To be sure Mr. Frazer tries to turn this point, and how? Perhaps
ancient kings of Lydia were once burned alive on pyres, 'as living
embodiments of their god.' For the Lydian, like the Macedonian and many
other royal houses, claimed descent from Heracles, who, being on fire
already under the shirt of Nessus, homeopathically burned himself.
Crœsus, defeated, was about to die by fire, but not out of his own
head. Cyrus was going to burn him alive, like Jeanne d'Arc, Cranmer,
Wishart, and others. This cruel infliction by a foreign enemy hardly
proves a Lydian custom, nor are Lydians exactly Babylonians. Again,
if an old Prussian king 'wished to leave a good name behind him,' he
burned himself before a holy oak. 'Crummies is not a Prussian,' nor
were the kings of Babylon. Once more Movers thought that the 'divine
pair who figured by deputy' at the Sacæa were Semiramis and Sandan
or Sardanapalus. (Which divine pair, the king's proxy and one of the
king's concubines, or the Tammuz man and the sacred harlot?) Sandan was
thought to be Heracles by the Greeks, and his effigy was perhaps burned
on a pyre at his festival in Tarsus. Now the Persians, according to
Agathias, worshipped Sandes (Sandan), and perhaps the Babylonians did
so also, though really that agreeable Byzantine minor poet, Agathias,
cannot be called a good witness. Next, K. O. Müller thinks that Sandan
(Sandes) may have been _burned_ in a mystery play in Nineveh, Müller
giving free licence to his fancy, as he admits. Movers, too, thought
that 'at the Sacæa the Zoganes represented a god, and paired with a
woman who personated a goddess.'[11] And Movers thinks that the Sacæan
victim was originally burned.[12]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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