Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 110
? 110 2. Hanged God. —In olden days the priest who bore the name and played the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele, was regularly hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree. This barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it is known to us in later times when the priest merely drew blood from his body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsale men and animals were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or by a combination of hanging and stab- bing, the men being strung up to a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was called the Lord of the gallows or the god of the hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallow. Indeed he is said to have been sacrificed to him- self in the ordinary way as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal given below in which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic: I know that I hung on the windy tree For nine whole nights; Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin, Myself to myself. 1 3. Arthur Weigall writes: One of the earliest seats of Christianity was Antioch, but in that city there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Tammuz or Adonis, the latter 1. do. p. 243, 244