I have dealt in this chapter only in very brief summary with this vast and interesting question of human deities. Mr. Frazer has devoted to it two large and fascinating volumes. His work is filled with endless facts as to such man-gods themselves, the mode of their vicarious or expiatory slaughter on behalf of the community, the gentler substitution of condemned criminals for the divine kings in more civilised countries, the occasional mitigation whereby the divine king merely draws his own blood instead {246}of killing himself, or where an effigy is made to take the place of the actual victim, and so forth _ad infinitum_. All these valuable suggestions and ideas I could not reproduce here without transcribing in full many pages of _The Golden Bough_, where Mr. Frazer has marshalled the entire evidence on the point with surprising effectiveness. I will content myself therefore by merely referring readers to that most learned yet interesting and amusing book. I will only say in conclusion that what most concerns us here is Mr. Frazer’s ample and convincing proof of the large part played by such slain (and rerisen) man-gods in the religion of those self-same east-Mediterranean countries where Christianity was first evolved as a natural product of the popular imagination. The death and resurrection of the humanly-embodied god form indeed the keynote of the greatest and most sacred religions of western Asia and northeastern Africa. CHAPTER XII.--THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS. |Normally {247}and originally, I believe, all gods grow spontaneously. They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or chieftains. The household gods are the dead of the family; the greater gods are the dead chiefs of the state or town or village. But upon this earlier and spontaneous crop of gods there supervenes later an artificial crop, deliberately manufactured. The importance of this later artificial class is so great, especially in connexion with the gods of agriculture, and with the habit of eating the god’s body as corn and drinking his blood as wine, that it becomes necessary for us here to examine their nature in due order. We shall find that some knowledge of them is needed preliminary to the comprehension of the Christian system.