail! King of the Jews!”; hence, the inscription over his head on the Cross; hence, the custom of releasing a prisoner. Frazer suggests that Barabbas was released as the clown-king;15 had Jesus been released he would have been compelled to undergo a gauntlet of undignified but fairly harmless horseplay. An objection is, of course, that Jesus was mocked by the Roman soldiers; but the Roman soldiers may have been provincial Syrians, and, if not, the Romans themselves knew all about the Saturnalia, which in the Danube frontier provinces was frequently a human sacrifice and not a carnival. In the Passion stories perhaps the cursing of the barren fig tree is an unobtrusive underscoring of the fertility motive. It also seems logical to associate, as Chesterton suggests, the slaughter of the innocents with the passing of the old world as a last despairingly ferocious gesture.16 More and more one becomes convinced that the establishing of an integration of the historical and symbolic implications of the supreme sacrifice is a task of imminent and overwhelming importance for the Christian apologist today.
Long before this, however, the world of the eastern Mediterranean had become sufficiently advanced culturally to grasp the idea, for its religious life, of abstract recurrence rather than simply the recurrence of concrete experiential data. Consequently, the various myths of recurrence begin to coincide in a single idea. The periodically disappearing fertility god is parallelled with the periodically vanquished but perennially arising sun-god. Sun worship is a study by itself, with which we are not concerned except when it joins with the fertility cults in the abstract conception of a temporary descent into the world of darkness or death and arrival again into light or life, whichever the protagonist is. But with fertility worship sun worship establishes a double relationship: it establishes a common factor and a relation of tension or antithesis.
First, for the common factor: religion develops the doctrine that the human soul, like the forces of nature, has to disappear into darkness and be reborn. This is the central idea behind all Greek religion, which, as inward life rather than as purely superficial cultus, was essentially a religion of initiation or purgatorial progression through difficulties and dangers to the full awakening of the spirit. The Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries are based on this idea, and the fact that the purgatorial progression consists in a search for the lost Kore and culminates with the symbolic act of sowing an ear of corn shows its fertility origin. In the same way the rise of purgatorial literature among the Jews, the growth of eschatology and apocalyptic, the various symbols of the katabasis such as we find in Jonah and Daniel, the developments of the ideas of the Suffering Servant and the Son of Man, illustrate the same process.
Now for the antithesis: the sun is a purely transcendent force; the fertility of the earth an essentially immanent one. Even when the gods of the classical pantheon had yielded place to Mithra and Attis, the complete fusion did not take place because of the tension between solar and chthonic ideas. Pantheism is the religious heresy resulting from an overemphasis on either a transcendent or an immanent God, without attempting to maintain the eternal tension between them, and paganism is essentially pantheistic. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity not only retains the paradox, but supplies the missing link in Jesus, the God-man who was at once hanged on a tree as the god of the trees incarnate, and stretched on the Cross in the radiating posture of the sun-god. Christ is the chasmogamous opening of Judaism from history into symbol, and the focusing, looking at him the other way, of all symbolic religious and artistic aspirations in historical actuality.
In the above I have implicitly identified the God immanent with the Holy Spirit. This conception is said to be in genesis a female principle, as Isis was to the son-god Horus and the father-god Osiris. Catholicism replaced the abstract doctrine with the poetically far apter idea of the brooding Mother of God, the Madonna, like the earth mother maternal but inviolate.
I have spoken of the fertility and solar cults as bound up with the symbolic rather than the historical expression of religion. This means that what it may lack in the moral approach to the good it makes up in the aesthetic, for the unit of art is the symbol. It is now rapidly becoming a commonplace of literary criticism that out of the pagan rites—chiefly the chthonic ones—were born the great rhythmic and communal art forms, music and drama, the essence of all objective art, forming a sort of corolla of the liturgy. The cultus begins with the spasmodic actions of sympathetic magic, leaping in the air to make the crops grow higher, walking in a processional circle to isolate a sacred area in enchantment, inarticulate ecstatic cries, and so on, gradually developing into a ritual dance, generally intended to re-enact the adventures of the god invoked. Out of this ritual dance grows a disciplined and mature drama. Tragedy was originally a goat sacrifice, like the Jewish scapegoat offering to Azazel,17 the goat being an incarnation of Dionysus, and Dionysiac ecstasy being the primary impetus of Greek creative activity. The fall of the tragic hero is in essence the death of the sacrificial victim. For the hero is the incarnation of the aspiring ego, the desire of man for self-apotheosis, and his fall brings the profound cathartic reaction of a reabsorption into society, like Samson (an important but frequently overlooked example of a sacrificial victim) justified by death. Maud Bodkin says in her entertaining book:
If, as I suggest, the spiritual power, which the philosopher analysing his poetic experience is constrained to represent, be conceived psychologically as the awakened sense of our common nature in its active emotional phase, then our exultation in the death of Hamlet is related in direct line of descent to the religious exultation felt by the primitive group that made sacrifice of the divine king or sacred animal, the representative of the tribal life, and, by the communion of its shed blood, felt that life strengthened and renewed. Hamlet, though he dies, is immortal, because he is the representative and creature of the immortal life of the race. He lives, as he desired to live, in the story with which he charged Horatio—and us who, having participated in that story, descend from the poetic ecstasy to draw breath again in the harsh world of our straitened separate personalities.18
But if tragedy develops from the sacrifice, should not comedy develop from the idea of the mock or substituted king, with its archetype the carnival? Dr. Richards says in his Principles of Literary Criticism: “The breaking-down of undesirable attitudes is normally part of the total response to a comedy.”19 This is a very cautious generalization, but I believe that a theory of comedy to be at all adequate would have to presuppose as the comic essence the exposure of a sham, the unreal deliberately but deliberately unsuccessfully substituted for the real.
In the same way the plastic arts, basically iconic, develop: from images and cave drawings which attempt to control the god by making an image of him, sculpture and painting take their origin.
This, of course, explains why the Hebrews gave so unique a contribution to culture and yet ignored the specifically cultural: the development of the arts. Job is too late and cosmopolitan a production to pass as representative Hebrew drama; the Yahwists abhorred the plastic arts; all the prophets attacked idols and Amos at least attacked architecture (“the great houses” [3:15]) as well. It preserved, however, through the Chronicler, an unusually strong interest in music, and so enabled Christianity, when music and drama were reborn in the womb of the Church, to develop the only systematic tradition of music the world has ever seen.
The pagan rites were a matrix of art, and of science as well, for science, as I have suggested in opposition to Frazer, develops from magic and occultism. The magical element in the rites is obvious enough; but not so occultism, as that development can take place only when paganism has finally reduced itself to its ultimate antithesis of earth worship and sky worship. Yet what is astrology but the forcing of the sun-gods to serve human speculations, or alchemy but the wresting of the quintessence of earth for man’s use? But the fertility rites, important as they were, by themselves, unaided by Judaism, would have failed. To progress, to save his soul or ameliorate his condition, man must live in time and must have an intuitive grasp of the meaning of time-existence. A religion focused on an historical Incarnation, thus, automatically distinguishes itself, as a religion of progress and challenge to life, from all others. And fertility religions are focused on the pure present; they move from season to season without advance in right living. By their periodic stimulation of the appetites and their value as an exhaust valve of energy they can continue indefinitely, but their ultimate futility can bring nothing but the unutterable weariness we find settling down on the late pagan world.
“Thou wast wearied with the length of thy way; yet saidst thou not, It is in vain: thou didst find a quickening of thy strength; therefore thou wast not faint.”
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Chesterton, G.K.: The Everlasting Man. [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925]
James, E.O.: Primitive Ritual and Sacrifice.20
Bodkin, Maud: Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. [London: Oxford University Press, 1934]
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