rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0fe4fb07-980e-5385-858f-e7c82db2cc12">217 So, too, the Erinyes visited the sins of the fathers even on the children and grandchildren;218 and the Erinyes were originally only personifications of curses.219 It is said in the Ecclesiasticus:—“A man that useth much swearing shall be filled with iniquity, and the plague shall never depart from his house. … If he swear in vain, he shall not be innocent, but his house shall be full of calamities.”220 Casalis remarks of the Basutos, that “the dreadful consequences that the curse of Noah has had for Ham and his descendants appear quite natural to these people.”221 The Dharkâr and Majhwâr in Mirzapur, believe that a person who forswears himself will lose his property and his children;222 but as we do not know the contents of the oath, it is possible that the destruction of the latter is not ascribed to mere contagion, but is expressly imprecated on them by the swearer.223 Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, “any accident that happens to a man, who has been known to take a false oath, or to his children or grandchildren, is carefully recorded in memory, and attributed to this sole cause.”224 Among the Karens the following story is told:—“Anciently there was a man who had ten children, and he cursed one of his brethren, who had done him no injury; but the curse did the man no harm, and he did not die. Then the curse returned to the man who sent it, and all his ten children died.”225 The Moors are fond of cursing each other’s father or mother, or grandfather, or grandfather’s father, such a curse being understood to involve their descendants as well. The Rev. R. Taylor says of the Maoris, “To bid you go and cook your father would be a great curse, but to tell a person to go and cook his great-grandfather would be far worse, because it included every individual who has sprung from him.”226
217 Herodotus, vi. 86. Cf. Hesiod, Opera et dies, 282 sqq.
218 Aeschylus, Eumenides, 934 sqq.
219 Aeschylus (Eumenides, 416 sq.) expressly designates the Erinyes by the title of “curses” (ἀραὶ), and Pausanias derives the name Erinys from an Arcadian word signifying a fit of anger. Cf. von Lasaulx, ‘Der Fluch bei Griechen und Römern,’ in Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen an der Julius-Maximilians-Universitaet zu Würzburg im Sommer-Semester 1843, p. 8; Müller, Dissertations on the Eumenides of Aeschylus, p. 155 sqq.; Rohde, ‘Paralipomena,’ in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1895, p. 16 sq.
220 Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 11. Cf. ibid. xli. 5 sqq.; Wisdom of Solomon, iii. 12 sq., xii. 11.
221 Casalis, Basutos, p. 305.
222 Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, ii. 287; iii. 444. Cf. ibid. i. 132.
223 Among these tribes it is usual to swear by “putting a bamboo on the head,” or “touching a broad-sword, touching the feet of a Brâhman, holding a cow’s tail, touching Ganges water.” But among many of the other tribes described by Mr. Crooke, persons swear on the heads of their children (ibid. i. 11, 130, 172; ii. 96, 138, 339, 357; iii. 40, 113, 251, 262; iv. 35), or with a son or grandson in the arms (ibid. ii. 428), and in such cases the death of the child would naturally be expected to follow perjury as a direct result of it. Among the Kol, the usual form of an oath is, “May my children die if I lie” (ibid. iii. 313).
224 Marsden, History of Sumatra, p. 240.
225 Mason, in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xxxvii. pt. ii. 137.
226 Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 208.
Thus, from the conception that sins and curses are contagious it follows that an innocent person may have to suffer for the sin of another. His suffering does not necessarily relieve the sinner from punishment; sin, like an infectious disease, may spread without vacating the seat of infection. But, as we have seen, it may also be transferred, and sin-transference involves vicarious suffering. At the same time, this kind of vicarious suffering must not be confounded with vicarious expiatory sacrifice. As a general rule, the scapegoat is driven or cast away, not killed. The exceptions to this rule seem to be due to two different causes. On the one hand, the scapegoat may be chased to death, or perhaps be pushed over a precipice,227 for the sake of ridding the community as effectively as possible of the evils loaded on the victim. Thus the Bhotiyás of Juhár take a dog, make him drunk, “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 by so doing no disease or misfortune will visit the village during the year.”228 On the other hand, the transference of evil may be combined with a sacrifice. But of such a combination only a few instances are recorded, and most of them are ambiguous. Considering further that in these cases, or at least in the best known of them, the act of transference takes place after the victim has been killed, it seems to me extremely probable that we have here to do with a fusion of two distinct rites into one, and that the victim is not offered up as a sacrifice in its capacity of a scapegoat, but, once sacrificed, has been made use of as a conductor for all the evils with which the people are beset.
227 According to the Mishna, the Hebrew scapegoat was not allowed to go free in the wilderness, but was killed by being pushed over a precipice (Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 418). See also the ambiguous passage in Servius, In Virgilii Aeneidos, iii. 57.
228 Atkinson, ‘Notes on the History of Religion in the Himálaya of the N.W. Provinces,’ in Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, liii. pt. i. 62.
In his list of scapegoats, Dr. Frazer refers to a case of human sacrifice witnessed by the Rev. J. C. Taylor at Onitsha, on the Niger.229 A young woman was drawn, with her face to the earth, from the king’s house to the river. As the people drew her along, they cried, “Wickedness! wickedness!” so as to notify to the passers-by to screen themselves from witnessing the dismal scene. The sacrifice 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 were thus carried away”; and it was finally drowned in the river. Our informant also heard that there was a man killed, as a sacrifice for the sins of the king. “Thus two human beings were offered as sacrifices, to propitiate their heathen deities, thinking that they would thus atone for the individual sins of those who had broken God’s laws during the past year. … Those who had fallen into gross sins during the past year—such as incendiarisms, thefts, fornications,