Section 2. Killing the Sacred Ram.
THE RUDE Californian rite which we have just considered has a close
parallel in the religion of ancient Egypt. The Thebans and all other
Egyptians who worshipped the Theban god Ammon held rams to be sacred,
and would not sacrifice them. But once a year at the festival of Ammon they
killed a ram, skinned it, and clothed the image of the god in the skin. Then
they mourned over the ram and buried it in a sacred tomb. The custom was
explained by a story that Zeus had once exhibited himself to Hercules clad
in the fleece and wearing the head of a ram. Of course the ram in this case
was simply the beast-god of Thebes, as the wolf was the beast-god of
Lycopolis, and the goat was the beast-god of Mendes. In other words, the
ram was Ammon himself. On the monuments, it is true, Ammon appears in
semi-human form with the body of a man and the head of a ram. But this
only shows that he was in the usual chrysalis state through which
beast-gods regularly pass before they emerge as full-blown
anthropomorphic gods. The ram, therefore, was killed, not as a sacrifice to
Ammon, but as the god himself, whose identity with the beast is plainly
shown by the custom of clothing his image in the skin of the slain ram. The
reason for thus killing the ram-god annually may have been that which I
have assigned for the general custom of killing a god and for the special
Californian custom of killing the divine buzzard. As applied to Egypt, this
explanation is supported by the analogy of the bull-god Apis, who was not
suffered to outlive a certain term of years. The intention of thus putting a
limit to the life of the human god was, as I have argued, to secure him from
the weakness and frailty of age. The same reasoning would explain the
custom-probably an older one-of putting the beast-god to death annually,
as was done with the ram of Thebes. 1
One point in the Theban ritual-the application of the skin to the image of
the god-deserves particular attention. If the god was at first the living ram,
his representation by an image must have originated later. But how did it
originate? One answer to this question is perhaps furnished by the practice
of preserving the skin of the animal which is slain as divine. The
Californians, as we have seen, preserved the skin of the buzzard; and the
skin of the goat, which is killed on the harvest-field as a representative of
the corn-spirit, is kept for various superstitious purposes. The skin in fact
was kept as a token or memorial of the god, or rather as containing in it a
part of the divine life, and it had only to be stuffed or stretched upon a
frame to become a regular image of him. At first an image of this kind would
be renewed annually, the new image being provided by the skin of the
slain animal. But from annual images to permanent images the transition is
easy. We have seen that the older custom of cutting a new May-tree every
year was superseded by the practice of maintaining a permanent
May-pole, which was, however, annually decked with fresh leaves and
flowers, and even surmounted each year by a fresh young tree. Similarly
when the stuffed skin, as a representative of the god, was replaced by a
permanent image of him in wood, stone, or metal, the permanent image was
annually clad in the fresh skin of the slain animal. When this stage had
been reached, the custom of killing the ram came naturally to be interpreted
as a sacrifice offered to the image, and was explained by a story like that
of Ammon and Hercules. 2