In other instances, however, the divine character attributed to the human scapegoat is quite unmistakable. Among the Gonds of India, at the festival of the god of the crops, the deity descends on the head of one of the worshippers, who is seized with a fit, and rushes off to the jungle. There, it is believed he would die of himself, if he were not brought back and tenderly treated: but the Gonds, more merciful here than in many other cases, take him back and restore him. The idea is that he is thus singled out to bear the sins of the rest of the village. At Halberstadt in Thuringia an exactly similar custom survived till late in the middle ages. A man was chosen, stained with deadly sin, as the public scapegoat. On the first day of Lent he was dressed in mourning, and expelled from church. For forty days, he wandered about, fed only by the priests, and no one would speak to him. He slept in the street. On the day before Good Friday, however, he was absolved of his sins, and being called Adam, was believed to be now in a state of innocence. This is a mitigated and Christianised form of the human sin-offering. Again, the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of sacred slaves in the temple of the moon, many of whom were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited unusual symptoms of inspiration, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain, and maintained for a year in luxury, like the Mexican corn-god. This fact immediately brings the human scapegoat into line with the annual human gods we have already considered. At the end of a year, he was anointed with unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and led forth to be sacrificed. {352}The sacrifice was accomplished as a purificatory ceremony. Mr. Frazer, to whom I owe all these examples, connects with such rites the curious ceremony of the expulsion of the Old Mars, the Mamurius Veturius, at Rome. Every year on the 14th of March (near the spring equinox), a man, called by the name of a god, was clad in skins--the significance of which rite we now know--and after being beaten with long white rods, was expelled the city. From one point of view, this personage no doubt represented the god of vegetation of the previous year (for the Mars was originally an annual corn-god). But from another point of view, being now of no further use to the community, he was utilised with true old Roman parsimony as a scapegoat, and sent to carry away the offences of the people. Indeed, there seems to be some reason for believing that he was driven into the territory of the hostile Oscans. In this case we perceive that an annual god is made the sin-offering for the crimes of a nation.