ABSTRACT
I should now like to examine in a little greater detail some of the more important elements in the myth, and ritual pattern which I have up to now characterized in general terms in an effort to see how the paradox of the fortunate fall ultimately stems from it, and I shall begin with the concept of the king as divine and his central position in the ancient community, but excluding for the moment the thought of the Hebrews. ‘God and the king’, Professor Gadd tells us, ‘are two conceptions so nearly coupled in the oriental mind that the distinction is constantly blurred.’ 1 The same point had been made by Frazer:
‘All that the people know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves, their cattle, and their crops are mysteriously bound up with their divine king, so that according as he is well or ill the community is healthy or sickly, the flocks and herds thrive or languish with disease, and the fields yield an abundant or a scanty harvest. The worst evil which they can conceive of is the natural death of their ruler, whether he succumb to sickness or old age, for in the opinion of his followers such a death would entail the most disastrous consequences on themselves and their possessions; fatal epidemics would sweep away man and beast, the earth would refuse her increase, nay the very frame of nature itself might be dissolved. To guard against these catastrophes it is necessary to put the king to death while he is still in the full bloom of his divine manhood, in order that his sacred life, transmitted in unabated force to his successor, may renew its youth, and thus by successive transmissions through a perpetual line of vigorous incarnations may remain eternally fresh and young, a pledge and security that men and animals shall in like manner renew their youth by a perpetual succession of generations, and that seedtime and harvest, and summer and winter, and rain and sunshine shall never fail’ 1
Frazer is here speaking of the time when the actual killing of the king was practised, but we are to concern outselves with a more advanced stage when the death and resurrection of the king was mimetically re-enacted in the portentous festivals; but the single, overpowering purpose behind the myth and ritual pattern of the ancient Near East remained as Frazer has described it, except in so far as in the course of time and under the impact of the differing genius of differing peoples, the pattern underwent successive transformations in the direction of an ever higher and higher spirituality. Frazer has spoken of the abiding need to maintain the succession of generations, and of the summer and winter; his phrases come from Genesis where, after God has decided no longer to smite anything living and will make a covenant with Noah, he resolves: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease’ (Genesis 8, 22.) Yet, while the language remains the same as in Frazer’s description of the attitude of mind of primitive peoples, the meaning has been changed; the same words are now used to express a far more significant ethical idea, and it shall be a part of our purpose to follow this fascinating process of transformation.