divinity can accrue from taking part in a burlesque, which cannot also be a high tragedy, with divine actors. As if difficulties were never to cease, the beardless buffoon is a degenerate copy of the Sacæan victim. But while _he_ was a proxy for the king, and also a representative of Humman, or Marduk, or Tammuz, or Gilgamesh, or Eabani, or a god not yet identified: in his popular form, as the beardless buffoon, 'his pretence of suffering from heat, and his final disappearance, suggest that, if he personified either of the seasons, it was the departing winter rather than the coming summer.'[8] If so, was the buffoon of the popular ceremony the folklore original of the Sacæan mock-king, or was he a degenerate copy of that versatile victim with a new meaning popularly assigned to him? We are to 'recognise in him the familiar features of the mock or temporary king,'[9] though he has neither crown, sceptre, robes, nor aught to cover his nakedness. If he is not the popular original of the mock-king of the Sacæa, how does he, and how does his magic, put us 'in a position finally to unmask the leading personages in the Book of Esther'?[10] If he is a new popular interpretation of the Sacæan mock-king, a misconstrued survival, he cannot help to explain the Sacæa, or 'Esther,' especially if, as a player in a farce which was a mitigation of the Sacæa, he had not come into existence when 'Esther' was written. But, if the beardless buffoon represents the popular germ of the Sacæan victim, then that victim was originally neither the king's proxy, nor Tammuz, nor Marduk, nor Gilgamesh, nor Eabani, but perhaps 'the departing winter.' He can only serve the theory, in that capacity, if provided with a counterpart to represent the coming summer, while he and his counterpart both have female mates, of whom there is not a ghost of a trace in our authorities, whether in the instance of the Sacæa, the Ride of the Beardless, or the Crucifixion. Nobody says that there were two beardless buffoons, yet there is just as much evidence for them as for the conjectural two sacred characters, with two sacred harlots, at the Sacæa. We must avoid the _multiplicatio entium præter necessitatem_. [1] _G. B_. iii. 181, 182. [2] _G. B_. iii. 183. [3] _G. B_. iii. 192. [4] _G. B_. iii. 186. [5] _G. B_. iii. 120. [6] _G. B_. iii. 195. [7] _G. B_. iii. 192. [8] _G. B_. iii. 184. [9] _G. B_. iii. 182. [10] _G. B_. iii. 184. INDEX