Section 3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle.
THE MEDIATE expulsion of evils by means of a scapegoat or other
material vehicle, like the immediate expulsion of them in invisible form,
tends to become periodic, and for a like reason. Thus every year,
generally in March, the people of Leti, Moa, and Lakor, islands of the
Indian Archipelago, send away all their diseases to sea. They make a proa
about six feet long, rig it with sails, oars, rudder, and other gear, and
every family deposits in its some rice, fruit, a fowl, two eggs, insects that
ravage the fields, and so on. Then they let it drift away to sea, saying,
"Take away from here all kinds of sickness, take them to other islands, to
other lands, distribute them in places that lie eastward, where the sun
rises." The Biajas of Borneo annually send to sea a little bark laden with
the sins and misfortunes of the people. The crew of any ship that falls in
with the ill-omened bark at sea will suffer all the sorrows with which it is
laden. A like custom is annually observed by the Dusuns of the Tuaran
district in British North Borneo. The ceremony is the most important of the
whole year. Its aim is to bring good luck to the village during the ensuing
year by solemnly expelling all the evil spirits that may have collected in or
about the houses throughout the last twelve months. The task of routing out
the demons and banishing them devolves chiefly on women. Dressed in
their finest array, they go in procession through the village. One of them
carries a small sucking pig in a basket on her back; and all of them bear
wands, with which they belabour the little pig at the appropriate moment; its
squeals help to attract the vagrant spirits. At every house the women
dance and sing, clashing castanets or cymbals of brass and jingling
bunches of little brass bells in both hands. When the performance has
been repeated at every house in the village, the procession defiles down
to the river, and all the evil spirits, which the performers have chased from
the houses, follow them to the edge of the water. There a raft has been
made ready and moored to the bank. It contains offerings of food, cloth,
cooking-pots, and swords; and the deck is crowded with figures of men,
women, animals, and birds, all made out of the leaves of the sago palm.
The evil spirits now embark on the raft, and when they are all aboard, it is
pushed off and allowed to float down with the current, carrying the demons
with it. Should the raft run aground near the village, it is shoved off with all
speed, lest the invisible passengers should seize the opportunity of
landing and returning to the village. Finally, the sufferings of the little pig,
whose squeals served to decoy the demons from their lurking-places, are
terminated by death, for it is killed and its carcase thrown away. 1
Every year, at the beginning of the dry season, the Nicobar Islanders
carry the model of a ship through their villages. The devils are chased out
of the huts, and driven on board the little ship, which is then launched and
suffered to sail away with the wind. The ceremony has been described by
a catechist, who witnessed it at Car Nicobar in July 1897. For three days
the people were busy preparing two very large floating cars, shaped like
canoes, fitted with sails, and loaded with certain leaves, which possessed
the valuable property of expelling devils. While the young people were
thus engaged, the exorcists and the elders sat in a house singing songs
by turns; but often they would come forth, pace the beach armed with rods,
and forbid the devil to enter the village. The fourth day of the solemnity
bore a name which means "Expelling the Devil by Sails." In the evening all
the villagers assembled, the women bringing baskets of ashes and
bunches of devil-expelling leaves. These leaves were then distributed to
everybody, old and young. When all was ready, a band of robust men,
attended by a guard of exorcists, carried one of the cars down to the sea
on the right side of the village graveyard, and set it floating in the water.
As soon as they had returned, another band of men carried the other car
to the beach and floated it similarly in the sea to the left of the graveyard.
The demon-laden barks being now launched, the women threw ashes from
the shore, and the whole crowd shouted, saying, "Fly away, devil, fly
away, never come again!" The wind and the tide being favourable, the
canoes sailed quickly away; and that night all the people feasted together
with great joy, because the devil had departed in the direction of Chowra.
A similar expulsion of devils takes place once a year in other Nicobar
villages; but the ceremonies are held at different times in different
places. 2
Amongst many of the aboriginal tribes of China, a great festival is
celebrated in the third month of every year. It is held by way of a general
rejoicing over what the people believe to be a total annihilation of the ills
of the past twelve months. The destruction is supposed to be effected in
the following way. A large earthenware jar filled with gunpowder, stones,
and bits of iron is buried in the earth. A train of gunpowder, communicating
with the jar, is then laid; and a match being applied, the jar and its
contents are blown up. The stones and bits of iron represent the ills and
disasters of the past year, and the dispersion of them by the explosion is
believed to remove the ills and disasters themselves. The festival is
attended with much revelling and drunkenness. 3
At Old Calabar on the coast of Guinea, the devils and ghosts are, or
used to be, publicly expelled once in two years. Among the spirits thus
driven from their haunts are the souls of all the people who died since the
last lustration of the town. About three weeks or a month before the
expulsion, which according to one account takes place in the month of
November, rude effigies representing men and animals, such as
crocodiles, leopards, elephants, bullocks, and birds, are made of
wicker-work or wood, and being hung with strips of cloth and bedizened
with gew-gaws, are set before the door of every house. About three
o'clock in the morning of the day appointed for the ceremony the whole
population turns out into the streets, and proceeds with a deafening uproar
and in a state of the wildest excitement to drive all lurking devils and
ghosts into the effigies, in order that they may be banished with them from
the abodes of men. For this purpose bands of people roam through the
streets knocking on doors, firing guns, beating drums, blowing on horns,
ringing bells, clattering pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might
and main, in short making all the noise it is possible for them to raise. The
hubbub goes on till the approach of dawn, when it gradually subsides and
ceases altogether at sunrise. By this time the houses have been
thoroughly swept, and all the frightened spirits are supposed to have
huddled into the effigies or their fluttering drapery. In these wicker figures
are also deposited the sweepings of the houses and the ashes of
yesterday's fires. Then the demon-laden images are hastily snatched up,
carried in tumultuous procession down to the brink of the river, and thrown
into the water to the tuck of drums. The ebb-tide bears them away
seaward, and thus the town is swept clean of ghosts and devils for another
two years. 4
Similar annual expulsions of embodied evils are not unknown in Europe.
On the evening of Easter Sunday the gypsies of Southern Europe take a
wooden vessel like a band-box, which rests cradle-wise on two cross
pieces of wood. In this they place herbs and simples, together with the
dried carcase of a snake, or lizard, which every person present must first
have touched with his fingers. The vessel is then wrapt in white and red
wool, carried by the oldest man from tent to tent, and finally thrown into
running water, not, however, before every member of the band has spat
into it once, and the sorceress has uttered some spells over it. They
believe that by performing this ceremony they dispel all the illnesses that
would otherwise have afflicted them in the course of the year; and that if
any one finds the vessel and opens it out of curiosity, he and his will be
visited by all the maladies which the others have escaped. 5
The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year
are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the
Garos of Assam, "besides the sacrifices for individual cases of illness,
there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year by a whole
community or village, and are intended to safeguard its members from
dangers of the forest, and from sickness and mishap during the coming
twelve months. The principal of these is the Asongtata ceremony. Close to
the outskirts of every big village a number of stones may be noticed stuck
into the ground, apparently without order or method. These are known by
the name of asong, and on them is offered the sacrifice which the
Asongtata demands. The sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later,
that of a langur (Entellus monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered
necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and is
led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the village. It is
taken inside each house in turn, the assembled villagers, meanwhile,
beating the walls from the outside, to frighten and drive out any evil spirits
which may have taken up their residence within. The round of the village
having been made in this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts
of the village, killed by a blow of a dao, which disembowels it, and then
crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified animal
long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form chevaux de frise round
about it. These commemorate the days when such defences surrounded
the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and they are now a
symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from the wild animals of the
forest. The langur required for the purpose is hunted down some days
before, but should it be found impossible to catch one, a brown monkey
may take its place; a hulock may not be used." Here the crucified ape or
rat is the public scapegoat, which by its vicarious sufferings and death
relieves the people from all sickness and mishap in the coming year. 6
Again, on one day of the year the Bhotiyas of Juhar, in the Western
Himalayas, take a dog, intoxicate him with spirits and bhang or hemp, and
having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village and let him
loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and stones, and believe
that, when they have done so, no disease or misfortune will visit the
village during the year. In some parts of Breadalbane it was formerly the
custom on New Year's Day to take a dog to the door, give him a bit of
bread, and drive him out, saying, "Get away, you dog! Whatever death of
men or loss of cattle would happen in this house to the end of the present
year, may it all light on your head!" On the Day of Atonement, which was
the tenth day of the seventh month, the Jewish high-priest laid both his
hands on the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of the
Children of Israel, and, having thereby transferred the sins of the people to
the beast, sent it away into the wilderness. 7
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid,
may also be a human being. At Onitsha, on the Niger, two human beings
used to be annually sacrificed to take away the sins of the land. The
victims were purchased by public subscription. All persons who, during
the past year, had fallen into gross sins, such as incendiarism, theft,
adultery, witchcraft, and so forth, were expected to contribute 28 ngugas,
or a little over £2. The money thus collected was taken into the interior of
the country and expended in the purchase of two sickly persons "to be
offered as a sacrifice for all these abominable crimes-one for the land and
one for the river." A man from a neighbouring town was hired to put them to
death. On the twenty-seventh of February 1858 the Rev. J. C. Taylor
witnessed the sacrifice of one of these victims. The sufferer was a woman,
about nineteen or twenty years of age. They dragged her alive along the
ground, face downwards, from the king's house to the river, a distance of
two miles, the crowds who accompanied her crying, "Wickedness!
wickedness!" The intention was "to take away the iniquities of the land.
The body was dragged along in a merciless manner, as if the weight of all
their wickedness was thus carried away." Similar customs are said to be
still secretly practised every year by many tribes in the delta of the Niger
in spite of the vigilance of the British Government. Among the Yoruba
negroes of West Africa "the human victim chosen for sacrifice, and who
may be either a freeborn or a slave, a person of noble or wealthy
parentage, or one of humble birth, is, after he has been chosen and
marked out for the purpose, called an Oluwo. He is always well fed and
nourished and supplied with whatever he should desire during the period
of his confinement. When the occasion arrives for him to be sacrificed and
offered up, he is commonly led about and paraded through the streets of
the town or city of the Sovereign who would sacrifice him for the
well-being of his government and of every family and individual under it,
in order that he might carry off the sin, guilt, misfortune and death of all
without exception. Ashes and chalk would be employed to hide his identity
by the one being freely thrown over his head, and his face painted with
the latter, whilst individuals would often rush out of their houses to lay their
hands upon him that they might thus transfer to him their sin, guilt, trouble,
and death." This parade over, he is taken to an inner sanctuary and
beheaded. His last words or dying groans are the signal for an outburst of
joy among the people assembled outside, who believe that the sacrifice
has been accepted and the divine wrath appeased. 8
In Siam it used to be the custom on one day of the year to single out a
woman broken down by debauchery, and carry her on a litter through all
the streets to the music of drums and hautboys. The mob insulted her and
pelted her with dirt; and after having carried her through the whole city,
they threw her on a dunghill or a hedge of thorns outside the ramparts,
forbidding her ever to enter the walls again. They believed that the woman
thus drew upon herself all the malign influences of the air and of evil
spirits. The Bataks of Sumatra offer either a red horse or a buffalo as a
public sacrifice to purify the land and obtain the favour of the gods.
Formerly, it is said, a man was bound to the same stake as the buffalo, and
when they killed the animal, the man was driven away; no one might
receive him, converse with him, or give him food. Doubtless he was
supposed to carry away the sins and misfortunes of the people. 9
Sometimes the scapegoat is a divine animal. The people of Malabar
share the Hindoo reverence for the cow, to kill and eat which "they esteem
to be a crime as heinous as homicide or wilful murder." Nevertheless the
"Bramans transfer the sins of the people into one or more Cows, which are
then carry'd away, both the Cows and the Sins wherewith these Beasts
are charged, to what place the Braman shall appoint." When the ancient
Egyptians sacrificed a bull, they invoked upon its head all the evils that
might otherwise befall themselves and the land of Egypt, and thereupon
they either sold the bull's head to the Greeks or cast it into the river. Now,
it cannot be said that in the times known to us the Egyptians worshipped
bulls in general, for they seem to have commonly killed and eaten them.
But a good many circumstances point to the conclusion that originally all
cattle, bulls as well as cows, were held sacred by the Egyptians. For not
only were all cows esteemed holy by them and never sacrificed, but even
bulls might not be sacrificed unless they had certain natural marks; a priest
examined every bull before it was sacrificed; if it had the proper marks, he
put his seal on the animal in token that it might be sacrificed; and if a man
sacrificed a bull which had not been sealed, he was put to death.
Moreover, the worship of the black bulls Apis and Mnevis, especially the
former, played an important part in Egyptian religion; all bulls that died a
natural death were carefully buried in the suburbs of the cities, and their
bones were afterwards collected from all parts of Egypt and interred in a
single spot; and at the sacrifice of a bull in the great rites of Isis all the
worshippers beat their breasts and mourned. On the whole, then, we are
perhaps entitled to infer that bulls were originally, as cows were always,
esteemed sacred by the Egyptians, and that the slain bull upon whose
head they laid the misfortunes of the people was once a divine scapegoat.
It seems not improbable that the lamb annually slain by the Madis of
Central Africa is a divine scapegoat, and the same supposition may partly
explain the Zuni sacrifice of the turtle. 10
Lastly, the scapegoat may be a divine man. Thus, in November the
Gonds of India worship Ghansyam Deo, the protector of the crops, and at
the festival the god himself is said to descend on the head of one of the
worshippers, who is suddenly seized with a kind of fit and, after staggering
about, rushes off into the jungle, where it is believed that, if left to himself,
he would die mad. However, they bring him back, but he does not recover
his senses for one or two days. The people think that one man is thus
singled out as a scapegoat for the sins of the rest of the village. In the
temple of the Moon the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number
of sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one
of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or insanity,
and wandered solitary up and down the woods, like the Gond in the
jungle, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and maintained
him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was anointed with
unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man whose business it was to
slay these human victims and to whom practice had given dexterity,
advanced from the crowd and thrust a sacred spear into the victim's side,
piercing his heart. From the manner in which the slain man fell, omens
were drawn as to the welfare of the commonwealth. Then the body was
carried to a certain spot where all the people stood upon it as a
purificatory ceremony. This last circumstance clearly indicates that the sins
of the people were transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest
transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hands on
the animal's head; and since the man was believed to be possessed by
the divine spirit, we have here an undoubted example of a man-god slain
to take away the sins and misfortunes of the people. 11
In Tibet the ceremony of the scapegoat presents some remarkable
features. The Tibetan new year begins with the new moon which appears
about the fifteenth of February. For twenty-three days afterwards the
government of Lhasa, the capital, is taken out of the hands of the ordinary
rulers and entrusted to the monk of the Debang monastery who offers to
pay the highest sum for the privilege. The successful bidder is called the
Jalno, and he announces his accession to power in person, going through
the streets of Lhasa with a silver stick in his hand. Monks from all the
neighbouring monasteries and temples assemble to pay him homage. The
Jalno exercises his authority in the most arbitrary manner for his own
benefit, as all the fines which he exacts are his by purchase. The profit he
makes is about ten times the amount of the purchase money. His men go
about the streets in order to discover any conduct on the part of the
inhabitants that can be found fault with. Every house in Lhasa is taxed at
this time, and the slightest offence is punished with unsparing rigour by
fines. This severity of the Jalno drives all working classes out of the city till
the twenty-three days are over. But if the laity go out, the clergy come in.
All the Buddhist monasteries of the country for miles round about open
their gates and disgorge their inmates. All the roads that lead down into
Lhasa from the neighbouring mountains are full of monks hurrying to the
capital, some on foot, some on horseback, some riding asses or lowing
oxen, all carrying their prayer-books and culinary utensils. In such
multitudes do they come that the streets and squares of the city are
encumbered with their swarms, and incarnadined with their red cloaks. The
disorder and confusion are indescribable. Bands of the holy men traverse
the streets chanting prayers, or uttering wild cries. They meet, they jostle,
they quarrel, they fight; bloody noses, black eyes, and broken heads are
freely given and received. All day long, too, from before the peep of dawn
till after darkness has fallen, these red-cloaked monks hold services in the
dim incense-laden air of the great Machindranath temple, the cathedral of
Lhasa; and thither they crowd thrice a day to receive their doles of tea and
soup and money. The cathedral is a vast building, standing in the centre
of the city, and surrounded by bazaars and shops. The idols in it are richly
inlaid with gold and precious stones. 12
Twenty-four days after the Jalno has ceased to have authority, he
assumes it again, and for ten days acts in the same arbitrary manner as
before. On the first of the ten days the priests again assemble at the
cathedral, pray to the gods to prevent sickness and other evils among the
people, "and, as a peace-offering, sacrifice one man. The man is not
killed purposely, but the ceremony he undergoes often proves fatal. Grain
is thrown against his head, and his face is painted half white, half black."
Thus grotesquely disguised, and carrying a coat of skin on his arm, he is
called the King of the Years, and sits daily in the market-place, where he
helps himself to whatever he likes and goes about shaking a black yak's
tail over the people, who thus transfer their bad luck to him. On the tenth
day, all the troops in Lhasa march to the great temple and form in line
before it. The King of the Years is brought forth from the temple and
receives small donations from the assembled multitude. He then ridicules
the Jalno, saying to him, "What we perceive through the five senses is no
illusion. All you teach is untrue," and the like. The Jalno, who represents
the Grand Lama for the time being, contests these heretical opinions; the
dispute waxes warm, and at last both agree to decide the questions at
issue by a cast of the dice, the Jalno offering to change places with the
scapegoat should the throw be against him. If the King of the Years wins,
much evil is prognosticated; but if the Jalno wins, there is great rejoicing,
for it proves that his adversary has been accepted by the gods as a victim
to bear all the sins of the people of Lhasa. Fortune, however, always
favours the Jalno, who throws sixes with unvarying success, while his
opponent turns up only ones. Nor is this so extraordinary as at first sight it
might appear; for the Jalno's dice are marked with nothing but sixes and
his adversary's with nothing but ones. When he sees the finger of
Providence thus plainly pointed against him, the King of the Years is
terrified and flees away upon a white horse, with a white dog, a white bird,
salt, and so forth, which have all been provided for him by the
government. His face is still painted half white and half black, and he still
wears his leathern coat. The whole populace pursues him, hooting,
yelling, and firing blank shots in volleys after him. Thus driven out of the
city, he is detained for seven days in the great chamber of horrors at the
Samyas monastery, surrounded by monstrous and terrific images of devils
and skins of huge serpents and wild beasts. Thence he goes away into the
mountains of Chetang, where he has to remain an outcast for several
months or a year in a narrow den. If he dies before the time is out, the
people say it is an auspicious omen; but if he survives, he may return to
Lhasa and play the part of scapegoat over again the following year. 13
This quaint ceremonial, still annually observed in the secluded capital of
Buddhism-the Rome of Asia-is interesting because it exhibits, in a clearly
marked religious stratification, a series of divine redeemers themselves
redeemed, of vicarious sacrifices vicariously atoned for, of gods
undergoing a process of fossilisation, who, while they retain the privileges,
have disburdened themselves of the pains and penalties of divinity. In the
Jalno we may without undue straining discern a successor of those
temporary kings, those mortal gods, who purchase a short lease of power
and glory at the price of their lives. That he is the temporary substitute of
the Grand Lama is certain; that he is, or was once, liable to act as
scapegoat for the people is made nearly certain by his offer to change
places with the real scapegoat-the King of the Years-if the arbitrament of
the dice should go against him. It is true that the conditions under which
the question is now put to the hazard have reduced the offer to an idle
form. But such forms are no mere mushroom growths, springing up of
themselves in a night. If they are now lifeless formalities, empty husks
devoid of significance, we may be sure that they once had a life and a
meaning; if at the present day they are blind alleys leading nowhere, we
may be certain that in former days they were paths that led somewhere, if
only to death. That death was the goal to which of old the Tibetan
scapegoat passed after his brief period of licence in the market-place, is a
conjecture that has much to commend it. Analogy suggests it; the blank
shots fired after him, the statement that the ceremony often proves fatal, the
belief that his death is a happy omen, all confirm it. We need not wonder
then that the Jalno, after paying so dear to act as deputy-deity for a few
weeks, should have preferred to die by deputy rather than in his own
person when his time was up. The painful but necessary duty was
accordingly laid on some poor devil, some social outcast, some wretch
with whom the world had gone hard, who readily agreed to throw away his
life at the end of a few days if only he might have his fling in the meantime.
For observe that while the time allowed to the original deputy-the
Jalno-was measured by weeks, the time allowed to the deputy's deputy
was cut down to days, ten days according to one authority, seven days
according to another. So short a rope was doubtless thought a long
enough tether for so black or sickly a sheep; so few sands in the
hour-glass, slipping so fast away, sufficed for one who had wasted so
many precious years. Hence in the jack-pudding who now masquerades
with motley countenance in the market-place of Lhasa, sweeping up
misfortune with a black yak's tail, we may fairly see the substitute of a
substitute, the vicar of a vicar, the proxy on whose back the heavy burden
was laid when it had been lifted from nobler shoulders. But the clue, if we
have followed it aright, does not stop at the Jalno; it leads straight back to
the pope of Lhasa himself, the Grand Lama, of whom the Jalno is merely
the temporary vicar. The analogy of many customs in many lands points to
the conclusion that, if this human divinity stoops to resign his ghostly
power for a time into the hands of a substitute, it is, or rather was once, for
no other reason than that the substitute might die in his stead. Thus through
the mist of ages unillumined by the lamp of history, the tragic figure of the
pope of Buddhism-God's vicar on earth for Asia-looms dim and sad as the
man-god who bore his people's sorrows, the Good Shepherd who laid
down his life for the sheep. 14