" In consequence of this a mysterious
threat was circulated from Armenia to Chuzistan that every town which did
not lament the dead King of the Jinn should utterly perish. Again, in the
year 1203 or 1204 A.D. a fatal disease, which attacked the throat, raged
in parts of Mosul and Irac, and it was divulged that a woman of the Jinn
called Umm 'Uncud or "Mother of the Grape-cluster" had lost her son, and
that all who did not lament for him would fall victims to the epidemic. So
men and women sought to save themselves from death by assembling and
beating their faces, while they cried out in a lamentable voice, "O mother
of the Grape-cluster, excuse us; the Grape-cluster is dead; we knew it
not."(17)





CHAPTER II. THE KILLING OF THE DIVINE KING.




§ 1. Preference for a Violent Death.


(M4) If the high gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this
earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected
that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the
same fate, though we hear of African kings who have imagined themselves
immortal by virtue of their sorceries.(18) Now primitive peoples, as we
have seen,(19) 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 shews
symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be
transferred to a vigorous successor before i