The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 04 of 12)
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Title: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 04 of 12)
Author: James George Frazer
Release date: December 6, 2012 [eBook #41572]
Most recently updated: June 15, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION (THIRD EDITION, VOL. 04 OF 12) ***
The Golden Bough
A Study in Magic and Religion
By
James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool
Third Edition.
Vol. IV.
Part III
The Dying God
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1911
CONTENTS
Preface.
Chapter I. The Mortality Of The Gods.
Chapter II. The Killing Of The Divine King.
§ 1. Preference for a Violent Death.
§ 2. Kings killed when their Strength fails.
§ 3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term.
§ 4. Octennial Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 5. Funeral Games.
§ 6. The Slaughter of the Dragon.
§ 7. Triennial Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 8. Annual Tenure of the Kingship.
§ 9. Diurnal Tenure of the Kingship.
Chapter III. The Slaying Of The King In Legend.
Chapter IV. The Supply Of Kings.
Chapter V. Temporary Kings.
Chapter VI. Sacrifice Of The King’s Son.
Chapter VII. Succession To The Soul.
Chapter VIII. The Killing Of The Tree-Spirit.
§ 1. The Whitsuntide Mummers.
§ 2. Mock Human Sacrifices.
§ 3. Burying the Carnival.
§ 4. Carrying out Death.
§ 5. Sawing the Old Woman.
§ 6. Bringing in Summer.
§ 7. Battle of Summer and Winter.
§ 8. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko.
§ 9. Death and Revival of Vegetation.
§ 10. Analogous Rites in India.
§ 11. The Magic Spring.
Note A. Chinese Indifference To Death.
Note B. Swinging As A Magical Rite.
Addenda.
Index.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
PREFACE.
With this third part of _The Golden Bough_ we take up the question, Why
had the King of the Wood at Nemi regularly to perish by the hand of his
successor? In the first part of the work I gave some reasons for thinking
that the priest of Diana, who bore the title of King of the Wood beside
the still lake among the Alban Hills, personated the great god Jupiter or
his duplicate Dianus, the deity of the oak, the thunder, and the sky. On
this theory, accordingly, we are at once confronted with the wider and
deeper question, Why put a man-god or human representative of deity to a
violent death? Why extinguish the divine light in its earthly vessel
instead of husbanding it to its natural close? My general answer to that
question is contained in the present volume. If I am right, the motive for
slaying a man-god is a fear lest with the enfeeblement of his body in
sickness or old age his sacred spirit should suffer a corresponding decay,
which might imperil the general course of nature and with it the existence
of his worshippers, who believe the cosmic energies to be mysteriously
knit up with those of their human divinity. Hence, if there is any measure
of truth in this theory, the practice of putting divine men and
particularly divine kings to death, which seems to have been common at a
particular stage in the evolution of society and religion, was a crude but
pathetic attempt to disengage an immortal spirit from its mortal envelope,
to arrest the forces of decomposition in nature by retrenching with
ruthless hand the first ominous symptoms of decay. We may smile if we
please at the vanity of these and the like efforts to stay the inevitable
decline, to bring the relentless revolution of the great wheel to a stand,
to keep youth’s fleeting roses for ever fresh and fair; but perhaps in
spite of every disillusionment, when we contemplate the seemingly endless
vistas of knowledge which have been opened up even within our own
generation, many of us may cherish in our heart of hearts a fancy, if not
a hope, that some loophole of escape may after all be discovered from the
iron walls of the prison-house which threaten to close on and crush us;
that, groping about in the darkness, mankind may yet chance to lay hands
on “that golden key that opes the palace of eternity,” and so to pass from
this world of shadows and sorrow to a world of untroubled light and joy.
If this is a dream, it is surely a happy and innocent one, and to those
who would wake us from it we may murmur with Michael Angelo,
“_Però non mi destar, deh! parla basso._”
J. G. FRAZER.
CAMBRIDGE,
_11th June 1911_.
CHAPTER I. THE MORTALITY OF THE GODS.
(M1) At an early stage of his intellectual development man deems himself
naturally immortal, and imagines that were it not for the baleful arts of
sorcerers, who cut the vital thread prematurely short, he would live for
ever. The illusion, so flattering to human wishes and hopes, is still
current among many savage tribes at the present day,(1) and it may be
supposed to have prevailed universally in that Age of Magic which appears
to have everywhere preceded the Age of Religion. But in time the sad truth
of human mortality was borne in upon our primitive philosopher with a
force of demonstration which no prejudice could resist and no sophistry
dissemble. Among the manifold influences which combined to wring from him
a reluctant assent to the necessity of death must be numbered the growing
influence of religion, which by exposing the vanity of magic and of all
the extravagant pretensions built on it gradually lowered man’s proud and
defiant attitude towards nature, and taught him to believe that there are
mysteries in the universe which his feeble intellect can never fathom, and
forces which his puny hands can never control. Thus more and more he
learned to bow to the inevitable and to console himself for the brevity
and the sorrows of life on earth by the hope of a blissful eternity
hereafter. But if he reluctantly acknowledged the existence of beings at
once superhuman and supernatural, he was as yet far from suspecting the
width and the depth of the gulf which divided him from them. The gods with
whom his imagination now peopled the darkness of the unknown were indeed
admitted by him to be his superiors in knowledge and in power, in the
joyous splendour of their life and in the length of its duration. But,
though he knew it not, these glorious and awful beings were merely, like
the spectre of the Brocken, the reflections of his own diminutive
personality exaggerated into gigantic proportions by distance and by the
mists and clouds upon which they were cast. Man in fact created gods in
his own likeness and being himself mortal he naturally supposed his
creatures to be in the same sad predicament. Thus the Greenlanders
believed that a wind could kill their most powerful god, and that he would
certainly die if he touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God,
they kept asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not,
they were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god
indeed.(2) In answer to the enquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North American
Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit. Being asked
which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad one, “Oh, neither of
_them_” replied he, “the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long
ago. He could not possibly have lived as long as this.”(3) A tribe in the
Philippine Islands told the Spanish conquerors that the grave of the
Creator was upon the top of Mount Cabunian.(4) Heitsi-eibib, a god or
divine hero of the Hottentots, died several times and came to life again.
His graves are generally to be met with in narrow defiles between
mountains. When the Hottentots pass one of them, they throw a stone on it
for good luck, sometimes muttering “Give us plenty of cattle.”(5) The
grave of Zeus, the great god of Greece, was shewn to visitors in Crete as
late as about the beginning of our era.(6) The body of Dionysus was buried
at Delphi beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the
inscription, “Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele.”(7) According to
one account, Apollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras is said
to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how the god had
been killed by the python and buried under the tripod.(8) The ancient god
Cronus was buried in Sicily,(9) and the graves of Hermes, Aphrodite, and
Ares were shewn in Hermopolis, Cyprus, and Thrace.(10)
(M2) The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common
lot. They too grew old and died. For like men they were composed of body
and soul, and like men were subject to all the passions and infirmities of
the flesh. Their bodies, it is true, were fashioned of more ethereal
mould, and lasted longer than ours, but they could not hold out for ever
against the siege of time. Age converted their bones into silver, their
flesh into gold, and their azure locks into lapis-lazuli. When their time
came, they passed away from the cheerful world of the living to reign as
dead gods over dead men in the melancholy world beyond the grave. Even
their souls, like those of mankind, could only endure after death so long
as their bodies held together; and hence it was as needful to preserve the
corpses of the gods as the corpses of common folk, lest with the divine
body the divine spirit should also come to an untimely end. At first their
remains were laid to rest under the desert sands of the mountains, that
the dryness of the soil and the purity of the air might protect them from
putrefaction and decay. Hence one of the oldest titles of the Egyptian
gods is “they who are under the sands.” But when at a later time the
discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to the souls of
the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite time from
corruption, the deities were permitted to share the benefit of an
invention which held out to gods as well as to men a reasonable hope of
immortality. Every province then had the tomb and mummy of its dead god.
The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis boasted of the mummy
of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of
Toumou.(11) But while their bodies lay swathed and bandaged here on earth
in the tomb, their souls, if we may trust the Egyptian priests, shone as
bright stars in the firmament. The soul of Isis sparkled in Sirius, the
soul of Horus in Orion, and the soul of Typhon in the Great Bear.(12) But
the death of the god did not involve the extinction of his sacred stock;
for he commonly had by his wife a son and heir, who on the demise of his
divine parent succeeded to the full rank, power, and honours of the
godhead.(13) The high gods of Babylon also, though they appeared to their
worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in
their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for
like men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and fought
and died.(14)
(M3) One of the most famous stories of the death of a god is told by
Plutarch. It runs thus. In the reign of the emperor Tiberius a certain
schoolmaster named Epitherses was sailing from Greece to Italy. The ship
in which he had taken his passage was a merchantman and there were many
other passengers on board. At evening, when they were off the Echinadian
Islands, the wind died away, and the vessel drifted close in to the island
of Paxos. Most of the passengers were awake and many were still drinking
wine after dinner, when suddenly a voice hailed the ship from the island,
calling upon Thamus. The crew and passengers were taken by surprise, for
though there was an Egyptian pilot named Thamus on board, few knew him
even by name. Twice the cry was repeated, but Thamus kept silence.
However, at the third call he answered, and the voice from the shore, now
louder than ever, said, “When you are come to Palodes, announce that the
Great Pan is dead.” Astonishment fell upon all, and they consulted whether
it would be better to do the bidding of the voice or not. At last Thamus
resolved that, if the wind held, he would pass the place in silence, but
if it dropped when they were off Palodes he would give the message. Well,
when they were come to Palodes, there was a great calm; so Thamus standing
in the stern and looking towards the land cried out, as he had been
bidden, “The Great Pan is dead.” The words had hardly passed his lips when
a loud sound of lamentation broke on their ears, as if a multitude were
mourning. This strange story, vouched for by many on board, soon got wind
at Rome, and Thamus was sent for and questioned by the emperor Tiberius
himself, who caused enquiries to be made about the dead god.(15) In modern
times, also, the annunciation of the death of the Great Pan has been much
discussed and various explanations of it have been suggested. On the whole
the simplest and most natural would seem to be that the deity whose sad
end was thus mysteriously proclaimed and lamented was the Syrian god
Tammuz or Adonis, whose death is known to have been annually bewailed by
his followers both in Greece and in his native Syria. At Athens the
solemnity fell at midsummer, and there is no improbability in the view
that in a Greek island a band of worshippers of Tammuz should have been
celebrating the death of their god with the customary passionate
demonstrations of sorrow at the very time when a ship lay becalmed off the
shore, and that in the stillness of the summer night the voices of
lamentation should have been wafted with startling distinctness across the
water and should have made on the minds of the listening passengers a deep
and lasting impression.(16) However that may be, stories of the same kind
found currency in western Asia down to the Middle Ages. An Arab writer
relates that in the year 1063 or 1064 A.D., in the reign of the caliph
Caiem, a rumour went abroad through Bagdad, which soon spread all over the
province of Irac, that some Turks out hunting in the desert had seen a
black tent, where many men and women were beating their faces and uttering
loud cries, as it is the custom to do in the East when some one is dead.
And among the cries they distinguished these words, “The great King of the
Jinn is dead, woe to this country!” 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 ’Uncūd 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 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. For if the man-god dies what we call a natural
death, it means, according to the savage, that his soul has either
voluntarily departed from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly
that it has been extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a
demon or sorcerer.(20) In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is
lost to his worshippers; and with it their prosperity is gone and their
very existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of
the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it to a
successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying of disease, his
soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage of weakness and
exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue to drag out a languid,
inert existence in any body to which it might be transferred. Whereas by
slaying him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of
catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable
successor; and, in the second place, by putting him to death before his
natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall
into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was
answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and
transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.
(M5) Some of the reasons for preferring a violent death to the slow death
of old age or disease are obviously as applicable to common men as to the
man-god. Thus the Mangaians think that “the spirits of those who die a
natural death are excessively feeble and weak, as their bodies were at
dissolution; whereas the spirits of those who are slain in battle are
strong and vigorous, their bodies not having been reduced by disease.”(21)
The Barongo believe that in the world beyond the grave the spirits of
their dead ancestors appear with the exact form and lineaments which their
bodies exhibited at the moment of death; the spirits are young or old
according as their bodies were young or old when they died; there are baby
spirits who crawl about on all fours.(22) The Lengua Indians of the Gran
Chaco are persuaded that the souls of the departed correspond exactly in
form and characteristics to the bodies which they quitted at death; thus a
tall man is tall, a short man is short, and a deformed man is deformed in
the spirit-land, and the disembodied soul of a child remains a child, it
never develops into an adult. Hence they burn the body of a murderer and
scatter the ashes to the winds, thinking that this treatment will prevent
his spirit from assuming human shape in the other world.(23) So, too, the
Naga tribes of Manipur hold that the ghost of a dead man is an exact image
of the deceased as he was at the moment of death, with his scars, tattoo
marks, mutilations, and all the rest.(24) The Baganda think that the
ghosts of men who were mutilated in life are mutilated in like manner
after death; so to avoid that shame they will rather die with all their
limbs than lose one by amputation and live.(25) Hence, men sometimes
prefer to kill themselves or to be killed before they grow feeble, in
order that in the future life their souls may start fresh and vigorous as
they left their bodies, instead of decrepit and worn out with age and
disease. Thus in Fiji, “self-immolation is by no means rare, and they
believe that as they leave this life, so they will remain ever after. This
forms a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude, or from a crippled
condition, by a voluntary death.”(26) Or, as another observer of the
Fijians puts it more fully, “the custom of voluntary suicide on the part
of the old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is also
connected with their superstitions respecting a future life. They believe
that persons enter upon the delights of their elysium with the same
faculties, mental and physical, that they possess at the hour of death, in
short, that the spiritual life commences where the corporeal existence
terminates. With these views, it is natural that they should desire to
pass through this change before their mental and bodily powers are so
enfeebled by age as to deprive them of their capacity for enjoyment. To
this motive must be added the contempt which attaches to physical weakness
among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults which await those
who are no longer able to protect themselves. When therefore a man finds
his strength declining with the advance of age, and feels that he will
soon be unequal to discharge the duties of this life, and to partake in
the pleasures of that which is to come, he calls together his relations,
and tells them that he is now worn out and useless, that he sees they are
all ashamed of him, and that he has determined to be buried.” So on a day
appointed they used to meet and bury him alive.(27) In Vaté, one of the
New Hebrides, the aged were buried alive at their own request. It was
considered a disgrace to the family of an old chief if he was not buried
alive.(28) Of the Kamants, a Jewish tribe in Abyssinia, it is reported
that “they never let a person die a natural death, but that if any of
their relatives is nearly expiring, the priest of the village is called to
cut his throat; if this be omitted, they believe that the departed soul
has not entered the mansions of the blessed.”(29) The old Greek
philosopher Heraclitus thought that the souls of those who die in battle
are purer than the souls of those who die of disease.(30)
(M6) Among the Chiriguanos, a tribe of South American Indians on the river
Pilcomayo, when a man was at the point of death his nearest relative used
to break his spine by a blow of an axe, for they thought that to die a
natural death was the greatest misfortune that could befall a man.(31)
Whenever a Payagua Indian of Paraguay, or a Guayana of south-eastern
Brazil, grew weary of life, a feast was made, and amid the revelry and
dancing the man was gummed and feathered with the plumage of many-coloured
birds. A huge jar had been previously fixed in the ground to be ready for
him; in this he was placed, the mouth of the jar was covered with a heavy
lid of baked clay, the earth was heaped over it, and thus “he went to his
doom more joyful and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”(32) Among the
Koryaks of north-eastern Asia, when a man felt that his last hour was
come, superstition formerly required that he should either kill himself or
be killed by a friend, in order that he might escape the Evil One and
deliver himself up to the Good God.(33) Similarly among the Chukchees of
the same region, when a man’s strength fails and he is tired of life, he
requests his son or other near relation to despatch him, indicating the
manner of death he prefers to die. So, on a day appointed, his friends and
neighbours assemble, and in their presence he is stabbed, strangled, or
otherwise disposed of according to his directions.(34) The turbulent
Angamis are the most warlike and bloodthirsty of the wild head-hunting
tribes in the valley of the Brahmapootra. Among them, when a warrior dies
a natural death, his nearest male relative takes a spear and wounds the
corpse by a blow on the head, in order that the man may be received with
honour in the other world as one who has died in battle.(35) The heathen
Norsemen believed that only those who fell fighting were received by Odin
in Valhalla; hence it appears to have been customary to wound the dying
with a spear, in order to secure their admission to the happy land. The
custom may have been a mitigation of a still older practice of
slaughtering the sick.(36) We know from Procopius that among the Heruli, a
Teutonic tribe, the sick and old were regularly slain at their own request
and then burned on a pyre.(37) The Wends used to kill their aged parents
and other kinsfolk, and having killed them they boiled and ate their
bodies; and the old folks preferred to die thus rather than to drag out a
weary life of weakness and decrepitude.(38)
§ 2. Kings killed when their Strength fails.
(M7) But it is with the death of the god-man—the divine king or
priest—that we are here especially concerned. The mystic kings of Fire and
Water in Cambodia are not allowed to die a natural death. Hence when one
of them is seriously ill and the elders think that he cannot recover, they
stab him to death.(39) The people of Congo believed, as we have seen,(40)
that if their pontiff the Chitomé were to die a natural death, the world
would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and
merit, would immediately be annihilated. Accordingly when he fell ill and
seemed likely to die, the man who was destined to be his successor entered
the pontiff’s house with a rope or a club and strangled or clubbed him to
death.(41) A fuller account of this custom is given by an old Italian
writer as follows: “Let us pass to the death of the magicians, who often
die a violent death, and that for the most part voluntarily. I shall speak
only of the head of this crew, from whom his followers take example. He is
called Ganga Chitome, being reputed god of the earth. The first-fruits of
all the crops are offered to him as his due, because they are thought to
be produced by his power, and not by nature at the bidding of the Most
High God. This power he boasts he can impart to others, when and to whom
he pleases. He asserts that his body cannot die a natural death, and
therefore when he knows he is near the end of his days, whether it is
brought about by sickness or age, or whether he is deluded by the demon,
he calls one of his disciples to whom he wishes to communicate his power,
in order that he may succeed him. And having made him tie a noose to his
neck he commands him to strangle him, or to knock him on the head with a
great cudgel and kill him. His disciple obeys and sends him a martyr to
the devil, to suffer torments with Lucifer in the flames for ever. This
tragedy is enacted in public, in order that his successor may be
manifested, who hath the power of fertilising the earth, the power having
been imparted to him by the deceased; otherwise, so they say, the earth
would remain barren, and the world would perish. Oh too great foolishness
and palpable blindness of the gentiles, to enlighten the eye of whose mind
there would be needed the very hand of Christ whereby he opened the bodily
eyes of him that had been born blind! I know that in my time one of these
magicians was cast into the sea, another into a river, a mother put to
death with her son, and many more seized by our orders and banished.”(42)
The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods; but whenever the
priests chose, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die, and
alleging an oracle of the gods as their authority for the command. This
command the kings always obeyed down to the reign of Ergamenes, a
contemporary of Ptolemy II., King of Egypt. Having received a Greek
education which emancipated him from the superstitions of his countrymen,
Ergamenes ventured to disregard the command of the priests, and, entering
the Golden Temple with a body of soldiers, put the priests to the
sword.(43)
(M8) Customs of the same sort appear to have prevailed in this region down
to modern times. Thus we are told that in Fazoql, a district in the valley
of the Blue Nile, to the west of Abyssinia, it was customary, as late as
the middle of the nineteenth century, to hang a king who was no longer
beloved. His relatives and ministers assembled round him, and announced
that as he no longer pleased the men, the women, the asses, the oxen, and
the fowls of the country, it was better he should die. Once on a time,
when a king was unwilling to take the hint, his own wife and mother urged
him so strongly not to disgrace himself by disregarding the custom, that
he submitted to his fate and was strung up in the usual way. In some
tribes of Fazoql the king had to administer justice daily under a certain
tree. If from sickness or any other cause he was unable to discharge this
duty for three whole days, he was hanged on the tree in a noose, which
contained two razors so arranged that when the noose was drawn tight by
the weight of the king’s body they cut his throat.(44) At Fazolglou an
annual festival, which partook of the nature of a Saturnalia, was preceded
by a formal trial of the king in front of his house. The judges were the
chief men of the country. The king sat on his royal stool during the
trial, surrounded by armed men, who were ready to carry out a sentence of
death. A little way off a jackal and a dog were tied to a post. The
conduct of the king during his year of office was discussed, complaints
were heard, and if the verdict was unfavourable, the king was executed and
his successor chosen from among the members of his family. But if the
monarch was acquitted, the people at once paid their homage to him afresh,
and the dog or the jackal was killed in his stead. This custom lasted down
to the year 1837 or 1838, when king Yassin was thus condemned and
executed.(45) His nephew Assusa was compelled under threats of death to
succeed him in the office.(46) Afterwards it would seem that the death of
the dog was regularly accepted as a substitute for the death of the king.
At least this may be inferred from a later account of the Fazoql practice,
which runs thus: “The meaning of another of their customs is quite
obscure. At a certain time of the year they have a kind of carnival, where
every one does what he likes best. Four ministers of the king then bear
him on an anqareb out of his house to an open space of ground; a dog is
fastened by a long cord to one of the feet of the anqareb. The whole
population collects round the place, streaming in on every side. They then
throw darts and stones at the dog, till he is killed, after which the king
is again borne into his house.”(47)
(M9) A custom of putting their divine kings to death at the first symptoms
of infirmity or old age prevailed until lately, if indeed it is even now
extinct and not merely dormant, among the Shilluk of the White Nile, and
in recent years it has been carefully investigated by Dr. C. G. Seligmann,
to whose researches I am indebted for the following detailed information
on the subject.(48) The Shilluk are a tribe or nation who inhabit a long
narrow fringe of territory on the western bank of the White Nile from Kaka
in the north to Lake No in the south, as well as a strip on the eastern
bank of the river, which stretches from Fashoda to Taufikia and for some
thirty-five miles up the Sobat River. The country of the Shilluk is almost
entirely in grass, hence the principal wealth of the people consists in
their flocks and herds, but they also grow a considerable quantity of the
species of millet which is known as durra. But though the Shilluk are
mainly a pastoral people, they are not nomadic, but live in many settled
villages. The tribe at present numbers about forty thousand souls, and is
governed by a single king (_ret_), whose residence is at Fashoda. His
subjects take great care of him, and hold him in much honour. In the old
days his word was law and he was not suffered to go forth to battle. At
the present day he still keeps up considerable state and exercises much
authority; his decisions on all matters brought before him are readily
obeyed; and he never moves without a bodyguard of from twelve to twenty
men. The reverence which the Shilluk pay to their king appears to arise
chiefly from the conviction that he is a reincarnation of the spirit of
Nyakang, the semi-divine hero who founded the dynasty and settled the
tribe in their present territory, to which he is variously said to have
conducted them either from the west or from the south. Tradition has
preserved the pedigree of the kings from Nyakang to the present day. The
number of kings recorded between Nyakang and the father of the reigning
monarch is twenty, distributed over twelve generations; but Dr. Seligmann
is of opinion that many more must have reigned, and that the genealogy of
the first six or seven kings, as given to him, has been much abbreviated.
There seems to be no reason to doubt the historical character of all of
them, though myths have gathered like clouds round the persons of Nyakang
and his immediate successors. The Shilluk about Kodok (Fashoda) think of
Nyakang as having been a man in appearance and physical qualities, though
unlike his royal descendants of more recent times he did not die but
simply disappeared. His holiness is manifested especially by his relation
to Jŭok, the great god of the Shilluk, who created man and is responsible
for the order of nature. Jŭok is formless and invisible and like the air
he is everywhere at once. He is far above Nyakang and men alike, but he is
not worshipped directly, and it is only through the intercession of
Nyakang, whose favour the Shilluk secure by means of sacrifices, that Jŭok
can be induced to send the needed rain for the cattle and the crops.(49)
In his character of rain-giver Nyakang is the great benefactor of the
Shilluk. Their country, baked by the burning heat of the tropical sun,
depends entirely for its fertility on the waters of heaven, for the people
do not resort to artificial irrigation. When the rain falls, then the
grass sprouts, the millet grows, the cattle thrive, and the people have
food to eat. Drought brings famine and death in its train.(50) Nyakang is
said not only to have brought the Shilluk into their present land, but to
have made them into a nation of warriors, divided the country among them,
regulated marriage, and made the laws.(51) The religion of the Shilluk at
the present time consists mainly of the worship paid to this semi-divine
hero, the traditionary ancestor of their kings. There seems to be no
reason to doubt that the traditions concerning him are substantially
correct; in all probability he was simply a man whom the superstition of
his fellows in his own and subsequent ages has raised to the rank of a
deity.(52) No less than ten shrines are dedicated to his worship; the
three most famous are at Fashoda, Akurwa, and Fenikang. They consist of
one or more huts enclosed by a fence; generally there are several huts
within the enclosure, one or more of them being occupied by the guardians
of the shrine. These guardians are old men, who not only keep the hallowed
spot scrupulously clean, but also act as priests, killing the sacrificial
victims which are brought to the shrine, sharing their flesh, and taking
the skins for themselves. All the shrines of Nyakang are called graves of
Nyakang (_kengo Nyakang_), though it is well known that nobody is buried
there.(53) Sacred spears are kept in all of them and are used to slaughter
the victims offered in sacrifice at the shrines. The originals of these
spears are said to have belonged to Nyakang and his companions, but they
have disappeared and been replaced by others.
(M10) Two great ceremonies are annually performed at the shrines of
Nyakang: one of them is intended to ensure the fall of rain, the other is
celebrated at harvest. At the rain-making ceremony, which is held before
the rains at the beginning of the month _alabor_, a bullock is slain with
a sacred spear before the door of the shrine, while the king stands by
praying in a loud voice to Nyakang to send down the refreshing showers on
the thirsty land. As much of the blood of the victim as possible is
collected in a gourd and thrown into the river, perhaps as a rain-charm.
This intention of the sacrifice comes out more plainly in a form of the
ritual which is said to be observed at Ashop. There the sacrificial
bullock is speared high up in the flank, so that the wound is not
immediately fatal. Then the wounded animal is allowed and indeed
encouraged to walk to and from the river before it sinks down and dies. In
the blood that streams from its side on the ground the people may see a
symbol of the looked-for rain.(54) Care is taken not to break the bones of
the animal, and they, like the blood, are thrown into the river. At the
annual rain-making ceremony a cow is also dedicated to Nyakang: it is not
killed but added to the sacred herd of the shrine. The other great annual
ceremony observed at the shrines of Nyakang falls at harvest. When the
millet has been reaped, every one brings a portion of the grain to a
shrine of Nyakang, where it is ground into flour, which is made into
porridge with water fetched from the river. Then some of the porridge is
poured out on the threshold of the hut which the spirit of Nyakang is
supposed to inhabit; some of it is smeared on the outer walls of the
building; and some of it is emptied out on the ground outside. Even before
harvest it is customary to bring some of the ripening grain from the
fields and to thrust it into the thatch of the huts in the shrines, no
doubt in order to secure the blessing of Nyakang on the crops. Sacrifices
are also offered at these shrines for the benefit of sick people. A
sufferer will bring or send a sheep to the nearest sanctuary, where the
guardians will slaughter the animal with a sacred spear and pray for the
patient’s recovery.
(M11) It is a fundamental article of the Shilluk creed that the spirit of
the divine or semi-divine Nyakang is incarnate in the reigning king, who
is accordingly himself invested to some extent with the character of a
divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their kings in high, indeed religious
reverence and take every precaution against their accidental death,
nevertheless they cherish “the conviction that the king must not be
allowed to become ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the
cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot
in the fields, and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever
increasing numbers.”(55) To prevent these calamities it used to be the
regular custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death whenever he
shewed signs of ill-health or failing strength. One of the fatal symptoms
of decay was taken to be an incapacity to satisfy the sexual passions of
his wives, of whom he has very many, distributed in a large number of
houses at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives
reported it to the chiefs, who are popularly said to have intimated to the
king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay
slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed
the sentence of death. A hut was specially built for the occasion: the
king was led into it and lay down with his head resting on the lap of a
nubile virgin: the door of the hut was then walled up; and the couple were
left without food, water, or fire to die of hunger and suffocation. This
was the old custom, but it was abolished some five generations ago on
account of the excessive sufferings of one of the kings who perished in
this way. He survived his companion for some days, and in the interval was
so distressed by the stench of her putrefying body that he shouted to the
people, whom he could hear moving outside, never again to let a king die
in this prolonged and exquisite agony. After a time his cries died away
into silence; death had released him from his sufferings; but since then
the Shilluk have adopted a quicker and more merciful mode of executing
their kings. What the exact form of execution has been in later times Dr.
Seligmann found it very difficult to ascertain, though with regard to the
fact of the execution he tells us that there is not the least doubt. It is
said that the chiefs announce his fate to the king, and that afterwards he
is strangled in a hut which has been specially built for the occasion.
(M12) From Dr. Seligmann’s enquiries it appears that not only was the
Shilluk king liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first symptoms
of incipient decay, but even while he was yet in the prime of health and
strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival and have to defend
his crown in a combat to the death. According to the common Shilluk
tradition any son of a king had the right thus to fight the king in
possession and, if he succeeded in killing him, to reign in his stead. As
every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of possible
candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not
inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his
hand. But the attack on him could only take place with any prospect of
success at night; for during the day the king surrounded himself with his
friends and bodyguards, and an aspirant to the throne could hardly hope to
cut his way through them and strike home. It was otherwise at night. For
then the guards were dismissed and the king was alone in his enclosure
with his favourite wives, and there was no man near to defend him except a
few herdsmen, whose huts stood a little way off. The hours of darkness
were therefore the season of peril for the king. It is said that he used
to pass them in constant watchfulness, prowling round his huts fully
armed, peering into the blackest shadows, or himself standing silent and
alert, like a sentinel on duty, in some dark corner. When at last his
rival appeared, the fight would take place in grim silence, broken only by
the clash of spears and shields, for it was a point of honour with the
king not to call the herdsmen to his assistance.(56)
When the king did not perish in single combat, but was put to death on the
approach of sickness or old age, it became necessary to find a successor
for him. Apparently the successor was chosen by the most powerful chiefs
from among the princes (_niăret_), the sons either of the late king or of
one of his predecessors. Details as to the mode of election are lacking.
So far as Dr. Seligmann could ascertain, the kings elect shewed no
reluctance to accept the fatal sovereignty; indeed he was told a story of
a man who clamoured to be made king for only one day, saying that he was
perfectly ready to be killed after that. The age at which the king was
killed would seem to have commonly been between forty and fifty.(57) To
the improvident and unimaginative savage the prospect of being put to
death at the end of a set time, whether long or short, has probably few
terrors; and if it has any, we may suspect that they are altogether
outweighed in his mind by the opportunities for immediate enjoyment of all
kinds which a kingdom affords to his unbridled appetites and passions.
(M13) An important part of the solemnities attending the accession of a
Shilluk king appears to be intended to convey to the new monarch the
divine spirit of Nyakang, which has been transmitted from the founder of
the dynasty to all his successors on the throne. For this purpose a sacred
four-legged stool and a mysterious object which bears the name of Nyakang
himself are brought with much solemnity from the shrine of Nyakang at
Akurwa to the small village of Kwom near Fashoda, where the king elect and
the chiefs await their arrival. The thing called Nyakang is said to be of
cylindrical shape, some two or three feet long by six inches broad. The
chief of Akurwa informed Dr. Seligmann that the object in question is a
rude wooden figure of a man, which was fashioned long ago at the command
of Nyakang in person. We may suppose that it represents the divine king
himself and that it is, or was formerly, supposed to house his spirit,
though the chief of Akurwa denied to Dr. Seligmann that it does so now. Be
that as it may, the object plays a prominent part at the installation of a
new king. When the men of Akurwa arrive at Kwom with the sacred stool and
the image of Nyakang, as we may call it, they engage in a sham fight with
the men who are waiting for them with the king elect. The weapons used on
both sides are simply stalks of millet. Being victorious in the mock
combat, the men of Akurwa escort the king to Fashoda, and some of them
enter the shrine of Nyakang with the stool. After a short time they bring
the stool forth again and set it on the ground outside of the sacred
enclosure. Then the image of Nyakang is placed on the stool; the king
elect holds one leg of the stool and an important chief holds another. The
king is surrounded by a crowd of princes and nobles, and near him stand
two of his paternal aunts and two of his sisters. After that a bullock is
killed and its flesh eaten by the men of certain families called _ororo_,
who are said to be descended from the third of the Shilluk kings. Then the
Akurwa men carry the image of Nyakang into the shrine, and the _ororo_ men
place the king elect on the sacred stool, where he remains seated for some
time, apparently till sunset. When he rises, the Akurwa men carry the
stool back into the shrine, and the king is escorted to three new huts,
where he stays in seclusion for three days. On the fourth night he is
conducted quietly, almost stealthily, to his royal residence at Fashoda,
and next day he shews himself publicly to his subjects. The three new huts
in which he spent the days of his seclusion are then broken up and their
fragments cast into the river. The installation of a new king generally
takes place about the middle of the dry season; and it is said that the
men of Akurwa tarry at Fashoda with the image of Nyakang till about the
beginning of the rains. Before they leave Fashoda they sacrifice a
bullock, and at every waddy or bed of a stream that they cross they kill a
sheep.
(M14) Like Nyakang himself, their founder, each of the Shilluk kings after
death is worshipped at a shrine, which is erected over his grave, and the
grave of a king is always in the village where he was born.(58) The
tomb-shrine of a king resembles the shrine of Nyakang, consisting of a few
huts enclosed by a fence; one of the huts is built over the king’s grave,
the others are occupied by the guardians of the shrine. Indeed the shrines
of Nyakang and the shrines of the kings are scarcely to be distinguished
from each other, and the religious rituals observed at all of them are
identical in form and vary only in matters of detail, the variations being
due apparently to the far greater sanctity attributed to the shrines of
Nyakang. The grave-shrines of the kings are tended by certain old men or
women, who correspond to the guardians of the shrines of Nyakang. They are
usually widows or old men-servants of the deceased king, and when they die
they are succeeded in their office by their descendants. Moreover, cattle
are dedicated to the grave-shrines of the kings and sacrifices are offered
at them just as at the shrines of Nyakang. Thus when the millet crop
threatens to fail or a murrain to break out among the cattle, either
Nyakang himself or one of his successors on the throne will appear to
somebody in a dream and demand a sacrifice. The dream is reported to the
king, who thereupon at once sends a cow and a bullock to one or more of
the shrines of Nyakang, if it was he who appeared in the vision, or to the
grave-shrine of the particular king whom the dreamer saw in his dream. The
bullock is then sacrificed and the cow added to the sacred herd belonging
to the shrine. Further, the harvest ceremony which is performed at the
shrines of Nyakang is usually, though not necessarily, performed also at
the grave-shrines of the kings; and, lastly, sick folk send animals to be
sacrificed as offerings on their behalf at the shrines of the kings just
as they send them to the shrines of Nyakang.
(M15) Sick people have, indeed, a special reason for sacrificing to the
spirits of the dead kings in the hope of recovery, inasmuch as one of the
commonest causes of sickness, according to the Shilluk, is the entrance of
one of these royal spirits into the body of the sufferer, whose first
care, therefore, is to rid himself as quickly as possible of his august
but unwelcome guest. Apparently, however, it is only the souls of the
early kings who manifest themselves in this disagreeable fashion. Dr.
Seligmann met with a woman, for example, who had been ill and who
attributed her illness to the spirit of Dag, the second of the Shilluk
kings, which had taken possession of her body. But a sacrifice of two
sheep had induced the spirit to quit her, and she wore anklets of beads,
with pieces of the ears of the sheep strung on them, which she thought
would effectually guard her against the danger of being again possessed by
the soul of the dead king. Nor is it only in sickness that the souls of
dead kings are thought to take possession of the bodies of the living.
Certain men and women, who bear the name of _ajuago_, are believed to be
permanently possessed by the spirit of one or other of the early kings,
and in virtue of this inspiration they profess to heal the sick and do a
brisk trade in amulets. The first symptom of possession may take the form
of illness or of a dream from which the sleeper awakes trembling and
agitated. A long and complicated ceremony follows to abate the extreme
force of the spiritual manifestations in the new medium, for were these to
continue in their first intensity he would not dare to approach his women.
But whichever of the dead kings may manifest himself to the living,
whether in dreams or in the form of bodily possession, his spirit is
deemed, at least by many of the Shilluk, to be identical with that of
Nyakang; they do not clearly distinguish, if indeed they distinguish at
all, between the divine spirit of the founder of the dynasty and its later
manifestations in all his royal successors.
(M16) In general the principal element in the religion of the Shilluk
would seem to be the worship which they pay to their sacred or divine
kings, whether dead or alive. These are believed to be animated by a
single divine spirit, which has been transmitted from the semi-mythical,
but probably in substance historical, founder of the dynasty through all
his successors to the present day. Yet the divine spirit, as Dr. Seligmann
justly observes, is clearly not thought of as congenital in the members of
the royal house; it is only conveyed to each king on his accession by
means of the mysterious object called Nyakang, in which, as Dr. Seligmann
with great probability conjectures, the holy spirit of Nyakang may be
supposed to reside. Hence, regarding their kings as incarnate divinities
on whom the welfare of men, of cattle, and of the corn implicitly depends,
the Shilluk naturally pay them the greatest respect and take every care of
them; and however strange it may seem to us, their custom of putting the
divine king to death as soon as he shews signs of ill-health or failing
strength springs directly from their profound veneration for him and from
their anxiety to preserve him, or rather the divine spirit by which he is
animated, in the most perfect state of efficiency: nay, we may go further
and say that their practice of regicide is the best proof they can give of
the high regard in which they hold their kings. For they believe, as we
have seen, that the king’s life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up
with the prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew
senile the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot
in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their
opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put the king to
death while he is still hale and hearty, in order that the divine spirit
which he has inherited from his predecessors may be transmitted in turn by
him to his successor while it is still in full vigour and has not yet been
impaired by the weakness of disease and old age. In this connexion the
particular symptom which is commonly said to seal the king’s death-warrant
is highly significant; when he can no longer satisfy the passions of his
numerous wives, in other words, when he has ceased, whether partially or
wholly, to be able to reproduce his kind, it is time for him to die and to
make room for a more vigorous successor. Taken along with the other
reasons which are alleged for putting the king to death, this one suggests
that the fertility of men, of cattle, and of the crops is believed to
depend sympathetically on the generative power of the king, so that the
complete failure of that power in him would involve a corresponding
failure in men, animals, and plants, and would thereby entail at no
distant date the entire extinction of all life, whether human, animal, or
vegetable. No wonder, that with such a danger before their eyes the
Shilluk should be most careful not to let the king die what we should call
a natural death of sickness or old age. It is characteristic of their
attitude towards the death of the kings that they refrain from speaking of
it as death: they do not say that a king has died but simply that he has
“gone away” like his divine ancestors Nyakang and Dag, the two first kings
of the dynasty, both of whom are reported not to have died but to have
disappeared. The similar legends of the mysterious disappearance of early
kings in other lands, for example at Rome and in Uganda,(59) may well
point to a similar custom of putting them to death for the purpose of
preserving their life.
(M17) On the whole the theory and practice of the divine kings of the
Shilluk correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the priests
of Nemi, the Kings of the Wood, if my view of the latter is correct.(60)
In both we see a series of divine kings on whose life the fertility of
men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to depend, and who are put
to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their
divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour,
uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because
any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his
worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on mankind, on cattle,
and on the crops. Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting
divine kings to death, particularly the method of transmitting their
divine souls to their successors, will be dealt with more fully in the
sequel. Meantime we pass to other examples of the general practice.
(M18) The Dinka are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of the
White Nile, whose territory, lying mostly on the eastern bank of the river
and stretching from the sixth to the twelfth degree of North Latitude, has
been estimated to comprise between sixty and seventy thousand square
miles. They are a tall long-legged people rather slender than fat, with
curly hair and a complexion of the deepest black. Though ill-fed, they are
strong and healthy and in general reach a great age. The nation embraces a
number of independent tribes, and each tribe is mainly composed of the
owners of cattle; for the Dinka are essentially a pastoral people,
passionately devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen, though
they also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate small quantities
of millet (durra) and sesame. The tribes have no political union. Each
village forms a separate community, pasturing its herds together in the
same grass-land. With the change of the seasons the people migrate with
their flocks and herds to and from the banks of the Nile. In summer, when
the plains near the great river are converted into swamps and covered with
clouds of mosquitoes, the herdsmen and their families drive their beasts
to the higher land of the interior, where the animals find firm ground,
abundant fodder, and pools of water at which to slake their thirst in the
fervour of the noonday heat. Here in the clearings of the forest the
community takes up its abode, each family dwelling by itself in one or
more conical huts enclosed by a strong fence of stakes and thorn-bushes.
It is in the patches of open ground about these dwellings that the women
grow their scanty crops of millet and sesame. The mode of tillage is rude.
The stumps of the trees which have been felled are left standing to a
height of several feet; the ground is hacked by the help of a tool between
a hoe and a spade, and the weeds are uprooted with the hand. Such as it
is, the crop is exposed to the ravages of apes and elephants by night and
of birds by day. The hungry blacks do not always wait till the corn is
ripe, but eat much of it while the ears are still green. The cattle are
kept in separate parks (_murahs_) away from the villages. It is in the
season of the summer rains that the Dinka are most happy and prosperous.
Then the cattle find sweet grass, plentiful water, coolness and shade in
the forest; then the people subsist in comfort on the milk of their flocks
and herds, supplementing it with the millet which they reap and the wild
fruits which they gather in the forest; then they brew the native beer,
then they marry and dance by night under the bright moon of the serene
tropical sky. But in autumn a great change passes over the life of the
community. When October has come, the rains are over, the grass of the
pastures is eaten down or withered, the pools are dry; thirst compels the
whole village, with its lowing herds and bleating flocks, to migrate to
the neighbourhood of the river. Now begins a time of privation and
suffering. There is no grass for the cattle save in some marshy spots,
where the herdsman must fight his rivals in order to win a meagre supply
of fodder for his starveling beasts. There is no milk for the people, no
fruits on the trees, except a bitter sort of acorns, from which a
miserable flour is ground to stay the pangs of hunger. The lean and
famished natives are driven to fish in the river for the tubers of
water-lilies, to grub in the earth for roots, to boil the leaves of trees,
and as a last resource to drink the blood drawn from the necks of their
wretched cattle. The gaunt appearance of the people at this season fills
the beholder with horror. The herds are decimated by famine, but even more
beasts perish by dysentery and other diseases when the first rains cause
the fresh grass to sprout.(61)
(M19) It is no wonder that the rain, on which the Dinka are so manifestly
dependent for their subsistence, should play a great part in their
religion and superstition. They worship a supreme being whose name of
Dengdit means literally Great Rain.(62) It was he who created the world
and established the present order of things, and it is he who sends down
the rain from the “rain-place,” his home in the upper regions of the air.
But according to the Niel Dinka this great being was once incarnate in
human form. Born of a woman, who descended from the sky, he became the
ancestor of a clan which has the rain for its totem; for the recent
researches of Dr. C. G. Seligmann have proved that every Dinka tribe is
divided into a number of clans, each of which reveres as its totem a
species of animals or plants or other natural objects, such as rain or
fire. Animal totems seem to be the commonest; amongst them are the lion,
the elephant, the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the fox, the hyaena, and a
species of small birds called _amur_, clouds of which infest the
cornfields and do great damage to the crops. Each clan speaks of its
totemic animal or plant as its ancestor and refrains from injuring and
eating it. Men of the Crocodile clan, for example, call themselves
“Brothers of the Crocodile,” and will neither kill nor eat the animal;
indeed they will not even eat out of any vessel which has held crocodile
flesh. And as they do not injure crocodiles, so they imagine that their
crocodile kinsfolk will not injure them; hence men of this clan swim
freely in the river, even by night, without fear of being attacked by the
dangerous reptiles. And when the totem is a carnivorous animal, members of
the clan may propitiate it by killing sheep and throwing out the flesh to
be devoured by their animal brethren either on the outskirts of the
village or in the river. Members of the Small Bird (_amur_) clan perform
ceremonies to prevent the birds from injuring the crops. The relationship
between a clan and its animal ancestor or totem is commonly explained by a
legend that in the beginning an ancestress gave birth to twins, one of
whom was the totemic animal and the other the human ancestor. Like most
totemic clans, the clans of the Dinka are exogamous, that is, no man may
marry a woman of his own clan. The descent of the clans is in the paternal
line; in other words, every man and woman belongs to his or her father’s
clan, not to that of his or her mother. But the Rain clan of the Niel
Dinka has for its ancestor, as we have seen, the supreme god himself, who
deigned to be born of a woman and to live for a long time among men,
ruling over them, till at last he grew very old and disappeared
appropriately, like Romulus, in a great storm of rain. Shrines erected in
his honour appear to be scattered all over the Dinka country and offerings
are made at them.
(M20) Perhaps without being unduly rash we may conjecture that the great
god of the Dinka, who gives them the rain, was indeed, what tradition
represents him as having been, a man among men, in fact a human
rain-maker, whom at his death the superstition of his fellows promoted to
the rank of a deity above the clouds. Be that as it may, the human
rain-maker (_bain_) is a very important personage among the Dinka to this
day; indeed the men in authority whom travellers dub chiefs or sheikhs are
in fact the actual or potential rain-makers of the tribe or community.(63)
Each of them is believed to be animated by the spirit of a great
rain-maker, which has come down to him through a succession of
rain-makers; and in virtue of this inspiration a successful rain-maker
enjoys very great power and is consulted on all important matters. For
example, in the Bor tribe of Dinka at the present time there is an old but
active rain-maker named Biyordit, who is reputed to have immanent in him a
great and powerful spirit called Lerpiu, and by reason of this reputation
he exercises immense influence over all the Dinka of the Bor and Tain
tribes. While the mighty spirit Lerpiu is supposed to be embodied in the
rain-maker, it is also thought to inhabit a certain hut which serves as a
shrine. In front of the hut stands a post to which are fastened the horns
of many bullocks that have been sacrificed to Lerpiu; and in the hut is
kept a very sacred spear which bears the name of Lerpiu and is said to
have fallen from heaven six generations ago. As fallen stars are also
called Lerpiu, we may suspect that an intimate connexion is supposed to
exist between meteorites and the spirit which animates the rain-maker; nor
would such a connexion seem unnatural to the savage, who observes that
meteorites and rain alike descend from the sky. In spring, about the month
of April, when the new moon is a few days old, a sacrifice of bullocks is
offered to Lerpiu for the purpose of inducing him to move Dengdit, the
great heavenly rain-maker, to send down rain on the parched and thirsty
earth. Two bullocks are led twice round the shrine and afterwards tied by
the rain-maker to the post in front of it. Then the drums beat and the
people, old and young, men and women, dance round the shrine and sing,
while the beasts are being sacrificed, “Lerpiu, our ancestor, we have
brought you a sacrifice. Be pleased to cause rain to fall.” The blood of
the bullocks is collected in a gourd, boiled in a pot on the fire, and
eaten by the old and important people of the clan. The horns of the
animals are attached to the post in front of the shrine.
(M21) In spite, or rather in virtue, of the high honour in which he is
held, no Dinka rain-maker is allowed to die a natural death of sickness or
old age; for the Dinka believe that if such an untoward event were to
happen, the tribe would suffer from disease and famine, and the herds
would not yield their increase. So when a rain-maker feels that he is
growing old and infirm, he tells his children that he wishes to die. Among
the Agar Dinka a large grave is dug and the rain-maker lies down in it on
his right side with his head resting on a skin. He is surrounded by his
friends and relatives, including his younger children; but his elder
children are not allowed to approach the grave lest in their grief and
despair they should do themselves a bodily injury. For many hours,
generally for more than a day, the rain-maker lies without eating or
drinking. From time to time he speaks to the people, recalling the past
history of the tribe, reminding them how he has ruled and advised them,
and instructing them how they are to act in the future. Then, when he has
concluded his admonition, he tells them that it is finished and bids them
cover him up. So the earth is thrown down on him as he lies in the grave,
and he soon dies of suffocation. Such, with minor variations, appears to
be the regular end of the honourable career of a rain-maker in all the
Dinka tribes. The Khor-Adar Dinka told Dr. Seligmann that when they have
dug the grave for their rain-maker they strangle him in his house. The
father and paternal uncle of one of Dr. Seligmann’s informants had both
been rain-makers and both had been killed in the most regular and orthodox
fashion. Even if a rain-maker is quite young he will be put to death
should he seem likely to perish of disease. Further, every precaution is
taken to prevent a rain-maker from dying an accidental death, for such an
end, though not nearly so serious a matter as death from illness or old
age, would be sure to entail sickness on the tribe. As soon as a
rain-maker is killed, his valuable spirit is supposed to pass to a
suitable successor, whether a son or other near blood relation.
(M22) In the Central African kingdom of Unyoro down to recent years custom
required that as soon as the king fell seriously ill or began to break up
from age, he should die by his own hand; for, according to an old
prophecy, the throne would pass away from the dynasty if ever the king
were to die a natural death. He killed himself by draining a poisoned cup.
If he faltered or were too ill to ask for the cup, it was his wife’s duty
to administer the poison.(64) When the king of Kibanga, on the Upper
Congo, seems near his end, the sorcerers put a rope round his neck, which
they draw gradually tighter till he dies.(65) If the king of Gingero
happens to be wounded in war, he is put to death by his comrades, or, if
they fail to kill him, by his kinsfolk, however hard he may beg for mercy.
They say they do it that he may not die by the hands of his enemies.(66)
The Jukos are a heathen tribe of the Benue river, a great tributary of the
Niger. In their country “the town of Gatri is ruled by a king who is
elected by the big men of the town as follows. When in the opinion of the
big men the king has reigned long enough, they give out that ‘the king is
sick’—a formula understood by all to mean that they are going to kill him,
though the intention is never put more plainly. They then decide who is to
be the next king. How long he is to reign is settled by the influential
men at a meeting; the question is put and answered by each man throwing on
the ground a little piece of stick for each year he thinks the new king
should rule. The king is then told, and a great feast prepared, at which
the king gets drunk on guinea-corn beer. After that he is speared, and the
man who was chosen becomes king. Thus each Juko king knows that he cannot
have very many more years to live, and that he is certain of his
predecessor’s fate. This, however, does not seem to frighten candidates.
The same custom of king-killing is said to prevail at Quonde and Wukari as
well as at Gatri.”(67) In the three Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Katsina, and
Daura, in Northern Nigeria, as soon as a king shewed signs of failing
health or growing infirmity, an official who bore the title of Killer of
the Elephant (_kariagiwa_) appeared and throttled him by holding his
windpipe. The king elect was afterwards conducted to the centre of the
town, called Head of the Elephant (_kan giwa_), where he was made to lie
down on a bed. Then a black ox was slaughtered and its blood allowed to
pour all over his body. Next the ox was flayed, and the remains of the
dead king, which had been disembowelled and smoked for seven days over a
slow fire, were wrapt up in the hide and dragged along the ground to the
place of burial, where they were interred in a circular pit. After his
bath of ox blood the new king had to remain for seven days in his mother’s
house, undergoing ablutions daily. On the eighth day he was conducted in
state to his palace. In the kingdom of Daura the new monarch had moreover
to step over the corpse of his predecessor.(68)
(M23) The Matiamvo is a great king or emperor in the interior of Angola.
One of the inferior kings of the country, by name Challa, gave to a
Portuguese expedition the following account of the manner in which the
Matiamvo comes by his end. “It has been customary,” he said, “for our
Matiamvos to die either in war or by a violent death, and the present
Matiamvo must meet this last fate, as, in consequence of his great
exactions, he has lived long enough. When we come to this understanding,
and decide that he should be killed, we invite him to make war with our
enemies, on which occasion we all accompany him and his family to the war,
when we lose some of our people. If he escapes unhurt, we return to the
war again and fight for three or four days. We then suddenly abandon him
and his family to their fate, leaving him in the enemy’s hands. Seeing
himself thus deserted, he causes his throne to be erected, and, sitting
down, calls his family around him. He then orders his mother to approach;
she kneels at his feet; he first cuts off her head, then decapitates his
sons in succession, next his wives and relatives, and, last of all, his
most beloved wife, called Anacullo. This slaughter being accomplished, the
Matiamvo, dressed in all his pomp, awaits his own death, which immediately
follows, by an officer sent by the powerful neighbouring chiefs,
Caniquinha and Canica. This officer first cuts off his legs and arms at
the joints, and lastly he cuts off his head; after which the head of the
officer is struck off. All the potentates retire from the encampment, in
order not to witness his death. It is my duty to remain and witness his
death, and to mark the place where the head and arms have been deposited
by the two great chiefs, the enemies of the Matiamvo. They also take
possession of all the property belonging to the deceased monarch and his
family, which they convey to their own residence. I then provide for the
funeral of the mutilated remains of the late Matiamvo, after which I
retire to his capital and proclaim the new government. I then return to
where the head, legs, and arms have been deposited, and, for forty slaves,
I ransom them, together with the merchandise and other property belonging
to the deceased, which I give up to the new Matiamvo, who has been
proclaimed. This is what has happened to many Matiamvos, and what must
happen to the present one.”(69)
(M24) It appears to have been a Zulu custom to put the king to death as
soon as he began to have wrinkles or grey hairs. At least this seems
implied in the following passage written by one who resided for some time
at the court of the notorious Zulu tyrant Chaka, in the early part of the
nineteenth century: “The extraordinary violence of the king’s rage with me
was mainly occasioned by that absurd nostrum, the hair oil, with the
notion of which Mr. Farewell had impressed him as being a specific for
removing all indications of age. From the first moment of his having heard
that such a preparation was attainable, he evinced a solicitude to procure
it, and on every occasion never forgot to remind us of his anxiety
respecting it; more especially on our departure on the mission his
injunctions were particularly directed to this object. It will be seen
that it is one of the barbarous customs of the Zoolas in their choice or
election of their kings that he must neither have wrinkles nor grey hairs,
as they are both distinguishing marks of disqualification for becoming a
monarch of a warlike people. It is also equally indispensable that their
king should never exhibit those proofs of having become unfit and
incompetent to reign; it is therefore important that they should conceal
these indications so long as they possibly can. Chaka had become greatly
apprehensive of the approach of grey hairs; which would at once be the
signal for him to prepare to make his exit from this sublunary world, it
being always followed by the death of the monarch.”(70) The writer to whom
we are indebted for this instructive anecdote of the hair-oil omits to
specify the mode in which a grey-haired and wrinkled Zulu chief used “to
make his exit from this sublunary world”; but on analogy we may conjecture
that he did so by the simple and perfectly sufficient process of being
knocked on the head.
(M25) The custom of putting kings to death as soon as they suffered from
any personal defect prevailed two centuries ago in the Caffre kingdom of
Sofala, to the north of the present Zululand. We have seen that these
kings of Sofala, each of whom bore the official name of Quiteve, were
regarded as gods by their people, being entreated to give rain or
sunshine, according as each might be wanted.(71) Nevertheless a slight
bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth, was considered a sufficient
cause for putting one of these god-men to death, as we learn from the
following passage of an old Portuguese historian: “It was formerly the
custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide by taking poison when
any disaster or natural physical defect fell upon them, such as impotence,
infectious disease, the loss of their front teeth, by which they were
disfigured, or any other deformity or affliction. To put an end to such
defects they killed themselves, saying that the king should be free from
any blemish, and if not, it was better for his honour that he should die
and seek another life where he would be made whole, for there everything
was perfect. But the Quiteve who reigned when I was in those parts would
not imitate his predecessors in this, being discreet and dreaded as he
was; for having lost a front tooth he caused it to be proclaimed
throughout the kingdom that all should be aware that he had lost a tooth
and should recognise him when they saw him without it, and if his
predecessors killed themselves for such things they were very foolish, and
he would not do so; on the contrary, he would be very sorry when the time
came for him to die a natural death, for his life was very necessary to
preserve his kingdom and defend it from his enemies; and he recommended
his successors to follow his example.”(72) The same historian tells us
that “near the kingdom of Quiteve is another of which Sedanda is king, the
laws and customs of which are very similar to those of Quiteve, all these
Kaffirs being of the same nation, and these two kingdoms having formerly
been one, as I shall relate hereafter. When I was in Sofala it happened
that King Sedanda was seized with a severe and contagious leprosy, and
seeing that his complaint was incurable, having named the prince who was
to succeed him, he took poison and died, according to the custom of those
kings when they are afflicted with any physical deformity.”(73)
(M26) The king of Sofala who dared to survive the loss of his front tooth
was thus a bold reformer like Ergamenes, king of Ethiopia. We may
conjecture that the ground for putting the Ethiopian kings to death was,
as in the case of the Zulu and Sofala kings, the appearance on their
person of any bodily defect or sign of decay; and that the oracle which
the priests alleged as the authority for the royal execution was to the
effect that great calamities would result from the reign of a king who had
any blemish on his body; just as an oracle warned Sparta against a “lame
reign,” that is, the reign of a lame king.(74) It is some confirmation of
this conjecture that the kings of Ethiopia were chosen for their size,
strength, and beauty long before the custom of killing them was
abolished.(75) To this day the Sultan of Wadai must have no obvious bodily
defect, and the king of Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a single
blemish, such as a broken or a filed tooth or the scar of an old
wound.(76) According to the Book of Acaill and many other authorities no
king who was afflicted with a personal blemish might reign over Ireland at
Tara. Hence, when the great King Cormac Mac Art lost one eye by an
accident, he at once abdicated.(77) It is only natural, therefore, to
suppose, especially with the other African examples before us, that any
bodily defect or symptom of old age appearing on the person of the
Ethiopian monarch was the signal for his execution. At a later time it is
recorded that if the king of Ethiopia became maimed in any part of his
body all his courtiers had to suffer the same mutilation.(78) But this
rule may perhaps have been instituted at the time when the custom of
killing the king for any personal defect was abolished; instead of
compelling the king to die because, for example, he had lost a tooth, all
his subjects would be obliged to lose a tooth, and thus the invidious
superiority of the subjects over the king would be cancelled. A rule of
this sort is still observed in the same region at the court of the Sultans
of Darfur. When the Sultan coughs, every one makes the sound _ts ts_ by
striking the tongue against the root of the upper teeth; when he sneezes,
the whole assembly utters a sound like the cry of the jeko; when he falls
off his horse, all his followers must fall off likewise; if any one of
them remains in the saddle, no matter how high his rank, he is laid on the
ground and beaten.(79) At the court of the king of Uganda in central
Africa, when the king laughs, every one laughs; when he sneezes, every one
sneezes; when he has a cold, every one pretends to have a cold; when he
has his hair cut, so has everybody.(80) At the court of Boni in Celebes it
is a rule that whatever the king does all the courtiers must do. If he
stands, they stand; if he sits, they sit; if he falls off his horse, they
fall off their horses; if he bathes, they bathe, and passers-by must go
into the water in the dress, good or bad, which they happen to have
on.(81) When the emperor of China laughs, the mandarins in attendance
laugh also; when he stops laughing, they stop; when he is sad, their
countenances are chopfallen; “you would say that their faces are on
springs, and that the emperor can touch the springs and set them in motion
at pleasure.”(82) But to return to the death of the divine king.
(M27) Many days’ journey to the north-east of Abomey, the old capital of
Dahomey, lies the kingdom of Eyeo. “The Eyeos are governed by a king, no
less absolute than the king of Dahomy, yet subject to a regulation of
state, at once humiliating and extraordinary. When the people have
conceived an opinion of his ill-government, which is sometimes insidiously
infused into them by the artifice of his discontented ministers, they send
a deputation to him with a present of parrots’ eggs, as a mark of its
authenticity, to represent to him that the burden of government must have
so far fatigued him that they consider it full time for him to repose from
his cares and indulge himself with a little sleep. He thanks his subjects
for their attention to his ease, retires to his own apartment as if to
sleep, and there gives directions to his women to strangle him. This is
immediately executed, and his son quietly ascends the throne upon the
usual terms of holding the reins of government no longer than whilst he
merits the approbation of the people.” About the year 1774, a king of
Eyeo, whom his ministers attempted to remove in the customary manner,
positively refused to accept the proffered parrots’ eggs at their hands,
telling them that he had no mind to take a nap, but on the contrary was
resolved to watch for the benefit of his subjects. The ministers,
surprised and indignant at his recalcitrancy, raised a rebellion, but were
defeated with great slaughter, and thus by his spirited conduct the king
freed himself from the tyranny of his councillors and established a new
precedent for the guidance of his successors.(83) However, the old custom
seems to have revived and persisted until late in the nineteenth century,
for a Catholic missionary, writing in 1884, speaks of the practice as if
it were still in vogue.(84) Another missionary, writing in 1881, thus
describes the usage of the Egbas and the Yorubas of west Africa: “Among
the customs of the country one of the most curious is unquestionably that
of judging and punishing the king. Should he have earned the hatred of his
people by exceeding his rights, one of his councillors, on whom the heavy
duty is laid, requires of the prince that he shall ‘go to sleep,’ which
means simply ‘take poison and die.’ If his courage fails him at the
supreme moment, a friend renders him this last service, and quietly,
without betraying the secret, they prepare the people for the news of the
king’s death. In Yoruba the thing is managed a little differently. When a
son is born to the king of Oyo, they make a model of the infant’s right
foot in clay and keep it in the house of the elders (_ogboni_). If the
king fails to observe the customs of the country, a messenger, without
speaking a word, shews him his child’s foot. The king knows what that
means. He takes poison and goes to sleep.”(85) The old Prussians
acknowledged as their supreme lord a ruler who governed them in the name
of the gods, and was known as God’s Mouth (_Kirwaido_). When he felt
himself weak and ill, if he wished to leave a good name behind him, he had
a great heap made of thorn-bushes and straw, on which he mounted and
delivered a long sermon to the people, exhorting them to serve the gods
and promising to go to the gods and speak for the people. Then he took
some of the perpetual fire which burned in front of the holy oak-tree, and
lighting the pile with it burned himself to death.(86)
(M28) We need not doubt the truth of this last tradition. Fanaticism or
the mere love of notoriety has led men in other ages and other lands to
court death in the flames. In antiquity the mountebank Peregrinus, after
bidding for fame in the various characters of a Christian martyr, a
shameless cynic, and a rebel against Rome, ended his disreputable and
vainglorious career by publicly burning himself at the Olympic festival in
the presence of a crowd of admirers and scoffers, among whom was the
satirist Lucian.(87) Buddhist monks in China sometimes seek to attain
Nirvana by the same method, the flame of their religious zeal being fanned
by a belief that the merit of their death redounds to the good of the
whole community, while the praises which are showered upon them in their
lives, and the prospect of the honours and worship which await them after
death, serve as additional incentives to suicide. The beautiful mountains
of Tien-tai, in the district of Tai-chow, are, or were till lately, the
scene of many such voluntary martyrdoms. The victims are monks who, weary
of the vanities of earth, have withdrawn even from their monasteries and
spent years alone in one or other of the hermitages which are scattered
among the ravines and precipices of this wild and secluded region. Their
fancy having been wrought and their resolution strung to the necessary
pitch by a life of solitude and brooding contemplation, they announce
their intention and fix the day of their departure from this world of
shadows, always choosing for that purpose a festival which draws a crowd
of worshippers and pilgrims to one of the many monasteries of the
district. Advertisements of the approaching solemnity are posted
throughout the country, and believers are invited to attend and assist the
martyrs with their prayers. From three to five monks are said thus to
commit themselves to the flames every year at Tien-tai. They prepare by
fasting and ablution for the last fiery trial of their faith. An upright
chest containing a seat is placed in a brick furnace, and the space
between the chest and the walls of the furnace is filled with fuel. The
doomed man takes his seat in the chest; the door is shut on him and
barred; fire is applied to the combustibles, and consumes the candidate
for heaven. When all is over, the charred remains are raked together,
worshipped, and reverently buried in a dagoba or shrine destined for the
preservation and worship of the relics of saints. The victims, it is said,
are not always voluntary. In remote districts unscrupulous priests have
been known to stupefy a clerical brother with drugs and then burn him
publicly, an unwilling martyr, as a means of spreading the renown of the
monastery and thereby attracting the alms of the faithful. On the
twenty-eighth of January 1888 the Spiritual-hill monastery, distant about
a day’s journey from the city of Wen-chow, witnessed the voluntary death
by fire of two monks who bore the euphonious names of
Perceptive-intelligence and Effulgent-glamour. Before they entered the
furnaces, the spectators prayed them to become after death the spiritual
guardians of the neighbourhood, to protect it from all evil influences,
and to grant luck in trade, fine seasons, plentiful harvests, and every
other blessing. The martyrs complaisantly promised to comply with these
requests, and were thereupon worshipped as living Buddhas, while a stream
of gifts poured into the coffers of the monastery.(88) Among the Esquimaux
of Bering Strait a shaman has been known to burn himself alive in the
expectation of returning to life with much stronger powers than he had
possessed before.(89)
(M29) But the suicides by fire of Chinese Buddhists and Esquimaux
sorcerers have been far surpassed by the frenzies of Christian fanaticism.
In the seventeenth century the internal troubles of their unhappy country,
viewed in the dim light of prophecy, created a widespread belief among the
Russian people that the end of the world was at hand, and that the reign
of Antichrist was about to begin. We know from Scripture that the old
serpent, which is the devil, has been or will be shut up under lock and
key for a thousand years,(90) and that the number of the Beast is six
hundred and sixty-six.(91) A simple mathematical calculation, based on
these irrefragable data, pointed to the year one thousand six hundred and
sixty-six as the date when the final consummation of all things and the
arrival of the Beast in question might be confidently anticipated. When
the year came and went and still, to the general surprise, the animal
failed to put in an appearance, the calculations were revised, it was
discovered that an error had crept into them, and the world was respited
for another thirty-three years. But though opinions differed as to the
precise date of the catastrophe, the pious were unanimous in their
conviction of its proximity. Accordingly some of them ceased to till their
fields, abandoned their houses, and on certain nights of the year expected
the sound of the last trump in coffins which they took the precaution of
closing, lest their senses, or what remained of them, should be
overpowered by the awful vision of the Judgment Day.
(M30) It would have been well if the delusion of their disordered
intellects had stopped there. Unhappily in many cases it went much
further, and suicide, universal suicide, was preached by fervent
missionaries as the only means to escape the snares of Antichrist and to
pass from the sins and sorrows of this fleeting world to the eternal joys
of heaven. Whole communities hailed with enthusiasm the gospel of death,
and hastened to put its precepts in practice. An epidemic of suicide raged
throughout northern and north-eastern Russia. At first the favourite mode
of death was by starvation. In the forest of Vetlouga, for example, an old
man founded an establishment for the use of religious suicides. It was a
building without doors and windows. The aspirants to heaven were lowered
into it through a hole in the roof, the hatch was battened down on them,
and men armed with clubs patrolled the outer walls to prevent the
prisoners from escaping. Hundreds of persons thus died a lingering death.
At first the sounds of devotion issued from the walls; but as time went on
these were replaced by entreaties for food, prayers for mercy, and finally
imprecations on the miscreant who had lured these misguided beings to
destruction and on the parents who had brought them into the world to
suffer such exquisite torments. Thus death by famine was attended by some
obvious disadvantages. It was slow: it opened the door to repentance: it
occasionally admitted of rescue. Accordingly death by fire was preferred
as surer and more expeditious. Priests, monks, and laymen scoured the
villages and hamlets preaching salvation by the flames, some of them
decked in the spoils of their victims; for the motives of the preachers
were often of the basest sort. They did not spare even the children, but
seduced them by promises of the gay clothes, the apples, the nuts, the
honey they would enjoy in heaven. Sometimes when the people hesitated,
these infamous wretches decided the wavering minds of their dupes by a
false report that the troops were coming to deliver them up to Antichrist,
and so to rob them of a blissful eternity. Then men, women, and children
rushed into the flames. Sometimes hundreds, and even thousands, thus
perished together. An area was enclosed by barricades, fuel was heaped up
in it, the victims huddled together, fire set to the whole, and the
sacrifice consummated. Any who in their agony sought to escape were driven
or thrown back into the flames, sometimes by their own relations. These
sinister fires generally blazed at night, reddening the sky till daybreak.
In the morning nothing remained but charred bodies gnawed by prowling
dogs; but the stench of burnt human flesh poisoned the air for days
afterwards.(92)
(M31) As the Christians expected the arrival of Antichrist in the year
1666, so the Jews cheerfully anticipated the long-delayed advent of their
Messiah in the same fateful year. A Jew of Smyrna, by name Sabatei-Sevi,
availed himself of this general expectation to pose as the Messiah in
person. He was greeted with enthusiasm. Jews from many parts of Europe
hastened to pay their homage and, what was still better, their money to
the future deliverer of his country, who in return parcelled out among
them, with the greatest liberality, estates in the Holy Land which did not
belong to him. But the alternative of death by impalement or conversion to
Mohammedanism, which the Sultan submitted to his consideration, induced
him to revise his theological opinions, and on looking into the matter
more closely he discovered that his true mission in life was to preach the
total abolition of the Jewish religion and the substitution for it of
Islam.(93)
§ 3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term.
(M32) In the cases hitherto described, the divine king or priest is
suffered by his people to retain office until some outward defect, some
visible symptom of failing health or advancing age, warns them that he is
no longer equal to the discharge of his divine duties; but not until such
symptoms have made their appearance is he put to death. Some peoples,
however, appear to have thought it unsafe to wait for even the slightest
symptom of decay and have preferred to kill the king while he was still in
the full vigour of life. Accordingly, they have fixed a term beyond which
he might not reign, and at the close of which he must die, the term fixed
upon being short enough to exclude the probability of his degenerating
physically in the interval. In some parts of southern India the period
fixed was twelve years. Thus, according to an old traveller, in the
province of Quilacare, about twenty leagues to the north-east of Cape
Comorin, “there is a Gentile house of prayer, in which there is an idol
which they hold in great account, and every twelve years they celebrate a
great feast to it, whither all the Gentiles go as to a jubilee. This
temple possesses many lands and much revenue: it is a very great affair.
This province has a king over it, who has not more than twelve years to
reign from jubilee to jubilee. His manner of living is in this wise, that
is to say: when the twelve years are completed, on the day of this feast
there assemble together innumerable people, and much money is spent in
giving food to Bramans. The king has a wooden scaffolding made, spread
over with silken hangings: and on that day he goes to bathe at a tank with
great ceremonies and sound of music, after that he comes to the idol and
prays to it, and mounts on to the scaffolding, and there before all the
people he takes some very sharp knives, and begins to cut off his nose,
and then his ears, and his lips, and all his members, and as much flesh
off himself as he can; and he throws it away very hurriedly until so much
of his blood is spilled that he begins to faint, and then he cuts his
throat himself. And he performs this sacrifice to the idol, and whoever
desires to reign other twelve years and undertake this martyrdom for love
of the idol, has to be present looking on at this: and from that place
they raise him up as king.”(94)
(M33) The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of
Samorin or Samory, which in the native language is said to mean “God on
earth.”(95) He “pretends to be of a higher rank than the Brahmans, and to
be inferior only to the invisible gods; a pretention that was acknowledged
by his subjects, but which is held as absurd and abominable by the
Brahmans, by whom he is only treated as a Sudra.”(96) Formerly the Samorin
had to cut his throat in public at the end of a twelve years’ reign. But
towards the end of the seventeenth century the rule had been modified as
follows: “Many strange customs were observed in this country in former
times, and some very odd ones are still continued. It was an ancient
custom for the Samorin to reign but twelve years, and no longer. If he
died before his term was expired, it saved him a troublesome ceremony of
cutting his own throat, on a publick scaffold erected for the purpose. He
first made a feast for all his nobility and gentry, who are very numerous.
After the feast he saluted his guests, and went on the scaffold, and very
decently cut his own throat in the view of the assembly, and his body was,
a little while after, burned with great pomp and ceremony, and the
grandees elected a new Samorin. Whether that custom was a religious or a
civil ceremony, I know not, but it is now laid aside. And a new custom is
followed by the modern Samorins, that jubilee is proclaimed throughout his
dominions, at the end of twelve years, and a tent is pitched for him in a
spacious plain, and a great feast is celebrated for ten or twelve days,
with mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so at the end of the
feast any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a crown by a
desperate action, in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his
guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him succeeds him
in his empire. In anno 1695, one of those jubilees happened, and the tent
pitched near Pennany, a seaport of his, about fifteen leagues to the
southward of Calicut. There were but three men that would venture on that
desperate action, who fell in, with sword and target, among the guard,
and, after they had killed and wounded many, were themselves killed. One
of the desperados had a nephew of fifteen or sixteen years of age, that
kept close by his uncle in the attack on the guards, and, when he saw him
fall, the youth got through the guards into the tent, and made a stroke at
his Majesty’s head, and had certainly despatched him if a large brass lamp
which was burning over his head had not marred the blow; but, before he
could make another, he was killed by the guards; and, I believe, the same
Samorin reigns yet. I chanced to come that time along the coast and heard
the guns for two or three days and nights successively.”(97)
(M34) The English traveller, whose account I have quoted, did not himself
witness the festival he describes, though he heard the sound of the firing
in the distance. Fortunately, exact records of these festivals and of the
number of men who perished at them have been preserved in the archives of
the royal family at Calicut. In the latter part of the nineteenth century
they were examined by Mr. W. Logan, with the personal assistance of the
reigning king, and from his work it is possible to gain an accurate
conception both of the tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically
enacted down to 1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time.
(M35) The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his crown and his
life on the issue of battle was known as the _Maha Makham_ or Great
Sacrifice. It fell every twelfth year, when the planet Jupiter was in
retrograde motion in the sign of the Crab, and it lasted twenty-eight
days, culminating at the time of the eighth lunar asterism in the month of
Makaram. As the date of the festival was determined by the position of
Jupiter in the sky, and the interval between two festivals was twelve
years, which is roughly Jupiter’s period of revolution round the sun,(98)
we may conjecture that the splendid planet was supposed to be in a special
sense the king’s star and to rule his destiny, the period of its
revolution in heaven corresponding to the period of his reign on earth.
However that may be, the ceremony was observed with great pomp at the
Tirunavayi temple, on the north bank of the Ponnani River. The spot is
close to the present railway line. As the train rushes by, you can just
catch a glimpse of the temple, almost hidden behind a clump of trees on
the river bank. From the western gateway of the temple a perfectly
straight road, hardly raised above the level of the surrounding
rice-fields and shaded by a fine avenue, runs for half a mile to a high
ridge with a precipitous bank, on which the outlines of three or four
terraces can still be traced. On the topmost of these terraces the king
took his stand on the eventful day. The view which it commands is a fine
one. Across the flat expanse of the rice-fields, with the broad placid
river winding through them, the eye ranges eastward to high tablelands,
their lower slopes embowered in woods, while afar off looms the great
chain of the western Ghauts, and in the furthest distance the Neilgherries
or Blue Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the azure of the sky above.
(M36) But it was not to the distant prospect that the king’s eyes
naturally turned at this crisis of his fate. His attention was arrested by
a spectacle nearer at hand. For all the plain below was alive with troops,
their banners waving gaily in the sun, the white tents of their many camps
standing sharply out against the green and gold of the rice-fields. Forty
thousand fighting men or more were gathered there to defend the king. But
if the plain swarmed with soldiers, the road that cuts across it from the
temple to the king’s stand was clear of them. Not a soul was stirring on
it. Each side of the way was barred by palisades, and from the palisades
on either hand a long hedge of spears, held by strong arms, projected into
the empty road, their blades meeting in the middle and forming a
glittering arch of steel. All was now ready. The king waved his sword. At
the same moment a great chain of massy gold, enriched with bosses, was
placed on an elephant at his side. That was the signal. On the instant a
stir might be seen half a mile away at the gate of the temple. A group of
swordsmen, decked with flowers and smeared with ashes, has stepped out
from the crowd. They have just partaken of their last meal on earth, and
they now receive the last blessings and farewells of their friends. A
moment more and they are coming down the lane of spears, hewing and
stabbing right and left at the spearmen, winding and turning and writhing
among the blades as if they had no bones in their bodies. It is all in
vain. One after the other they fall, some nearer the king, some further
off, content to die, not for the shadow of a crown, but for the mere sake
of approving their dauntless valour and swordsmanship to the world. On the
last days of the festival the same magnificent display of gallantry, the
same useless sacrifice of life was repeated again and again. Yet perhaps
no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves that there are men who prefer
honour to life.(99)
(M37) “It is a singular custom in Bengal,” says an old native historian of
India, “that there is little of hereditary descent in succession to the
sovereignty. There is a throne allotted for the king; there is, in like
manner, a seat or station assigned for each of the _amirs_, _wazirs_, and
_mansabdars_. It is that throne and these stations alone which engage the
reverence of the people of Bengal. A set of dependents, servants, and
attendants are annexed to each of these situations. When the king wishes
to dismiss or appoint any person, whosoever is placed in the seat of the
one dismissed is immediately attended and obeyed by the whole
establishment of dependents, servants, and retainers annexed to the seat
which he occupies. Nay, this rule obtains even as to the royal throne
itself. Whoever kills the king, and succeeds in placing himself on that
throne, is immediately acknowledged as king; all the _amirs_, _wazirs_,
soldiers, and peasants instantly obey and submit to him, and consider him
as being as much their sovereign as they did their former prince, and obey
his orders implicitly. The people of Bengal say, ‘We are faithful to the
throne; whoever fills the throne we are obedient and true to it.’ ”(100) A
custom of the same sort formerly prevailed in the little kingdom of
Passier, on the northern coast of Sumatra. The old Portuguese historian De
Barros, who informs us of it, remarks with surprise that no wise man would
wish to be king of Passier, since the monarch was not allowed by his
subjects to live long. From time to time a sort of fury seized the people,
and they marched through the streets of the city chanting with loud voices
the fatal words, “The king must die!” When the king heard that song of
death he knew that his hour had come. The man who struck the fatal blow
was of the royal lineage, and as soon as he had done the deed of blood and
seated himself on the throne he was regarded as the legitimate king,
provided that he contrived to maintain his seat peaceably for a single
day. This, however, the regicide did not always succeed in doing. When
Fernão Peres d’Andrade, on a voyage to China, put in at Passier for a
cargo of spices, two kings were massacred, and that in the most peaceable
and orderly manner, without the smallest sign of tumult or sedition in the
city, where everything went on in its usual course, as if the murder or
execution of a king were a matter of everyday occurrence. Indeed, on one
occasion three kings were raised to the dangerous elevation and followed
each other on the dusty road of death in a single day. The people defended
the custom, which they esteemed very laudable and even of divine
institution, by saying that God would never allow so high and mighty a
being as a king, who reigned as his vicegerent on earth, to perish by
violence unless for his sins he thoroughly deserved it.(101) Far away from
the tropical island of Sumatra a rule of the same sort appears to have
obtained among the old Slavs. When the captives Gunn and Jarmerik
contrived to slay the king and queen of the Slavs and made their escape,
they were pursued by the barbarians, who shouted after them that if they
would only come back they would reign instead of the murdered monarch,
since by a public statute of the ancients the succession to the throne
fell to the king’s assassin. But the flying regicides turned a deaf ear to
promises which they regarded as mere baits to lure them back to
destruction; they continued their flight, and the shouts and clamour of
the barbarians gradually died away in the distance.(102)
(M38) When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at their own hands or
at the hands of others, on the expiration of a fixed term of years, it was
natural that they should seek to delegate the painful duty, along with
some of the privileges of sovereignty, to a substitute who should suffer
vicariously in their stead. This expedient appears to have been resorted
to by some of the princes of Malabar. Thus we are informed by a native
authority on that country that “in some places all powers both executive
and judicial were delegated for a fixed period to natives by the
sovereign. This institution was styled _Thalavettiparothiam_ or authority
obtained by decapitation. _Parothiam_ is the name of a supreme authority
of those days. The name of the office is still preserved in the Cochin
state, where the village headman is called a _Parathiakaran_. This
_Thalavettiparothiam_ was a terrible but interesting institution. It was
an office tenable for five years during which its bearer was invested with
supreme despotic powers within his jurisdiction. On the expiry of the five
years the man’s head was cut off and thrown up in the air amongst a large
concourse of villagers, each of whom vied with the other in trying to
catch it in its course down. He who succeeded was nominated to the post
for the next five years.”(103) A similar delegation of the duty of dying
for his country was perhaps practised by the Sultans of Java. At least
such a custom would explain a strange scene which was witnessed at the
court of one of these sultans by the famous traveller Ibn Batuta, a native
of Tangier, who visited the East Indies in the first half of the
fourteenth century. He says: “During my audience with the Sultan I saw a
man who held in his hand a knife like that used by a grape-gleaner. He
placed it on his own neck and spoke for a long time in a language which I
did not understand. After that he seized the knife with both hands at once
and cut his throat. His head fell to the ground, so sharp was the blade
and so great the force with which he used it. I remained dumbfoundered at
his behaviour, but the Sultan said to me, ‘Does any one do like that in
your country?’ I answered, ‘Never did I see such a thing.’ He smiled and
replied, ‘These people are our slaves, and they kill themselves for love
of us.’ Then he commanded that they should take away him who had slain
himself and should burn him. The Sultan’s officers, the grandees, the
troops, and the common people attended the cremation. The sovereign
assigned a liberal pension to the children of the deceased, to his wife,
and to his brothers; and they were highly honoured because of his conduct.
A person, who was present at the audience when the event I have described
took place, informed me that the speech made by the man who sacrificed
himself set forth his devotion to the monarch. He said that he wished to
immolate himself out of affection for the sovereign, as his father had
done for love of the prince’s father, and as his grandfather had done out
of regard for the prince’s grandfather.”(104) We may conjecture that
formerly the sultans of Java, like the kings of Quilacare and Calicut,
were bound to cut their own throats at the end of a fixed term of years,
but that at a later time they deputed the painful, though glorious, duty
of dying for their country to the members of a certain family, who
received by way of recompense ample provision during their life and a
handsome funeral at death.
(M39) A similar mode of religious suicide seems to have been often adopted
in India, especially in Malabar, during the Middle Ages. Thus we are told
by Friar Jordanus that in the Greater India, by which he seems to mean
Malabar and the neighbouring regions, many sacrifice themselves to the
idols. When they are sick or involved in misfortune, they vow themselves
to the idol in case they are delivered. Then, when they have recovered,
they fatten themselves for one or two years; and when another festival
comes round, they cover themselves with flowers, crown themselves with
white garlands, and go singing and playing before the idol, when it is
carried through the land. There, after they have shown off a great deal,
they take a sword with two handles, like those used in currying leather,
put it to the back of their neck, and cutting strongly with both hands
sever their heads from their bodies before the idol.(105) Again, Nicolo
Conti, who travelled in the East in the early part of the fifteenth
century, informs us that in the city of Cambaita “many present themselves
who have determined upon self immolation, having on their neck a broad
circular piece of iron, the fore part of which is round and the hinder
part extremely sharp. A chain attached to the fore part hangs suspended
upon the breast, into which the victims, sitting down with their legs
drawn up and their neck bent, insert their feet. Then, on the speaker
pronouncing certain words, they suddenly stretch out their legs, and at
the same time drawing up their neck, cut off their own head, yielding up
their lives as a sacrifice to their idols. These men are regarded as
saints.”(106) Among the Jaintias or Syntengs, a Khasi tribe of Assam,
human sacrifices used to be annually offered on the _Sandhi_ day in the
month of Ashwin. Persons often came forward voluntarily and presented
themselves as victims. This they generally did by appearing before the
Rajah on the last day of Shravan and declaring that the goddess had called
them to herself. After due enquiry, if the would-be victim were found
suitable, it was customary for the Rajah to present him with a golden
anklet and to give him permission to live as he chose and to do what he
liked, the royal treasury undertaking to pay compensation for any damage
he might do in the exercise of his remarkable privileges. But the
enjoyment of these privileges was very short. On the day appointed the
voluntary victim, after bathing and purifying himself, was dressed in new
attire, daubed with red sandal-wood and vermilion, and bedecked with
garlands. Thus arrayed, he sat for a time in meditation and prayer on a
dais in front of the goddess; then he made a sign with his finger, and the
executioner, after uttering the usual formulas, cut off his head, which
was thereafter laid before the goddess on a golden plate. The lungs were
cooked and eaten by such _Kandra Yogis_ as were present, and it is said
that the royal family partook of a small quantity of rice cooked in the
blood of the victim. The ceremony was usually witnessed by crowds of
spectators who assembled from all parts of the neighbouring hills. When
the supply of voluntary victims fell short, emissaries were sent out to
kidnap strangers from other territories, and it was the practice of such
man-hunts that led to the annexation of the Jaintia country by the
British.(107)
(M40) When once kings, who had hitherto been bound to die a violent death
at the end of a term of years, conceived the happy thought of dying by
deputy in the persons of others, they would very naturally put it in
practice; and accordingly we need not wonder at finding so popular an
expedient, or traces of it, in many lands. Thus, for example, the Bhuiyas
are an aboriginal race of north-eastern India, and one of their chief
seats is Keonjhur. At the installation of a Rajah of Keonjhur a ceremony
is observed which has been described as follows by an English officer who
witnessed it: “Then the sword, a very rusty old weapon, is placed in the
Raja’s hands, and one of the Bhuiyas, named Anand Kopat, comes before him,
and kneeling sideways, the Raja touches him on the neck as if about to
strike off his head, and it is said that in former days there was no
fiction in this part of the ceremony. The family of the Kopat hold their
lands on the condition that the victim when required shall be produced.
Anand, however, hurriedly arose after the accolade and disappeared. He
must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself again to the
Raja as miraculously restored to life.”(108) Here the custom of putting
the king’s proxy to death has dwindled, probably under English influence,
to a mere pretence; but elsewhere it survives, or survived till recent
times, in full force. Cassange, a native state in the interior of Angola,
is ruled by a king, who bears the title of Jaga. When a king is about to
be installed in office, some of the chiefs are despatched to find a human
victim, who may not be related by blood or marriage to the new monarch.
When he comes to the king’s camp, the victim is provided with everything
he requires, and all his orders are obeyed as promptly as those of the
sovereign. On the day of the ceremony the king takes his seat on a
perforated iron stool, his chiefs, councillors, and the rest of the people
forming a great circle round about him. Behind the king sits his principal
wife, together with all his concubines. An iron gong, with two small bells
attached to it, is then struck by an official, who continues to ring the
bells during the ceremony. The victim is then introduced and placed in
front of the king, but with his back towards him. Armed with a scimitar
the king then cuts open the man’s back, extracts his heart, and having
taken a bite out of it, spits it out and gives it to be burned. The
councillors meantime hold the victim’s body so that the blood from the
wound spouts against the king’s breast and belly, and, pouring through the
hole in the iron stool, is collected by the chiefs in their hands, who rub
their breasts and beards with it, while they shout, “Great is the king and
the rites of the state!” After that the corpse is skinned, cut up, and
cooked with the flesh of an ox, a dog, a hen, and some other animals. The
meal thus prepared is served first to the king, then to the chiefs and
councillors, and lastly to all the people assembled. Any man who refused
to partake of it would be sold into slavery together with his family.(109)
The distinction with which the human victim is here treated before his
execution suggests that he is a substitute for the king.
(M41) Scandinavian traditions contain some hints that of old the Swedish
kings reigned only for periods of nine years, after which they were put to
death or had to find a substitute to die in their stead. Thus Aun or On,
king of Sweden, is said to have sacrificed to Odin for length of days and
to have been answered by the god that he should live so long as he
sacrificed one of his sons every ninth year. He sacrificed nine of them in
this manner, and would have sacrificed the tenth and last, but the Swedes
would not allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala.(110)
Another indication of a similar tenure of the crown occurs in a curious
legend of the disposition and banishment of Odin. Offended at his
misdeeds, the other gods outlawed and exiled him, but set up in his place
a substitute, Oller by name, a cunning wizard, to whom they accorded the
symbols both of royalty and of godhead. The deputy bore the name of Odin,
and reigned for nearly ten years, when he was driven from the throne,
while the real Odin came to his own again. His discomfited rival retired
to Sweden and was afterwards slain in an attempt to repair his shattered
fortunes.(111) As gods are often merely men who loom large through the
mists of tradition, we may conjecture that this Norse legend preserves a
confused reminiscence of ancient Swedish kings who reigned for nine or ten
years together, then abdicated, delegating to others the privilege of
dying for their country. The great festival which was held at Upsala every
nine years may have been the occasion on which the king or his deputy was
put to death. We know that human sacrifices formed part of the rites.(112)
§ 4. Octennial Tenure of the Kingship.
(M42) There are some grounds for believing that the reign of many ancient
Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at the end of
every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh outpouring of the
divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order to enable them to
discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus it was a rule of the
Spartan constitution that every eighth year the ephors should choose a
clear and moonless night and sitting down observe the sky in silence. If
during their vigil they saw a meteor or shooting star, they inferred that
the king had sinned against the deity, and they suspended him from his
functions until the Delphic or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in
them. This custom, which has all the air of great antiquity, was not
suffered to remain a dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan
monarchy; for in the third century before our era a king, who had rendered
himself obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually deposed on various
trumped-up charges, among which the allegation that the ominous sign had
been seen in the sky took a prominent place.(113) When we compare this
custom with the evidence to be presently adduced of an eight years’ tenure
of the kingship in Greece, we shall probably agree with K. O. Müller(114)
that the quaint Spartan practice was much more than a mere antiquarian
curiosity; it was the attenuated survival of an institution which may once
have had great significance, and it throws an important light on the
restrictions and limitations anciently imposed by religion on the Dorian
kingship. What exactly was the import of a meteor in the opinion of the
old Dorians we can hardly hope to determine; one thing only is clear, they
regarded it as a portent of so ominous and threatening a kind that its
appearance under certain circumstances justified and even required the
deposition of their king. This exaggerated dread of so simple a natural
phenomenon is shared by many savages at the present day; and we shall
hardly err in supposing that the Spartans inherited it from their
barbarous ancestors, who may have watched with consternation, on many a
starry night among the woods of Germany, the flashing of a meteor through
the sky. It may be well, even at the cost of a digression, to illustrate
this primitive superstition by examples.
(M43) Thus, shooting stars and meteors are viewed with apprehension by the
natives of the Andaman Islands, who suppose them to be lighted faggots
hurled into the air by the malignant spirit of the woods in order to
ascertain the whereabouts of any unhappy wight in his vicinity. Hence if
they happen to be away from their camp when the meteor is seen, they hide
themselves and remain silent for a little before they venture to resume
the work they were at; for example, if they are out fishing they will
crouch at the bottom of the boat.(115) The natives of the Tully River in
Queensland believe falling stars to be the fire-sticks carried about by
the spirits of dead enemies. When they see one shooting through the air
they take it as a sign that an enemy is near, and accordingly they shout
and make as much noise as they can; next morning they all go out in the
direction in which the star fell and look for the tracks of their
foe.(116) The Turrbal tribe of Queensland thought that a falling star was
a medicine-man flying through the air and dropping his fire-stick to kill
somebody; if there was a sick man in the camp, they regarded him as
doomed.(117) The Ngarigo of New South Wales believed the fall of a meteor
to betoken the place where their foes were mustering for war.(118) The
Kaitish tribe of central Australia imagine that the fall of a star marks
the whereabouts of a man who has killed another by means of a magical
pointing-stick or bone. If a member of any group has been killed in this
way, his friends watch for the descent of a meteor, march in that
direction, slay an enemy there, and leave his body lying on the ground.
The friends of the murdered man understand what has happened, and bury his
body where the star fell; for they recognise the spot by the softness of
the earth.(119) The Mara tribe of northern Australia suppose a falling
star to be one of two hostile spirits, father and son, who live up in the
sky and come down occasionally to do harm to men. In this tribe the
profession of medicine-man is strictly hereditary in the stock which has
the falling star for its totem;(120) if these wizards had ever developed
into kings, the descent of a meteor at certain times might have had the
same fatal significance for them as for the kings of Sparta. The Taui
Islanders, to the west of the Bismarck Archipelago, make war in the
direction in which they have observed a star to fall,(121) probably for a
reason like that which induces the Kaitish to do the same.
(M44) When the Baronga of south Africa see a shooting star they spit on
the ground to avert the evil omen, and cry, “Go away! go away all alone!”
By this they mean that the light, which is so soon to disappear, is not to
take them with it, but to go and die by itself.(122) So when a Masai
perceives the flash of a meteor he spits several times and says, “Be lost!
go in the direction of the enemy!” after which he adds, “Stay away from
me.”(123) The Namaquas “are greatly afraid of the meteor which is vulgarly
called a falling star, for they consider it a sign that sickness is coming
upon the cattle, and to escape it they will immediately drive them to some
other parts of the country. They call out to the star how many cattle they
have, and beg of it not to send sickness.”(124) The Bechuanas are also
much alarmed at the appearance of a meteor. If they happen to be dancing
in the open air at the time, they will instantly desist and retire hastily
to their huts.(125) The Ewe negroes of Guinea regard a falling star as a
powerful divinity, and worship it as one of their national gods, by the
name of Nyikpla or Nyigbla. In their opinion the falling star is
especially a war-god who marches at the head of the host and leads it to
victory, riding like Castor and Pollux on horseback. But he is also a
rain-god, and the showers are sent by him from the sky. Special priests
are devoted to his worship, with a chief priest at their head, who resides
in the capital. They are known by the red staves which they carry and by
the high-pointed caps, woven of threads and palm-leaves, which they wear
on their heads. In times of drought they call upon their god by night with
wild howls. Once a year an ox is sacrificed to him at the capital, and the
priests consume the flesh. On this occasion the people smear themselves
with the pollen of a certain plant and go in procession through the towns
and villages, singing, dancing, and beating drums.(126)
(M45) By some Indians of California meteors were called “children of the
moon,” and whenever young women saw one of them they fell to the ground
and covered their heads, fearing that, if the meteor saw them, their faces
would become ugly and diseased.(127) The Tarahumares of Mexico fancy that
a shooting star is a dead sorcerer coming to harm a man who harmed him in
life. Hence when they see one they huddle together and scream for
terror.(128) When a German traveller was living with the Bororos of
central Brazil, a splendid meteor fell, spreading dismay through the
Indian village. It was believed to be the soul of a dead medicine-man, who
suddenly appeared in this form to announce that he wanted meat, and that,
as a preliminary measure, he proposed to visit somebody with an attack of
dysentery. Its appearance was greeted with yells from a hundred throats:
men, women, and children swarmed out of their huts like ants whose nest
has been disturbed; and soon watch-fires blazed, round which at a little
distance groups of dusky figures gathered, while in the middle, thrown
into strong relief by the flickering light of the fire, two red-painted
sorcerers reeled and staggered in a state of frantic excitement, snorting
and spitting towards the quarter of the sky where the meteor had run its
brief but brilliant course. Pressing his right hand to his yelling mouth,
each of them held aloft in his extended left, by way of propitiating the
angry star, a bundle of cigarettes. “There!” they seemed to say, “all that
tobacco will we give to ward off the impending visitation. Woe to you, if
you do not leave us in peace.”(129) The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco
also stand in great fear of meteors, imagining them to be stones hurled
from heaven at the wicked sorcerers who have done people to death by their
charms.(130) When the Abipones beheld a meteor flashing or heard thunder
rolling in the sky, they imagined that one of their medicine-men had died,
and that the flash of light and the peal of thunder were part of his
funeral honours.(131)
(M46) When the Laughlan Islanders see a shooting star they make a great
noise, for they think it is the old woman who lives in the moon coming
down to earth to catch somebody, who may relieve her of her duties in the
moon while she goes away to the happy spirit-land.(132) In Vedic India a
meteor was believed to be the embodiment of a demon, and on its appearance
certain hymns or incantations, supposed to possess the power of killing
demons, were recited for the purpose of expiating the prodigy.(133) To
this day in India, when women see a falling star, they spit thrice to
scare the demon.(134) Some of the Esthonians at the present time regard
shooting stars as evil spirits.(135) It is a Mohammedan belief that
falling stars are demons or jinn who have attempted to scale the sky, and,
being repulsed by the angels with stones, are hurled headlong, flaming,
from the celestial vault. Hence every true believer at sight of a meteor
should say, “I take refuge with God from the stoned devil.”(136)
(M47) A widespread superstition, of which some examples have already been
given, associates meteors or falling stars with the souls of the dead.
Often they are believed to be the spirits of the departed on their way to
the other world. The Maoris imagine that at death the soul leaves the body
and goes to the nether world in the form of a falling star.(137) The
Kingsmill Islanders deemed a shooting star an omen of death to some member
of the family which occupied the part of the council-house nearest to the
point of the sky whence the meteor took its flight. If the star was
followed by a train of light, it foretold the death of a woman; if not,
the death of a man.(138) When the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria see a
shooting star, they think it is falling with the heart of a man who has
been caught by a sorcerer and deprived of his fat.(139) One evening when
Mr. Howitt was talking with an Australian black, a bright meteor was seen
shooting through the sky. The native watched it and remarked, “An old
blackfellow has fallen down there.”(140) Among the Yerrunthally tribe of
Queensland the ideas on this subject were even more definite. They thought
that after death they went to a place away among the stars, and that to
reach it they had to climb up a rope; when they had clambered up they let
go the rope, which, as it fell from heaven, appeared to people on earth as
a falling star.(141) The natives of the Prince of Wales Islands, off
Queensland, are much afraid of shooting stars, for they believe them to be
ghosts which, in breaking up, produce young ones of their own kind.(142)
The natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain think that meteors are
the souls of people who have been murdered or eaten; so at the sight of a
meteor flashing they cry out, “The ghost of a murdered man!”(143)
According to the Sulka of New Britain meteors are souls which have been
flung into the air in order to plunge into the sea; and the train of light
which they leave behind them is a burning tail of dry coco-nut leaves
which has been tied to them by other souls, in order to help them to wing
their way through the air.(144) The Caffres of South Africa often say that
a shooting star is the sign of the death of some chief, and at sight of it
they will spit on the ground as a mark of friendly feeling towards the
dead man.(145) Similarly the Ababua of the Congo valley think that a chief
will die in the village into which a star appears to fall, unless the
danger of death be averted by a particular dance.(146) In the opinion of
the Masai, the fall of a meteor signifies the death of some one; at sight
of it they pray that the victim may be one of their enemies.(147) The
Wambugwe of eastern Africa fancy that the stars are men, of whom one dies
whenever a star is seen to fall.(148) The Tinneh Indians and the Tchiglit
Esquimaux of north-western America believe that human life on earth is
influenced by the stars, and they take a shooting star to be a sign that
some one has died.(149) The Lolos, an aboriginal tribe of western China,
hold that for each person on earth there is a corresponding star in the
sky. Hence when a man is ill, they sacrifice wine to his star and light
four and twenty lamps outside of his room. On the day after the funeral
they dig a hole in the chamber of death and pray the dead man’s star to
descend and be buried in it. If this precaution were not taken, the star
might fall and hit somebody and hurt him very much.(150) In classical
antiquity there was a popular notion that every human being had his own
star in the sky, which shone bright or dim according to his good or evil
fortune, and fell in the form of a meteor when he died.(151)
(M48) Superstitions of the same sort are still commonly to be met with in
Europe. Thus in some parts of Germany they say that at the birth of a man
a new star is set in the sky, and that as it burns brilliantly or faintly
he grows rich or poor; finally when he dies it drops from the sky in the
likeness of a shooting star.(152) Similarly in Brittany, Transylvania,
Bohemia, the Abruzzi, the Romagna, and the Esthonian island of Oesel it is
thought by some that every man has his own particular star in the sky, and
that when it falls in the shape of a meteor he expires.(153) A like belief
is entertained by Polish Jews.(154) In Styria they say that when a
shooting star is seen a man has just died, or a poor soul been released
from purgatory.(155) The Esthonians believe that if any one sees a falling
star on New Year’s night he will die or be visited by a serious illness
that year.(156) In Belgium and many parts of France the people suppose
that a meteor is a soul which has just quitted the body, sometimes that it
is specially the soul of an unbaptized infant or of some one who has died
without absolution. At sight of it they say that you should cross yourself
and pray, or that if you wish for something while the star is falling you
will be sure to get it.(157) Among the Vosges Mountains in the warm nights
of July it is not uncommon to see whole showers of shooting stars. It is
generally agreed that these stars are souls, but some difference of
opinion exists as to whether they are souls just taking leave of earth, or
tortured by the fires of purgatory, or on their passage from purgatory to
heaven.(158) The last and most cheering of these views is held by the
French peasantry of Beauce and Perche and by the Italian peasantry of the
Abruzzi, and charitable people pray for the deliverance of a soul at the
sight of a falling star.(159) The downward direction of its flight might
naturally suggest a different goal; and accordingly other people have seen
in the transient flame of a meteor the descent of a soul from heaven to be
born on earth. In the Punjaub, for example, Hindoos believe that the
length of a soul’s residence in the realms of bliss is exactly
proportioned to the sums which the man distributed in charity during his
life; and that when these are exhausted his time in heaven is up, and down
he comes.(160) In Polynesia a shooting star was held to be the flight of a
spirit, and to presage the birth of a great prince.(161) The Mandans of
north America fancied that the stars were dead people, and that when a
woman was brought to bed a star fell from heaven, and entering into her
was born as a child.(162) On the Biloch frontier of the Punjaub each man
is held to have his star, and he may not journey in particular directions
when his star is in certain positions. If duty compels him to travel in
the forbidden direction, he takes care before setting out to bury his
star, or rather a figure of it cut out of cloth, so that it may not see
what he is doing.(163)
(M49) Which, if any, of these superstitions moved the barbarous Dorians of
old to depose their kings whenever at a certain season a meteor flamed in
the sky, we cannot say. Perhaps they had a vague general notion that its
appearance signified the dissatisfaction of the higher powers with the
state of the commonwealth; and since in primitive society the king is
commonly held responsible for all untoward events, whatever their origin,
the natural course was to relieve him of duties which he had proved
himself incapable of discharging. But it may be that the idea in the minds
of these rude barbarians was more definite. Possibly, like some people in
Europe at the present day, they thought that every man had his star in the
sky, and that he must die when it fell. The king would be no exception to
the rule, and on a certain night of a certain year, at the end of a cycle,
it might be customary to watch the sky in order to mark whether the king’s
star was still in the ascendant or near its setting. The appearance of a
meteor on such a night—of a star precipitated from the celestial
vault—might prove for the king not merely a symbol but a sentence of
death. It might be the warrant for his execution.
(M50) If the tenure of the regal office was formerly limited among the
Spartans to eight years, we may naturally ask, why was that precise period
selected as the measure of a king’s reign? The reason is probably to be
found in those astronomical considerations which determined the early
Greek calendar. The difficulty of reconciling lunar with solar time is one
of the standing puzzles which has taxed the ingenuity of men who are
emerging from barbarism. Now an octennial cycle is the shortest period at
the end of which sun and moon really mark time together after overlapping,
so to say, throughout the whole of the interval. Thus, for example, it is
only once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the
longest or shortest day; and as this coincidence can be observed with the
aid of a simple dial, the observation is naturally one of the first to
furnish a base for a calendar which shall bring lunar and solar times into
tolerable, though not exact, harmony.(164) But in early days the proper
adjustment of the calendar is a matter of religious concern, since on it
depends a knowledge of the right seasons for propitiating the deities
whose favour is indispensable to the welfare of the community.(165) No
wonder, therefore, that the king, as the chief priest of the state, or as
himself a god, should be liable to deposition or death at the end of an
astronomical period. When the great luminaries had run their course on
high, and were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be thought
that the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them unabated,
under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor. In southern
India, as we have seen, the king’s reign and life terminated with the
revolution of the planet Jupiter round the sun. In Greece, on the other
hand, the king’s fate seems to have hung in the balance at the end of
every eight years, ready to fly up and kick the beam as soon as the
opposite scale was loaded with a falling star.
(M51) The same train of thought may explain an ancient Greek custom which
appears to have required that a homicide should be banished his country,
and do penance for a period of eight or nine years.(166) With the
beginning of a new cycle or great year, as it was called, it might be
thought that all nature was regenerate, all old scores wiped out.
According to Pindar, the dead whose guilt had been purged away by an abode
of eight years in the nether world were born again on earth in the ninth
year as glorious kings, athletes, and sages.(167) The doctrine may well be
an old popular belief rather than a mere poetical fancy. If so, it would
supply a fresh reason for the banishment of a homicide during the years
that the angry ghost of his victim might at any moment issue from its
prison-house and pounce on him. Once the perturbed spirit had been happily
reborn, he might be supposed to forgive, if not to forget, the man who had
done him an injury in a former life.
(M52) Whatever its origin may have been, the cycle of eight years appears
to have coincided with the normal length of the king’s reign in other
parts of Greece besides Sparta. Thus Minos, king of Cnossus in Crete,
whose great palace has been unearthed in recent years, is said to have
held office for periods of eight years together. At the end of each period
he retired for a season to the oracular cave on Mount Ida, and there
communed with his divine father Zeus, giving him an account of his
kingship in the years that were past, and receiving from him instructions
for his guidance in those which were to come.(168) The tradition plainly
implies that at the end of every eight years the king’s sacred powers
needed to be renewed by intercourse with the godhead, and that without
such a renewal he would have forfeited his right to the throne. We may
surmise that among the solemn ceremonies which marked the beginning or the
end of the eight years’ cycle the sacred marriage of the king with the
queen played an important part, and that in this marriage we have the true
explanation of the strange legend of Pasiphae and the bull. It was said
that Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, fell in love with a wondrous white
bull which rose from the sea, and that in order to gratify her unnatural
passion the artist Daedalus constructed a hollow wooden cow, covered with
a cow’s hide, in which the love-sick queen was hidden while the bull
mounted it. The result of their union was the Minotaur, a monster with the
body of a man and the head of a bull, whom the king shut up in the
labyrinth, a building full of such winding and intricate passages that the
prisoner might roam in it for ever without finding the way out.(169) The
legend appears to reflect a mythical marriage of the sun and moon, which
was acted as a solemn rite by the king and queen of Cnossus, wearing the
masks of a bull and cow respectively.(170) To a pastoral people a bull is
the most natural type of vigorous reproductive energy,(171) and as such is
a fitting emblem of the sun. Islanders who, like many of the Cretans, see
the sun daily rising from the sea, might readily compare him to a white
bull issuing from the waves. Indeed, we are expressly told that the
Cretans called the sun a bull.(172) Similarly in ancient Egypt the sacred
bull Mnevis of Heliopolis (the City of the Sun) was deemed an incarnation
of the Sun-god,(173) and for thousands of years the kings of Egypt
delighted to be styled “mighty bull”; many of them inscribed the title on
their _serekh_ or cognisance, which set forth their names in their
character of descendants of Horus.(174) The identification of Pasiphae,
“she who shines on all,” with the moon was made long ago by Pausanias, who
saw her image along with that of the sun in a sanctuary on that wild rocky
coast of Messenia where the great range of Taygetus descends seaward in a
long line of naked crags.(175) The horns of the waxing or waning moon
naturally suggest the resemblance of the luminary to a white cow; hence
the ancients represented the goddess of the moon drawn by a team of white
cattle.(176) When we remember that at the court of Egypt the king and
queen figured as god and goddess in solemn masquerades, where the parts of
animal-headed deities were played by masked men and women,(177) we need
have no difficulty in imagining that similar dramas may have been
performed at the court of a Cretan king, whether we suppose them to have
been imported from Egypt or to have had an independent origin.
(M53) The stories of Zeus and Europa, and of Minos and Britomartis or
Dictynna appear to be only different expressions of the same myth,
different echoes of the same custom. The moon rising from the sea was the
fair maiden Europa coming across the heaving billows from the far eastern
land of Phoenicia, borne or pursued by her suitor the solar bull. The moon
setting in the western waves was the coy Britomartis or Dictynna, who
plunged into the sea to escape the warm embrace of her lover Minos,
himself the sun. The story how the drowning maiden was drawn up in a
fisherman’s net may well be, as some have thought, the explanation given
by a simple seafaring folk of the moon’s reappearance from the sea in the
east after she had sunk into it in the west.(178) To the mythical fancy of
the ancients the moon was a coy or a wanton maiden, who either fled from
or pursued the sun every month till the fugitive was overtaken and the
lovers enjoyed each other’s company at the time when the luminaries are in
conjunction, namely, in the interval between the old and the new moon.
Hence on the principles of sympathetic magic that interval was considered
the time most favourable for human marriages. When the sun and moon are
wedded in the sky, men and women should be wedded on earth. And for the
same reason the ancients chose the interlunar day for the celebration of
the Sacred Marriages of gods and goddesses. Similar beliefs and customs
based on them have been noted among other peoples.(179) It is likely,
therefore, that a king and queen who represented the sun and moon may have
been expected to exercise their conjugal rights above all at the time when
the moon was thought to rest in the arms of the sun. However that may have
been, it would be natural that their union should be consummated with
unusual solemnity every eight years, when the two great luminaries, so to
say, meet and mark time together once more after diverging from each other
more or less throughout the interval. It is true that sun and moon are in
conjunction once every month, but every month their conjunction takes
place at a different point in the sky, until eight revolving years have
brought them together again in the same heavenly bridal chamber where
first they met.
(M54) Without being unduly rash we may surmise that the tribute of seven
youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were bound to send to Minos
every eight years had some connexion with the renewal of the king’s power
for another octennial cycle. Traditions varied as to the fate which
awaited the lads and damsels on their arrival in Crete; but the common
view appears to have been that they were shut up in the labyrinth, there
to be devoured by the Minotaur, or at least to be imprisoned for
life.(180) Perhaps they were sacrificed by being roasted alive in a bronze
image of a bull, or of a bull-headed man, in order to renew the strength
of the king and of the sun, whom he personated. This at all events is
suggested by the legend of Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his
breast and leaped with them into the fire, so that they were roasted
alive. He is said to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or by Hephaestus
to Minos, to guard the island of Crete, which he patrolled thrice
daily.(181) According to one account he was a bull,(182) according to
another he was the sun.(183) Probably he was identical with the Minotaur,
and stripped of his mythical features was nothing but a bronze image of
the sun represented as a man with a bull’s head. In order to renew the
solar fires, human victims may have been sacrificed to the idol by being
roasted in its hollow body or placed on its sloping hands and allowed to
roll into a pit of fire. It was in the latter fashion that the
Carthaginians sacrificed their offspring to Moloch. The children were laid
on the hands of a calf-headed image of bronze, from which they slid into a
fiery oven, while the people danced to the music of flutes and timbrels to
drown the shrieks of the burning victims.(184) The resemblance which the
Cretan traditions bear to the Carthaginian practice suggests that the
worship associated with the names of Minos and the Minotaur may have been
powerfully influenced by that of a Semitic Baal.(185) In the tradition of
Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, and his brazen bull(186) we may have an
echo of similar rites in Sicily, where the Carthaginian power struck deep
roots.
(M55) But perhaps the youths and maidens who were sent across the sea to
Cnossus had to perform certain religious duties before they were cast into
the fiery furnace. The same cunning artist Daedalus who planned the
labyrinth and contrived the wooden cow for Pasiphae was said to have made
a dance for Ariadne, daughter of Minos. It represented youths and maidens
dancing in ranks, the youths armed with golden swords, the maidens crowned
with garlands.(187) Moreover, when Theseus landed with Ariadne in Delos on
his return from Crete, he and the young companions whom he had rescued
from the Minotaur are said to have danced a mazy dance in imitation of the
intricate windings of the labyrinth; on account of its sinuous turns the
dance was called “the Crane.”(188) Taken together, these two traditions
suggest that the youths and maidens who were sent to Cnossus had to dance
in the labyrinth before they were sacrificed to the bull-headed image. At
all events there are good grounds for thinking that there was a famous
dance which the ancients regularly associated with the Cretan labyrinth.
(M56) Among the Romans that dance appears to have been known from the
earliest times by the name of Troy or the Game of Troy. Tradition ran that
it was imported into Italy by Aeneas, who transmitted it through his son
Ascanius to the Alban kings, who in their turn handed it down to the
Romans. It was performed by bands of armed youths on horseback. Virgil
compares their complicated evolutions to the windings of the Cretan
labyrinth;(189) and that the comparison is more than a mere poetical
flourish appears from a drawing on a very ancient Etruscan vase found at
Tragliatella. The drawing represents a procession of seven beardless
warriors dancing, accompanied by two armed riders on horseback, who are
also beardless. An inscription proves that the scene depicted is the Game
of Troy; and attached to the procession is a figure of the Cretan
labyrinth,(190) the pattern of which is well known from coins of Cnossus
on which it is often represented.(191) The same pattern, identified by an
inscription, “_Labyrinthus, hic habitat Minotaurus_,” is scratched on a
wall at Pompeii; and it is also worked in mosaic on the floor of Roman
apartments, with the figures of Theseus and the Minotaur in the
middle.(192) Roman boys appear to have drawn the very same pattern on the
ground and to have played a game on it, probably a miniature Game of
Troy.(193) Labyrinths of similar type occur as decorations on the floors
of old churches, where they are known as “the Road of Jerusalem”; they
were used for processions. The garden mazes of the Renaissance were
modelled on them. Moreover, they are found very commonly in the north of
Europe, marked out either by raised bands of turf or by rows of stones.
Such labyrinths may be seen in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finnland, the
south coast of Russian Lappland, and even in Iceland. They go by various
names, such as Babylon, Wieland’s House, Trojeborg, Tröburg, and so forth,
some of which clearly indicate their connexion with the ancient Game of
Troy. They are used for children’s games.(194)
(M57) A dance or game which has thus spread over Europe and survived in a
fashion to modern times must have been very popular, and bearing in mind
how often with the decay of old faiths the serious rites and pageants of
grown people have degenerated into the sports of children, we may
reasonably ask whether Ariadne’s Dance or the Game of Troy may not have
had its origin in religious ritual. The ancients connected it with Cnossus
and the Minotaur. Now we have seen reason to hold, with many other
scholars, that Cnossus was the seat of a great worship of the sun, and
that the Minotaur was a representative or embodiment of the sun-god. May
not, then, Ariadne’s dance have been an imitation of the sun’s course in
the sky? and may not its intention have been, by means of sympathetic
magic, to aid the great luminary to run his race on high? We have seen
that during an eclipse of the sun the Chilcotin Indians walk in a circle,
leaning on staves, apparently to assist the labouring orb. In Egypt also
the king, who embodied the sun-god, seems to have solemnly walked round
the walls of a temple for the sake of helping the sun on his way.(195) If
there is any truth in this conjecture, it would seem to follow that the
sinuous lines of the labyrinth which the dancers followed in their
evolutions may have represented the ecliptic, the sun’s apparent annual
path in the sky. It is some confirmation of this view that on coins of
Cnossus the sun or a star appears in the middle of the labyrinth, the
place which on other coins is occupied by the Minotaur.(196)
(M58) On the whole the foregoing evidence, slight and fragmentary as it
is, points to the conclusion that at Cnossus the king represented the
sun-god, and that every eight years his divine powers were renewed at a
great festival, which comprised, first, the sacrifice of human victims by
fire to a bull-headed image of the sun, and, second, the marriage of the
king disguised as a bull to the queen disguised as a cow, the two
personating respectively the sun and the moon.
(M59) Whatever may be thought of these speculations, we know that many
solemn rites were celebrated by the ancient Greeks at intervals of eight
years.(197) Amongst them, two deserve to be noticed here, because it has
been recently suggested, with some appearance of probability, that they
were based on an octennial tenure of the kingship.(198) One was the
Festival of the Crowning at Delphi; the other was the Festival of the
Laurel-bearing at Thebes. In their general features the two festivals seem
to have resembled each other very closely. Both represented dramatically
the slaying of a great water-dragon by a god or hero; in both, the lad who
played the part of the victorious god or hero crowned his brows with a
wreath of sacred laurel and had to submit to a penance and purification
for the slaughter of the beast. At Delphi the legendary slayer of the
dragon was Apollo; at Thebes he was Cadmus.(199) At both places the
legendary penance for the slaughter seems to have been servitude for eight
years.(200) The evidence for the rites of the Delphic festival is fairly
complete, but for the Theban festival it has to be eked out by
vase-paintings, which represent Cadmus crowned with laurel preparing to
attack the dragon or actually in combat with the monster, while goddesses
bend over the champion, holding out wreaths of laurel to him as the mede
of victory.(201) It is true that in historical times Apollo appears to
have ousted Cadmus from the festival, though not from the myth. But at
Thebes the god was plainly a late intruder, for his temple lay outside the
walls, whereas the most ancient sanctuaries stood in the oldest part of
the city, the low hill which took its name of Cadmea from the genuine
Theban hero Cadmus.(202) It is not impossible that at Delphi also, and
perhaps at other places where the same drama was acted,(203) Apollo may
have displaced an old local hero in the honourable office of
dragon-slayer.
(M60) Both at Thebes and at Delphi the dragon guarded a spring,(204) the
water of which was probably deemed oracular. At Delphi the sacred spring
may have been either Cassotis or the more famed Castaly, which issues from
a narrow gorge, shut in by rocky walls of tremendous height, a little to
the east of Apollo’s temple. The waters of both were thought to be endowed
with prophetic power.(205) Probably, too, the monster was supposed to keep
watch and ward over the sacred laurel, from which the victor in the combat
wreathed his brows; for in vase-paintings the Theban dragon appears coiled
beside the holy tree,(206) and Euripides describes the Delphic dragon as
covered by a leafy laurel.(207) At all oracular seats of Apollo his
priestess drank of the sacred spring and chewed the sacred laurel before
she prophesied.(208) Thus it would seem that the dragon, which at Delphi
is expressly said to have been the guardian of the oracle,(209) had in its
custody both the instruments of divination, the holy tree and the holy
water. We are reminded of the dragon or serpent, slain by Hercules, which
guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides in the happy garden.(210) But
at Delphi the oldest sacred tree appears, as Mr. A. B. Cook has pointed
out,(211) to have been not a laurel but an oak. For we are told that
originally the victors in the Pythian games at Delphi wore crowns of oak
leaves, since the laurel had not yet been created.(212) Now, like the
Festival of Crowning, the Pythian games were instituted to commemorate the
slaughter of the dragon;(213) like it they were originally held every
eighth year;(214) the two festivals were celebrated nearly at the same
time of the year;(215) and the representative of Apollo in the one and the
victors in the other were adorned with crowns made from the same sacred
laurel.(216) In short, the two festivals appear to have been in origin
substantially identical; the distinction between them may have arisen when
the Delphians decided to hold the Pythian games every fourth, instead of
every eighth year.(217) We may fairly suppose, therefore, that the
leaf-crowned victors in the Pythian games, like the laurel-wreathed boy in
the Festival of Crowning, formerly acted the part of the god himself. But
if in the beginning these actors in the sacred drama wore wreaths of oak
instead of laurel, it seems to follow that the deity whom they personated
was the oak-god Zeus rather than the laurel-god Apollo; from which again
we may infer that Delphi was a sanctuary of Zeus and the oak before it
became the shrine of Apollo and the laurel.(218)
(M61) But why should the crown of oak have ceased to be the badge of
victory? and why should a wreath of laurel have taken its place? The
abandonment of the oak crown may have been a consequence of the
disappearance of the oak itself from the neighbourhood of Delphi; in
Greece, as in Italy, the deciduous trees have for centuries been
retreating up the mountain sides before the advance of the
evergreens.(219) When the last venerable oak, the rustling of whose leaves
in the breeze had long been listened to as oracular, finally succumbed
through age, or was laid low by a storm, the priests may have cast about
for a tree of another sort to take its place. Yet they sought it neither
in the lower woods of the valley nor in the dark forests which clothe the
upper slopes of Parnassus above the frowning cliffs of Delphi. Legend ran
that after the slaughter of the dragon, Apollo had purged himself from the
stain of blood in the romantic Vale of Tempe, where the Peneus flows
smoothly in a narrow defile between the lofty wooded steeps of Olympus and
Ossa. Here the god crowned himself with a laurel wreath, and thither
accordingly at the Festival of Crowning his human representative went to
pluck the laurel for his brows.(220) The custom, though doubtless ancient,
can hardly have been original. We must suppose that in the beginning the
dragon-guarded tree, whether an oak or a laurel, grew at Delphi itself.
But why should the laurel be chosen as a substitute for the oak? Mr. A. B.
Cook has suggested a plausible answer. The laurel leaf resembles so
closely the leaf of the ilex or holm-oak in both shape and colour that an
untrained observer may easily confuse the two. The upper surface of both
is a dark glossy green, the lower surface shews a lighter tint. Nothing,
therefore, could be more natural than to make the new wreath out of leaves
which looked so like the old oak leaves that the substitution might almost
pass undetected.(221)
Whether at Thebes, as at Delphi, the laurel had ousted the oak from the
place of honour at the festival of the Slaying of the Dragon, we cannot
say. The oak has long disappeared from the low hills and flat ground in
the neighbourhood of Thebes, but as late as the second century of our era
there was a forest of ancient oaks not many miles off at the foot of Mount
Cithaeron.(222)
(M62) It has been conjectured that in ancient days the persons who wore
the wreath of laurel or oak at the octennial festivals of Delphi and
Thebes were no other than the priestly kings, who personated the god, slew
their predecessors in the guise of dragons, and reigned for a time in
their stead.(223) The theory certainly cannot be demonstrated, but there
is a good deal of analogy in its favour. An eight years’ tenure of the
kingship at Delphi and Thebes would accord with the similar tenure of the
office at Sparta and Cnossus. And if the kings of Cnossus disguised
themselves as bulls, there seems no reason why the kings of Delphi and
Thebes should not have personated dragons or serpents. In all these cases
the animal whose guise the king assumed would be sacred to the royal
family. At first the relation of the beast to the man would be direct and
simple; the creature would be revered for some such reason as that for
which a savage respects a certain species of animals, for example, because
he believes that his ancestors were beasts of the same sort, or that the
souls of his dead are lodged in them. In later times the sanctity of the
species would be explained by saying that a god had at some time, and for
some reason or other, assumed the form of the animal. It is probably not
without significance that in Greek mythology the gods in general, and Zeus
in particular, are commonly said to have submitted to this change of shape
for the purpose of prosecuting a love adventure. Such stories may well
reflect a custom of a Sacred Marriage at which the actors played the parts
of the worshipful animals. With the growth of culture these local
worships, the relics of a barbarous age, would be explained away by tales
of the loves of the gods, and, gradually falling out of practice, would
survive only as myths.
(M63) It is said that at the festival of the Wolf-god Zeus, held every
nine years on the Wolf-mountain in Arcadia, a man tasted of the bowel of a
human victim mixed with the bowels of animals, and having tasted it he was
turned into a wolf, and remained a wolf for nine years, when he changed
back again into a man if in the interval he had abstained from eating
human flesh.(224) The tradition points to the existence of a society of
cannibal wolf-worshippers, one or more of whom personated, and were
supposed to embody, the sacred animal for periods of nine years together.
Their theory and practice would seem to have agreed with those of the
Human Leopard Societies of western Africa, whose members disguise
themselves in the skins of leopards with sharp claws of steel. In that
guise they attack and kill men in order to eat their flesh or to extract
powerful charms from their bodies.(225) Their mode of gaining recruits is
like that of the Greek Wolf Society. When a visitor came to a village
inhabited by a Leopard Society, “he was invited to partake of food, in
which was mixed a small quantity of human flesh. The guest all
unsuspectingly partook of the repast, and was afterwards told that human
flesh formed one of the ingredients of the meal, and that it was then
necessary that he should join the society, which was invariably
done.”(226) As the ancient Greeks thought that a man might be turned into
a wolf, so these negroes believe that he can be changed into a leopard;
and, like the Greeks, some of them fancy that if the transformed man
abstains during his transformation from preying on his fellows he can
regain his human shape, but that if he once laps human blood he must
remain a leopard for ever.(227)
(M64) The hypothesis that the ancient kings of Thebes and Delphi had for
their sacred animal the serpent or dragon, and claimed kinship with the
creature, derives some countenance from the tradition that at the end of
their lives Cadmus and his wife Harmonia quitted Thebes and went to reign
over a tribe of Encheleans or Eel-men in Illyria, where they were both
finally transformed into dragons or serpents.(228) To the primitive mind
an eel is a water-serpent;(229) it can hardly, therefore, be an accident
that the serpent-killer afterwards reigned over a tribe of eel-men and
himself became a serpent at last. Moreover, according to one account, his
wife Harmonia was a daughter of the very dragon which he slew.(230) The
tradition would fit in well with the hypothesis that the dragon or serpent
was the sacred animal of the old royal house of Thebes, and that the
kingdom fell to him who slew his predecessor and married his daughter. We
have seen reason to think that such a mode of succession to the throne was
common in antiquity.(231) The story of the final transformation of Cadmus
and Harmonia into snakes may be a relic of a belief that the souls of the
dead kings and queens of Thebes transmigrated into the bodies of serpents,
just as Caffre kings turn at death into boa-constrictors or deadly black
snakes.(232) Indeed the notion that the souls of the dead lodge in
serpents is widely spread in Africa and Madagascar.(233) Other African
tribes believe that their dead kings and chiefs turn into lions, leopards,
hyaenas, pythons, hippopotamuses, or other creatures, and the animals are
respected and spared accordingly.(234) In like manner the Semang and other
wild tribes of the Malay Peninsula imagine that the souls of their chiefs,
priests, and magicians transmigrate at death into the bodies of certain
wild beasts, such as elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses, and that in
their bestial form the dead men extend a benign protection to their living
human kinsfolk.(235) Even during their lifetime kings in rude society
sometimes claim kinship with the most formidable beasts of the country.
Thus the royal family of Dahomey specially worships the leopard; some of
the king’s wives are distinguished by the title of Leopard Wives, and on
state occasions they wear striped cloths to resemble the animal.(236) One
king of Dahomey, on whom the French made war, bore the name of Shark;
hence in art he was represented sometimes with a shark’s body and a human
head, sometimes with a human body and the head of a shark.(237) The
Trocadero Museum at Paris contains the wooden images of three kings of
Dahomey who reigned during the nineteenth century, and who are all
represented partly in human and partly in animal form. One of them, Guezo,
bore the surname of the Cock, and his image represents him as a man
covered with feathers. His son Guelelé, who succeeded him on the throne,
was surnamed the Lion, and his effigy is that of a lion rampant with tail
raised and hair on his body, but with human feet and hands. Guelelé was
succeeded on the throne by his son Behanzin, who was surnamed the Shark,
and his effigy portrays him standing upright with the head and body of a
fish, the fins and scales being carefully represented, while his arms and
legs are those of a man.(238) Again, a king of Benin was called Panther,
and a bronze statue of him, now in the Anthropological Museum at Berlin,
represents him with a panther’s whiskers.(239) Such portraits furnish an
exact parallel to what I conceive to be the true story of the Minotaur. On
the Gold Coast of Africa a powerful ruler is commonly addressed as “O
Elephant!” or “O Lion!” and one of the titles of the king of Ashantee,
mentioned at great ceremonies, is _borri_, the name of a venomous
snake.(240) It has been argued that King David belonged to a serpent
family, and that the brazen serpent, which down to the time of Hezekiah
was worshipped with fumes of burning incense,(241) represented the old
sacred animal of his house.(242) In Europe the bull, the serpent, and the
wolf would naturally be on the list of royal beasts.
(M65) If the king’s soul was believed to pass at death into the sacred
animal, a custom might arise of keeping live creatures of the species in
captivity and revering them as the souls of dead rulers. This would
explain the Athenian practice of keeping a sacred serpent on the Acropolis
and feeding it with honey cakes; for the serpent was identified with
Erichthonius or Erechtheus, one of the ancient kings of Athens, of whose
palace some vestiges have been discovered in recent times. The creature
was supposed to guard the citadel. During the Persian invasion a report
that the serpent had left its honey-cake untasted was one of the strongest
reasons which induced the people to abandon Athens to the enemy; they
thought that the holy reptile had forsaken the city.(243) Again, Cecrops,
the first king of Athens, is said to have been half-serpent and
half-man;(244) in art he is represented as a man from the waist upwards,
while the lower part of his body consists of the coils of a serpent.(245)
It has been suggested that like Erechtheus he was identical with the
serpent on the Acropolis.(246) Once more, we are told that Cychreus gained
the kingdom of Salamis by slaying a snake which ravaged the island,(247)
but that after his death he, like Cadmus, appeared in the form of the
reptile.(248) Some said that he was a man who received the name of Snake
on account of his cruelty.(249) Such tales may preserve reminiscences of
kings who assumed the style of serpents in their lifetime and were
believed to transmigrate into serpents after death. Like the dragons of
Thebes and Delphi, the Athenian serpent appears to have been conceived as
a creature of the waters; for the serpent-man Erechtheus was identified
with the water-god Poseidon,(250) and in his temple, the Erechtheum, where
the serpent lived, there was a tank which went by the name of “the sea of
Erechtheus.”(251)
(M66) If the explanation of the eight years’ cycle which I have adopted
holds good for Thebes and Delphi, the octennial festivals held at these
places probably had some reference to the sun and moon, and may have
comprised a sacred marriage of these luminaries. The solar character of
Apollo, whether original or adventitious, lends some countenance to this
view, but at both Delphi and Thebes the god was apparently an intruder who
usurped the place of an older god or hero at the festival. At Thebes that
older hero was Cadmus. Now Cadmus was a brother of Europa, who appears to
have been a personification of the moon conceived in the form of a
cow.(252) He travelled westward seeking his lost sister till he came to
Delphi, where the oracle bade him give up the search and follow a cow
which had the white mark of the full moon on its flank; wherever the cow
fell down exhausted, there he was to take up his abode and found a city.
Following the cow and the directions of the oracle he built Thebes.(253)
Have we not here in another form the myth of the moon pursued and at last
overtaken by the sun? and the famous wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia, to
attend which all the gods came down from heaven,(254) may it not have been
at once the mythical marriage of the great luminaries and the ritual
marriage of the king and queen of Thebes masquerading, like the king and
queen of Cnossus, in the character of the lights of heaven at the
octennial festival which celebrated and symbolised the conjunction of the
sun and moon after their long separation, their harmony after eight years
of discord? A better name for the bride at such a wedding could hardly
have been chosen than Harmonia.
(M67) This theory is supported by a remarkable feature of the festival. At
the head of the procession, immediately in front of the Laurel-bearer,
walked a youth who carried in his hands a staff of olive-wood draped with
laurels and flowers. To the top of the staff was fastened a bronze globe,
with smaller globes hung from it; to the middle of the staff were attached
a globe of medium size and three hundred and sixty-five purple ribbands,
while the lower part of the staff was swathed in a saffron pall. The
largest globe, we are told, signified the sun, the smaller the moon, and
the smallest the stars, and the purple ribbands stood for the course of
the year, being equal in number to the days comprised in it.(255) The
choir of virgins who followed the Laurel-bearer singing hymns(256) may
have represented the Muses, who are said to have sung and played at the
marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia; down to late times the very spot in the
market-place was shewn where they had discoursed their heavenly
music.(257) We may conjecture that the procession of the Laurel-bearing
was preceded by a dramatic performance of the Slaying of the Dragon, and
that it was followed by a pageant representative of the nuptials of Cadmus
and Harmonia in the presence of the gods. On this hypothesis Harmonia, the
wife of Cadmus, is only another form of his sister Europa, both of them
being personifications of the moon. Accordingly in the Samothracian
mysteries, in which the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia appears to have
been celebrated, it was Harmonia and not Europa whose wanderings were
dramatically represented.(258) The gods who quitted Olympus to grace the
wedding by their presence were probably represented in the rites, whether
celebrated at Thebes or in Samothrace, by men and women attired as
deities. In like manner at the marriage of a Pharaoh the courtiers
masqueraded in the likeness of the animal-headed Egyptian gods.(259)
Within historical times the great Olympic festival was always held at
intervals of four, not of eight, years. Yet it too would seem to have been
based on the octennial cycle. For it always fell on a full moon, at
intervals of fifty and of forty-nine lunar months alternately.(260) Thus
the total number of lunar months comprised in two successive Olympiads was
ninety-nine, which is precisely the number of lunar months in the
octennial cycle.(261) It is possible that, as K. O. Müller
conjectured,(262) the Olympic games may, like the Pythian, have originally
been celebrated at intervals of eight instead of four years. If that was
so, analogy would lead us to infer that the festival was associated with a
mythical marriage of the sun and moon. A reminiscence of such a marriage
appears to survive in the legend that Endymion, the son of the first king
of Elis, had fifty daughters by the Moon, and that he set his sons to run
a race for the kingdom at Olympia.(263) For, as scholars have already
perceived, Endymion is the sunken sun overtaken by the moon below the
horizon, and his fifty daughters by her are the fifty lunar months of an
Olympiad or, more strictly speaking, of every alternate Olympiad.(264) If
the Olympic festival always fell, as many authorities have maintained, at
the first full moon after the summer solstice,(265) the time would be
eminently appropriate for a marriage of the luminaries, since both of them
might then be conceived to be at the prime of their vigour.
(M68) It has been ingeniously argued by Mr. A. B. Cook(266) that the
Olympic victors in the chariot-race were the lineal successors of the old
rulers, the living embodiments of Zeus, whose claims to the kingdom were
decided by a race, as in the legend of Endymion and his sons, and who
reigned for a period of four, perhaps originally of eight years, after
which they had again, like Oenomaus, to stake their right to the throne on
the issue of a chariot-race. Certainly the four-horse car in which they
raced assimilated them to the sun-god, who was commonly supposed to drive
through the sky in a similar fashion;(267) while the crown of sacred olive
which decked their brows(268) likened them to the great god Zeus himself,
whose glorious image at Olympia wore a similar wreath.(269) But if the
olive-crowned victor in the men’s race at Olympia represented Zeus, it
becomes probable that the olive-crowned victor in the girls’ race, which
was held every fourth year at Olympia in honour of Hera,(270) represented
in like manner the god’s wife; and that in former days the two together
acted the part of the god and goddess in that sacred marriage of Zeus and
Hera which is known to have been celebrated in many parts of Greece.(271)
This conclusion is confirmed by the legend that the girls’ race was
instituted by Hippodamia in gratitude for her marriage with Pelops;(272)
for if Pelops as victor in the chariot-race represented Zeus, his bride
would naturally play the part of Hera. But under the names of Zeus and
Hera the pair of Olympic victors would seem to have really personated the
Sun and Moon, who were the true heavenly bridegroom and bride of the
ancient octennial festival.(273) In the decline of ancient civilisation
the old myth of the marriage of the great luminaries was revived by the
crazy fanatic and libertine, the emperor Heliogabalus, who fetched the
image of Astarte, regarded as the moon-goddess, from Carthage to Rome and
wedded it to the image of the Syrian sun-god, commanding all men at Rome
and throughout Italy to celebrate with joy and festivity the solemn
nuptials of the God of the Sun with the Goddess of the Moon.(274)
§ 5. Funeral Games.
(M69) But a different and at first sight inconsistent explanation of the
Olympic festival deserves to be considered. Some of the ancients held that
all the great games of Greece—the Olympic, the Nemean, the Isthmian, and
the Pythian—were funeral games celebrated in honour of the dead.(275) Thus
the Olympic games were supposed to have been founded in honour of
Pelops,(276) the great legendary hero, who had a sacred precinct at
Olympia, where he was honoured above all the other heroes and received
annually the sacrifice of a black ram.(277) Once a year, too, all the lads
of Peloponnese are said to have lashed themselves on his grave at Olympia,
till the blood streamed down their backs as a libation to the departed
hero.(278) Similarly at Roman funerals the women scratched their faces
till they bled for the purpose, as Varro tells us, of pleasing the ghosts
with the sight of the flowing blood.(279) So, too, among the aborigines of
Australia mourners sometimes cut and hack themselves and allow the
streaming blood to drip on the dead body of their kinsman or into the
grave.(280) Among the eastern islanders of Torres Straits in like manner
youths who had lately been initiated and girls who had attained to puberty
used to have the lobes of their ears cut as a mourning ceremony, and the
flowing blood was allowed to drip on the feet of the corpse as a mark of
pity or sorrow; moreover, young adults of both sexes had patterns cut in
their flesh with a sharp shell so that the blood fell on the dead
body.(281) The similarity of these savage rites to the Greek custom
observed at the grave of Pelops suggests that the tomb was not a mere
cenotaph, but that it contained the actual remains of the dead hero,
though these have not been discovered by the German excavators of Olympia.
In like manner the Nemean games are said to have been celebrated in honour
of the dead Opheltes, whose grave was shewn at Nemea.(282) According to
tradition, the Isthmian games were instituted in honour of the dead
Melicertes, whose body had been washed ashore at the Isthmus of Corinth.
It is said that when this happened a famine fell upon the Corinthians, and
an oracle declared that the evil would not cease until the people paid due
obsequies to the remains of the drowned Melicertes and honoured him with
funeral games. The Corinthians complied with the injunction for a short
time; but as soon as they omitted to celebrate the games, the famine broke
out afresh, and the oracle informed them that the honours paid to
Melicertes must be eternal.(283) Lastly, the Pythian games are said to
have been celebrated in honour of the dead dragon or serpent Python.(284)
(M70) These Greek traditions as to the funeral origin of the great games
are strongly confirmed by Greek practice in historical times. Thus in the
Homeric age funeral games, including chariot-races, foot-races, wrestling,
boxing, spear-throwing, quoit-throwing, and archery, were celebrated in
honour of dead kings and heroes at their barrows.(285) In the fifth
century before Christ, when Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, died in the
Thracian Chersonese, the people offered sacrifices to him as their founder
and instituted equestrian and athletic games in his honour, in which no
citizen of Lampsacus was allowed to contend.(286) Near the theatre at
Sparta there were two graves; one contained the bones of the gallant
Leonidas which had been brought back from the pass of Thermopylae to rest
in Spartan earth; the other held the dust of King Pausanias, who commanded
the Greek armies on the great day when they routed the Persian host at
Plataea, but who lived to tarnish his laurels and to die a traitor’s
death. Every year speeches were spoken over these graves and games were
held in which none but Spartans might compete.(287) Perhaps in the case of
Pausanias the games were intended rather to avert his anger than to do him
honour; for we are told that wizards were fetched even from Italy to lay
the traitor’s unquiet ghost.(288) Again, when the Spartan general
Brasidas, defending Amphipolis in Thrace against the Athenians, fell
mortally wounded before the city and just lived, like Wolfe on the Heights
of Abraham, to learn that his men were victorious, all the allies in arms
followed the dead soldier to the grave; and the grateful citizens fenced
his tomb about, sacrificed to him as a hero, and decreed that his memory
should be honoured henceforth with games and annual sacrifices.(289) So,
too, when Timoleon, the saviour of Syracuse, died in the city which he had
delivered from tyrants within and defended against enemies without, vast
multitudes of men and women, crowned with garlands and clad in clean
raiment, attended all that was mortal of their benefactor to the funeral
pyre, the voices of praise and benediction mingling with the sound of
lamentations and sobs; and when at last the bier was laid on the pyre a
herald chosen for his sonorous voice proclaimed that the people of
Syracuse were burying Timoleon, and that they would honour him for all
time to come with musical, equestrian, and athletic games, because he had
put down the tyrants, conquered the foreign foe, rebuilt the cities that
had been laid waste, and restored their free constitutions to the
Sicilians.(290) In dedicating the great Mausoleum at Halicarnassus to the
soul of her dead husband Mausolus, his widow Artemisia instituted a
contest of eloquence in his memory, prizes of money and other valuables
being offered to such as should pronounce the most splendid panegyrics on
the departed. Isocrates himself is said to have entered for the prize but
to have been vanquished by his pupil Theopompus.(291) Alexander the Great
prepared to pay honour to his dead friend Hephaestion by celebrating
athletic and musical contests on a greater scale than had ever been
witnessed before, and for this purpose he actually assembled three
thousand competitors, who shortly afterwards contended at the funeral
games of the great conqueror himself.(292)
(M71) Nor were the Greeks in the habit of instituting games in honour only
of a few distinguished individuals; they sometimes established them to
perpetuate the memory or to appease the ghosts of large numbers of men who
had perished on the field of battle or been massacred in cold blood. When
the Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians together had beaten the Phocaeans in a
sea-fight, they landed their prisoners near Agylla in Etruria and stoned
them all to death. After that, whenever the people of Agylla or their oxen
or their sheep passed the scene of the massacre, they were attacked by a
strange malady, which distorted their bodies and deprived them of the use
of their limbs. So they consulted the Delphic oracle, and the priestess
told them that they must offer great sacrifices to the dead Phocaeans and
institute equestrian and athletic games in their honour,(293) no doubt to
appease the angry ghosts of the murdered men, who were supposed to be
doing the mischief. At Plataea down to the second century of our era might
be seen the graves of the men who fell in the great battle with the
Persians. Sacrifices were offered to them every year with great solemnity.
The chief magistrate of Plataea, clad in a purple robe, washed with his
own hands the tombstones and anointed them with scented oil. He
slaughtered a black bull over a burning pyre and called upon the dead
warriors to come and partake of the banquet and the blood. Then filling a
bowl of wine and pouring a libation he said, “I drink to the men who died
for the freedom of Greece.” Moreover, games were celebrated every fourth
year in honour of these heroic dead, the principal prizes being offered
for a race in armour.(294) At Athens funeral games were held in the
Academy to commemorate the men slain in war who were buried in the
neighbouring Ceramicus, and sacrifices were offered to them at a pit: the
games were superintended and the sacrifices offered by the Polemarch or
minister of war.(295)
(M72) Similar honours have been paid to the spirits of the departed by
many other peoples both ancient and modern. Thus in antiquity the
Thracians burned or buried their dead, and having raised mounds over their
remains they held games of all kinds on the spot, assigning the principal
prizes to victory in single combat.(296) At Rome funeral games were
celebrated and gladiators fought in honour of distinguished men who had
just died. The games were sometimes held in the forum. Thus in the year
216 B.C., when Marcus Aemilius Lepidus died, who had been twice consul,
his three sons celebrated funeral games in the forum for three days, and
two-and-twenty pairs of gladiators fought on the occasion.(297) Again, in
the year 200 B.C. funeral games were held for four days in the forum, and
five-and-twenty pairs of gladiators fought in honour of the deceased M.
Valerius Laevinus, the expense of the ceremonies being defrayed by the two
sons of the dead man.(298) Once more, when the Pontifex Maximus, Publicius
Licinius Crassus, died at the beginning of the year 183 B.C., funeral
games were celebrated in his honour for three days, a hundred and twenty
gladiators fought, and the ceremonies concluded with a banquet, for which
the tables were spread in the forum.(299) These games and combats were
doubtless intended to please and soothe the ghost of the recently
departed, just as we saw that Roman women lacerated their faces for a
similar purpose. Similarly, when the Southern Nicobarese dig up the bones
of their dead, clean them, and bury them again, they hold a feast at which
sham-fights with quarter-staves take place “to gratify the departed
spirit.”(300) In Futuna, an island of the South Pacific, when a death has
taken place friends express their grief by cutting their faces, breast,
and arms with shells, and at the funeral festival which follows pairs of
boxers commonly engage in combats by way of honouring the deceased.(301)
In Laos, a province of Siam, boxers are similarly engaged to bruise each
other at the festival which takes place when the remains of a chief or
other important person are cremated. The festival lasts three days, but it
is while the pyre is actually blazing that the combatants are expected to
batter each other’s heads with the utmost vigour.(302) Among the Kirghiz
the anniversary of the death of a rich man is celebrated with a great
feast and with horse-races, shooting-matches, and wrestling-matches. It is
said that thousands of sheep and hundreds of horses, besides slaves, coats
of mail, and a great many other objects, are sometimes distributed as
prizes among the winners.(303) The Bashkirs, a Tartar people of mixed
extraction, bury their dead, and always end the obsequies with
horse-races.(304) Among some of the North American Indians contests in
running, shooting, and so forth formed part of the funeral
celebration.(305)
(M73) The Bedouins of the Sinaitic peninsula observe a great annual
festival at the grave of the prophet Salih, and camel-races are included
in the ceremonies. At the end of the races a procession takes place round
the prophet’s grave, after which the sacrificial victims are led to the
door of the mortuary chapel, their ears are cut off, and the doorposts are
smeared with their streaming blood.(306) The custom of holding funeral
games in honour of the dead appears to be common among the people of the
Caucasus. Thus in Circassia the anniversary of the death of a
distinguished warrior or chief is celebrated for years with horse-races,
foot-races, and various kinds of martial and athletic exercises, for which
prizes are awarded to the successful competitors.(307) Among the Chewsurs,
another people of the Caucasus, horse-races are held at the funeral of a
rich man, and prizes of cattle and sheep are given to the winners; poorer
folk content themselves with a competition in shooting and with more
modest prizes. Similar celebrations take place on the anniversary of the
death.(308) In like manner shooting-matches form a feature of an annual
Festival of All Souls, when the spirits of departed Chewsurs are believed
to revisit their old village. Adults and children alike take part in the
matches, the adults shooting with guns and the children with bows and
arrows. The prizes consist of loaves, stockings, gloves, and so
forth.(309) Among the Abchases, another people of the Caucasus, two years
after a death a memorial feast is held in honour of the deceased, at which
animals are killed and measures taken to appease the soul of the departed.
For they believe that if the ghost is discontented he can injure them and
their property. The horse of the deceased figures prominently at the
festival. After the guests have feasted at a long table spread in the open
air, the young men perform evolutions on horseback which are said to
recall the tournaments of the Middle Ages, and children of eight or nine
years of age ride races on horseback.(310)
(M74) Thus it appears that many different peoples have been in the habit
of holding games, including horse-races, in honour of the dead; and as the
ancient Greeks unquestionably did so within historical times for men whose
existence is as little open to question as that of Wellington and
Napoleon, we cannot dismiss as improbable the tradition that the Olympic
and perhaps other great Greek games were instituted to commemorate real
men who once lived, died, and were buried on the spot where the festivals
were afterwards held. When the person so commemorated had been great and
powerful in his lifetime, his ghost would be deemed great and powerful
after death, and the games celebrated in his honour might naturally
attract crowds of spectators. The need of providing food and accommodation
for the multitude which assembled on these occasions would in turn draw
numbers of hucksters and merchants to the spot, and thus what in its
origin had been a solemn religious ceremony might gradually assume more
and more the character of a fair, that is, of a concourse of people
brought together mainly for purposes of trade and amusement. This theory
might account for the origin not only of the Olympic and other Greek
games, but also for that of the great fairs or public assemblies of
ancient Ireland which have been compared, not without reason, to the Greek
games. Indeed the two most famous of these Irish festivals, in which
horse-races played a prominent part, are actually said to have been
instituted in honour of the dead. Most celebrated of all was the fair of
Tailltiu or Tailltin, held at a place in the county of Meath which is now
called Teltown on the Blackwater, midway between Navan and Kells. The
festival lasted for a fortnight before Lammas (the first of August) and a
fortnight after it. Among the manly sports and contests which formed a
leading feature of the fair horse-races held the principal place. But
trade was not neglected, and among the wares brought to market were
marriageable women, who, according to a tradition which survived into the
nineteenth century, were bought and sold as wives for one year. The very
spot where the marriages took place is still pointed out by the peasantry;
they call it “Marriage Hollow.” Multitudes flocked to the fair not only
from all parts of Ireland, but even from Scotland; it is officially
recorded that in the year 1169 A.D. the horses and chariots alone,
exclusive of the people on foot, extended in a continuous line for more
than six English miles, from Tailltin to Mullach-Aiti, now the Hill of
Lloyd near Kells. The Irish historians relate that the fair of Tailltin
was instituted by Lug in honour of his foster-mother Tailltiu, whom he
buried under a great sepulchral mound on the spot, ordering that a
commemorative festival with games and sports should be celebrated there
annually for ever.(311) The other great fair of ancient Ireland was held
only once in three years at Carman, now called Wexford, in Leinster. It
began on Lammas Day (the first of August) and lasted six days. A
horse-race took place on each day of the festival. In different parts of
the green there were separate markets for victuals, for cattle and horses,
and for gold and precious stuffs of the merchants. Harpers harped and
pipers piped for the entertainment of the crowds, and in other parts of
the fair bards recited in the ears of rapt listeners old romantic tales of
forays and cattle-raids, of battles and murders, of love and courtship and
marriage. Prizes were awarded to the best performers in every art. In the
Book of Ballymote the fair of Carman or Garman is said to have been
founded in accordance with the dying wish of a chief named Garman, who was
buried on the spot, after begging that a fair of mourning (_aenach
n-guba_) should be instituted for him and should bear his name for ever.
“It was considered an institution of great importance, and among the
blessings promised to the men of Leinster from holding it and duly
celebrating the established games, were plenty of corn, fruit and milk,
abundance of fish in their lakes and rivers, domestic prosperity, and
immunity from the yoke of any other province. On the other hand, the evils
to follow from the neglect of this institution were to be failure and
early greyness on them and their kings.”(312)
(M75) Nor were these two great fairs the only ancient Irish festivals of
the sort which are reported to have been founded in honour of the dead.
The annual fair at Emain is said to have been established to lament the
death of Queen Macha of the Golden Hair, who had her palace on the
spot.(313) In short “most of the great meetings, by whatever name known,
had their origin in funeral games. Tara, Tailltenn, Tlachtga, Ushnagh,
Cruachan, Emain Macha and other less prominent meeting-places, are well
known as ancient pagan cemeteries, in all of which many illustrious
semi-historical personages were interred: and many sepulchral monuments
remain in them to this day.”(314) “There was a notion that Carman was a
cemetery, that there kings and queens had been buried, and that the games
and horse-races, which formed the principal attraction of the fair, had
been instituted in honour of the dead folk on whose graves the feet of the
assembled multitude were treading. The same view is taken of the fairs of
Tailltiu and Cruachan: Tailltiu and Cruachan were cemeteries before they
served periodically as places of assembly for business and pleasure.”(315)
The tombs of the first kings of Ulster were at Tailltin.(316)
(M76) If we ask whether the tradition as to the funeral origin of these
great Irish fairs is true or false, it is important to observe the date at
which they were commonly celebrated. The date was the first of August, or
Lugnasad, that is, the _nasad_ or games of Lug, as the day is still called
in every part of Ireland.(317) This was the date of the great fair of
Cruachan(318) as well as of Tailltin and Carman. Now the first of August
is our Lammas Day, a name derived from the Anglo-Saxon _hlafmaesse_, that
is, “Loaf-mass” or “Bread-mass,” and the name marks the day as a mass or
feast of thanksgiving for the first-fruits of the corn-harvest, which in
England and Ireland usually ripen about that time. The feast “seems to
have been observed with bread of new wheat, and therefore in some parts of
England, and even in some near Oxford, the tenants are bound to bring in
wheat of that year to their lord, on or before the first of August.”(319)
But if the festival of the first of August was in its origin an offering
of the first-fruits of the corn-harvest, we can easily understand the
great importance which the ancient Irish attached to it, and why they
should have thought that its observance ensured a plentiful crop of corn
as well as abundance of fruit and milk and fish, whereas the neglect of
the festival would entail the failure of these things and cause the hair
of their kings to turn prematurely grey.(320) For it is a widespread
custom among primitive agricultural peoples to offer the first-fruits of
the harvest to divine beings, whether gods or spirits, before any person
may eat of the new crops,(321) and wherever such customs are observed we
may assume that an omission to offer the first-fruits must be supposed to
endanger the crops and the general prosperity of the community, by
exciting the wrath of the gods or spirits, who conceive themselves to be
robbed of their dues. Now among the divine beings who are thus propitiated
the souls of dead ancestors take in many tribes a prominent or even
exclusive place, and that these ancestors are not creations of the
mythical fancy but were once men of flesh and blood is sometimes
demonstrated by the substantial evidence of their skulls, to which the
offerings are made and in which the spirits are supposed to take up their
abode for the purpose of partaking of the food presented to them.
Sometimes the ceremony is designated by the expressive name of “feeding
the dead.”(322)
(M77) All this tends to support the traditional explanation of the great
Irish fairs held at the beginning of August, when the first corn is ripe;
for if these festivals were indeed celebrated, as they are said to have
been, at cemeteries where kings and other famous men were buried, and if
the horse-races and other games, which formed the most prominent feature
of the celebrations, were indeed instituted, as they are said to have
been, in honour of dead men and women, we can perfectly understand why the
observance of the festivals and the games was supposed to ensure a
plentiful harvest and abundance of fruit and fish, whereas the neglect to
celebrate them was believed to entail the failure of these things. So long
as the spirits of the dead men and women, who were buried on the spot,
received the homage of their descendants in the shape of funeral games and
perhaps of first-fruits, so long would they bless their people with plenty
by causing the earth to bring forth its fruits, the cows to yield milk,
and the waters to swarm with fish; whereas if they deemed themselves
slighted and neglected, they would avenge their wrongs by cutting off the
food supply and afflicting the people with dearth and other calamities.
Among these threatened calamities the premature greyness of the kings is
specially mentioned, and was probably deemed not the least serious; for we
have seen that the welfare of the whole people is often deemed to be bound
up with the physical vigour of the king, and that the appearance of grey
hairs on his head and wrinkles on his face is sometimes viewed with
apprehension and proves the signal for putting him to death.(323)
Similarly the Abchases of the Caucasus imagine that if they do not honour
a dead man by horse-races and other festivities, his ghost will be angry
with them and visit his displeasure on their persons and their
property.(324) In this connexion it is significant that the celebration of
the Isthmian games at Corinth in honour of the dead Melicertes is said to
have been instituted for the purpose of staying a famine, and that the
intermission of the games was immediately followed by a fresh visitation
of the calamity.(325) Analogy suggests that the famine may have been
ascribed to the anger of the ghost of Melicertes at the neglect of his
funeral honours.
(M78) Thus on the whole the theory of the funeral origin of the great
Greek games is supported not only by Greek tradition and Greek custom but
by the evidence of parallel customs observed in many lands. Yet the theory
seems hardly adequate to explain all the features in the legends of the
foundation and early history of the Olympic games. For if these contests
were instituted merely to please and propitiate the soul of a prince named
Pelops who was buried on the spot, what are we to make of the tradition
that the foot-race was founded in order to determine the successor to the
kingdom?(326) or of the similar, though not identical, tradition that the
kingdom and the hand of the king’s daughter were awarded as the prize to
him who could vanquish the king in a chariot race, while death was the
penalty inflicted on the beaten charioteer?(327) Such legends can hardly
have been pure fictions; they probably reflect some real custom observed
at Olympia. We may perhaps combine them with the tradition of the funeral
origin of the games by supposing that victory in the race entitled the
winner to reign as a divine king, the embodiment of a god, for a term of
years, whether four or eight years according to the interval between
successive celebrations of the
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