On the same principle we can understand why
Mamurius Veturius was beaten with rods, why the slave at the
Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the _agnus castus_ (a tree to
which magical properties were ascribed), why the effigy of Death in
some parts of Europe is assailed with sticks and stones, and why at
Babylon the criminal who played the god scourged before he was
crucified. The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the
agony of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any
malignant influences by which at the supreme moment he might
conceivably be beset.
Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia
represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been
well remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to
have masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He
points out that the process of caprification, as it is called, that
is, the artificial fertilisation of the cultivated fig-trees by
hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs, takes place in Greece
and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date of the
Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white
figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom
represented the men and the other the women, may have been a direct
imitation of the process of caprification designed, on the principle
of imitative magic, to assist the fertilisation of the fig-trees.
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