The Criminal-God

Abstract

Among primitive men, it was one of the duties of a 'Divine King' to have himself killed for the benefit of his people. Happily for the king, this periodic sacrifice degenerated into a symbolic form. In order to spare the life of the sovereign and yet reap the benefit of the ritual, a criminal was substituted for the king and was both honoured and killed in his place. Frazer, in an argument of appealing simplicity, explains the substitution as an act of economyJ. But granting that the life of the king was saved by that act, how is it to be explained that the sacrifice continued to be considered effective ?2 To offer a criminal in the place of a divine king presupposes--in the minds of people who did not wish to forego the magical profit of the sacrifice--that the criminal, by virtue of his inherent powers, was acceptable as a true equivalent. The powers of which the criminal is possessed induce him to place himself apart from the rules of the group. He thus resembles the king who stands above them. The equation of king and criminal becomes intelligible if Superior Power is understood as a force which is neutral to the distinction between good and evil and thus qualifies the bearer as taboo.8 To particularise this power is a function of the ritual. The divine and kingly honours paid to the criminal before he is killed are necessary to ensure the validity of the substitution. This ritual, which in its original form was quite certainly a serious performance of imitational magic, degenerated into a mock ritual by being continued and repeated long after the criminal had ceased to be the substitute of a king and had become the mere victim of legal procedure. The connotation of a beneficial sacrifice had vanished, yet the killing retained the association of a feast. "It is not so long ago," says Nietzsche in one of his most forceful attacks against the utilitarian explanation of punishment,' "that princely weddings and great popular festivals were inconceivable without executions, tortures, or perhaps an Autodafi." In rejecting the view that legal punishment originated as an attempt at just retribution, he declares that in those powerful springs of human action which lie 'beyond good and evil' the desire to punish and the desire to hurt, which he calls "man's most elementary pleasure of feasting," are indistinguishable. Nor will he admit that they ever quite separate even in the most"'enlightened' states of jurisdiction: "An der grossen Strafe ist so viel Festliches." Without this background of feast and ritual it would indeed be difficult to explain why the infliction of pain as a form of punishment should have been so very fanciful throughout the ages. The National Museum in Munich owns a whole collection of