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custom in regard to domestic cattle, were led by their loftier morality to discard it in respect of children,
and to replace it by a merciful law that first born children should be ransomed instead of sacrificed.
Page 194-195. With the preceding evidence before us we may safely infer that a custom of allowing a
king to kill his son, as {199} a substitute or vicarious sacrifice for himself, would be in now way
exceptional or surprising, at least in Semitic lands, where indeed religion seems at one time to have
recommended or enjoined every man, as a duty that he owed to his god, to take the life of his eldest son.
And it would be entirely in accordance with analogy if, long after the barbarous custom had been dropped
by others, it continued to be observed by kings, who remain in many respects the representatives of a
vanished world, solitary pinnacles that topple over the rising waste of waters under which the past lies
buried. We have seen that in Greece two families of royal descent remained liable to furnish human
victims from their number down to a time when the rest of their fellow countrymen and country women
ran hardly more risk of being sacrificed than passengers in Cheapside at present run of being hurried into
St. Paul's or Bow Church and immolated on the altar. A final mitigation of the custom would be to
substitute condemned criminals for innocent victims. Such a substitution is known to have taken place in
the human sacrifices annually offered in Rhodes to Baal, and we have seen good grounds for believing
that the criminal, who perished on the cross or the gallows at Babylon, died instead of the king in whose
royal robes he had been allowed to masquerade for a few days.
Further evidence with regard to the custom of hanging the god upon a tree is given in Attis, Adonis,
Osiris.[WEH NOTE: Vol. I] We again quote. (Page 289-291.) We may conjecture that in old days the
priest who bore the name and played the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele was regularly
hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated
into the form in which it is known to us in later times, {200} when the priest merely draw blood from his
body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsala men
and animals were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human victims dedicated to Odin
were regularly put to death by hanging or by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being
strung up to a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was called the Lord of the
Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to
have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal, in
which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:
'I know that I hung on the windy tree
For nine whole nights,
Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
Myself to myself.'
The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philipine Islands, used annually to sacrifice human victims for the
good of the crops in a similar way. Early in December, when the constellation Orion appeared at seven
o'clock in the evening, the people knew that the time had come to clear their fields for sowing and to
sacrifice a slave. The sacrifice was presented to certain powerful spirits as payment for the good year
which the people had enjoyed, and to ensure the favour of the spirits for the coming season. The victim
was led to a great tree in the forest; there he was tied with his back to the tree and his arms stretched high
above his head, in the attitude in which ancient artists portrayed Marsyas hanging on the fatal tree. While
he thus hung by the arms he was slain by a spear thrust through his body at the level of the armpits. {201}
We need hardly proceed. Every detail of the death of Jesus appears as the essential in some ritual or other
of some earlier faith. We need not trouble the reader with similar parallels to the resurrection: we trust that
the tests which we have offered him will induce him to make the Golden Bough the chief cornerstone of
this religious library.
It will be objected that we have proved almost too much, that we have had to mingle the rites of Attis with
those of Osiris; we have traced one incident to the worship of Dionysus, another to that of Mithras or the
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