Now
primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their
safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one
of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally,
therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard
for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the
man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His
worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to
meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the
course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what
catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of
his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one
way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as
he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his
soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been
seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus
putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old
age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough.
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