In vol. ii. 253 Mr. Frazer returns to the victim, the mock-king, of
the Sacæa. But he says nothing here about the real king of Babylon.
He wishes to show how and why the victim is divine. Now, in ii. 26,
we were told that the victim is divine because he 'represents a dying
god.' 'For we must not forget that the king dies in his character of a
god.'...
Was Mr. Frazer satisfied with this explanation given in ii. 26?
Apparently not; for[19] he gives a new explanation and a different
one. 'It seems worth suggesting that the mock-king who was annually
killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacæa on the sixteenth day of
the month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself.' Here the Tammuz
dummy or effigy of ii. 123, 124, is, perhaps, discarded. Still, if a
real live Tammuz was burned on a funeral pyre[20] his ashes might well
be represented by a dummy. It has not yet occurred to Mr. Frazer, as
it does later, to have the re-arisen god personated by a living human
counterpart (Mordecai in a later page) of the dead Tammuz (Haman). The
festival of the Sacæa is now a Tammuz festival, a religious feast,
and, indeed, is identical with that of ii. 123, 124, for it occurs in
the month Lous. Now Lous, says Mr. Robertson Smith, 'answered to the
lunar month Tammuz,'[21] and the month of Tammuz[22] was June-July, or
June-September.
There could not surely be _two_ Tammuz feasts in the month Tammuz? We
are therefore confronted by the singular facts that Tammuz lay 'on a
funeral pyre'[23] and also that, as the Sacæan victim, who, Mr. Frazer
thinks it 'worth suggesting' personated Tammuz, he was at the same
feast, the Sacæa, whipped and hanged.[24] Mr. Frazer goes on: 'If this
conjecture is right, the view that the mock-king at the Sacæa was slain
in the character of a god' (Tammuz) 'would be established.'
But it was established already, was it not on other grounds, to Mr.
Frazer's satisfaction, in ii. 26? There the criminal victim died as a
king, and as a god, for the king was a god, and so was his proxy. Now,
on the other hand, if Mr. Frazer's latest conjecture is right, the
victim dies as a real known god, Tammuz. We keep asking, Was the king
also an incarnation of Tammuz? May I not be excused for surmising that
we have here an hypothesis in the making, an hypothesis resting on two
different theories? If Mr. Frazer holds that the king of Babylon was
also Tammuz, as the mock-king was, here was the opportunity for saying
so, and proving the fact from Babylonian texts.
Mr. Frazer here gives us a Tammuz feast in which Tammuz lies on a
funeral pyre, and also a Tammuz feast in which the human representative
of that deity is whipped and hanged, while 'the dead Tammuz was
probably represented in effigy,' water was poured over him, and he came
to life again. How? In the person of Mordecai? These are the results of
ii. 123, 124, and of ii. 253, 254.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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