36 Hut ton Webster 



classical festivals presently to be discussed. Amongst certain 

 Fijian tribes when the sacred nanga enclosure was being raised 

 for the initiation ceremonies the people suspended all other work. 

 Not even food-planting might be done at this time. If " any 

 impious person transgressed this law, ' he would only plant evil to 

 himself and to his kinsfolk.' "* In this instance there vv^as no 

 attribution of the sacred period to any particular divinity, 

 though all the ceremonies connected with the nanga were sup- 

 posed to be under the care and by the direction of the ancestral 

 spirits. In another part of the world, among the Basuto of 

 South Africa, we learn that days of sacrifice or "great purifica- 

 tion " are holidays, when no work is done. " Hence it is," writes 

 a French missionary, " that the law relative to the repose of the 

 seventh day, so far from finding any objection in the minds of 

 the natives, appears to them very natural, and perhaps even more 

 fundamental, than it appears to certain Christians."^ 



To the Hebrews the Day of Atonement was the sabbdtJi 

 sabbdthon/' the holiest of rest days, " a sabbath of solemn rest," 

 when "no manner of work" might be performed. The trans- 

 gressor of this regulation was threatened with death : " Whoever 

 doeth any work at all on that same day, I will destroy from among 

 his people."'' A similar punishment is prescribed for one who 

 does not fast on that day : the expression " to afflict your souls " 

 ('inna uephesh) was considered by late theologians to be a 

 synonym for fasting, and as a matter of fact the Atonement fast 

 was the only one enjoined by the Law. On the Day of Atone- 

 ment a scapegoat laden with the sins of the people was sent 

 forth into the wilderness where it was sacrificed to Azazel, a 

 bad angel or demon. In the later centuries of Jewish history, 

 and particularly after the Exile, this rite took on a more spiritual 

 character at a time when the ceremonial aspects of sin and 



* Fison, in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1885, xiv. 18. 

 ^ E. Casalis, Les Bassoutos, Paris, 1859, p. 275. 



" Both expressions are commonly derived from the Bab3lonian 

 sabattum. See infra. 



''Leviticus, xvi. 31: xxiii. 26-32. 



36 



