If Mr. Frazer really means to add the duties of a scapegoat, and the consequent beating,[17] to the duties of proxy king and Tammuz man in his chapter on the Saturnalia, he does not say so. It does not appear, then, that he wishes to explain the scourging of the mock-king at the Sacæa by his theory of a human scapegoat, and it does not appear that he ever explains the stripping of the royal robes from the unlucky man. Yet if the man really died as a mock-king, there must have been some reason for stripping him of his royal raiment. We never hear that the representative of King Saturnus was either stripped or whipped before being sacrificed. Nor do I remark that, in Anahuac, the human victim who personated a god was stripped of the god's robes and ornaments. Why then was the Sacæan victim, and he alone (as far as we know), reduced from his royalty by being stripped before execution, and also brought down to the estate of a slave by being scourged? III. MORE PERIODS OF LICENCE I am going with more than diffidence to offer a guess at the reasons, asking it to be remembered that I do so merely because the case is isolated, and cannot at present be illustrated by parallel ceremonies. But first, returning to the periods of licence, I must show that they are not peculiar to agricultural races, nor, therefore, necessarily instituted to aid the farmer. This in itself is a great comfort, for one wearies of being told that the crops are so eternally the cause of custom and rite. Among the Arunta of Central Australia, in many ways a backward race and not agricultural, 'considerable licence is allowed on certain occasions, when a large number of men and women are gathered together to perform certain corroborees' (or sacred dances). So say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. The laws of marriage are then turned upside down. A man is ordered to have relations with the woman who is his 'Mura--that is, one to whom he may not, under ordinary circumstances, even speak, or go near, much less have anything like marital relations with.' Every man is expected to send his wife to these dances, for the express purpose of violating, in this period of licence, the most sacred laws of the tribe.[18] These backward persons, the Arunta, have no native strong drink, and cannot get intoxicated, but what they can they do in the way of licence, like more civilised races, and necessarily not for agricultural reasons, as they have no agriculture. They break their most sacred law, just as the Jews, at Purim, deliberately broke the law of Moses.[19] Conceivably, then, even stripping, scourging, and hanging a mock-king at the Sacæa may also have been done for some reason not agricultural.