Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D. and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially made his own, and for further information on it his classic work should be consulted. (1) Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. (See also S. Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius. Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes largely from Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in the following passage: "The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for the male gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess. (1) The latter victims were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in, each case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice (? victim), and of both with the officiating priest. The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated." (2) (1) Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae. It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert the wrath of the god (the Sun). A man and a woman, as representing the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs (fertility) round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore. (Nettleship and Sandys.) (2) A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.