(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 festival; that when the term had expired

the human god must again submit his title to the crown to the hazard of a

race for the purpose of proving that his bodily vigour was unimpaired;

that if he failed to do so he lost both his kingdom and his life; and

lastly that the spirits of these divine kings, like those of the divine

kings of the Shilluk, were worshipped with sacrifices at their graves and

were thought to delight in the spectacle of the games which reminded them

of the laurels they had themselves won long ago, amid the plaudits of a

vast multitude, in the sunshine and dust of the race-course, before they

joined the shadowy company of ghosts in the darkness and silence of the

tomb. The theory would explain the existence of the sacred precinct of

Pelops at Olympia, where the black rams, the characteristic offerings to

the dead,(328) were sacrificed to the hero, and where the young men lashed

themselves till the blood dripped from their backs on the ground—a sight

well-pleasing to the grim bloodthirsty ghost lurking unseen below.

Perhaps, too, the theory may explain the high mound, at some distance from

Olympia, which passed for the grave of the suitors of Hippodamia, to whose

shades Pelops is said to have sacrificed as to heroes every year.(329) It

is possible that the men buried in this great barrow were not, as

tradition had it, the suitors who contended in the chariot-race for the

hand of Hippodamia and being defeated were slain by her relentless father;

they may have been men who, like Pelops himself, had won the kingdom and a

bride in the chariot-race, and, after enjoying the regal dignity and

posing as incarnate deities for a term of years, had been finally defeated

in the race and put to death.

(M79) Whatever may be thought of these speculations, the great Olympic

festival cannot have been, like our Lammas, a harvest festival: the

quadrennial period of the celebration and the season of the year at which

it fell, about halfway between the corn-reaping of early summer and the

vintage of mid-autumn, alike exclude the supposition and alike point to an

astronomical, not an agricultural, basis of the solemnity. Accordingly we

seem driven to conclude that if the winners, male and female, in the

Olympic games indeed represented divinities, these divinities must have

been personifications of astronomical, not agricultural, powers; in short

that the victors posed as embodiments of the Sun and Moon, then at the

prime of their radiant power and glory, whose meeting in the heavenly

bridechamber of the sky after years of separation was mimicked and

magically promoted by the nuptials of their human representatives on

earth.

§ 6. The Slaughter of the Dragon.

(M80) In the foregoing discussion it has been suggested that Delphi,

Thebes, Salamis, and Athens were once ruled by kings who had, in modern

language, a serpent or dragon for their crest, and were believed to

migrate at death into the bodies of the beasts. But these legends of the

dragon admit of another and, at first sight at least, discrepant

explanation. It is difficult to separate them from those similar tales of

the slaughter of a great dragon which are current in many lands, and have

commonly been interpreted as nature-myths, in other words, as

personifications of physical phenomena. Of such tales the oldest known

versions are the ancient Babylonian and the ancient Indian. The Babylonian

myth relates how in the beginning the mighty god Marduk fought and killed

the great dragon Tiamat, an embodiment of the primaeval watery chaos, and

how after his victory he created the present heaven and earth by splitting

the huge carcase of the monster into halves and setting one of them up to

form the sky, while the other half apparently he used to fashion the

earth. Thus the story is a myth of creation. In language which its authors

doubtless understood literally, but which more advanced thinkers

afterwards interpreted figuratively, it describes how confusion was

reduced to order, how a cosmos emerged from chaos.(330) The account of

creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, which has been so much

praised for its simple grandeur and sublimity, is merely a rationalised

version of the old myth of the fight with the dragon,(331) a myth which

for crudity of thought deserves to rank with the quaint fancies of the

lowest savages.

(M81) Again, the Indian myth embodied in the hymns of the Rigveda tells

how the strong and valiant god Indra conquered a great dragon or serpent

named Vṛtra, which had obstructed the waters so that they could not flow.

He slew the monster with his bolt, and then the pent-up springs gushed in

rivers to the sea. And what he did once, he continues to do. Again and

again he renews the conflict; again and again he slays the dragon and

releases the imprisoned waters. Prayers are addressed to him that he would

be pleased to do so in the future. Even priests on earth sometimes

associate themselves with Indra in his battles with the dragon. The

worshipper is said to have placed the bolt in the god’s hands, and the

sacrifice is spoken of as having helped the weapon to slay the

monster.(332) Thus the feat attributed to Indra would seem to be a

mythical account not so much of creation as of some regularly recurring

phenomenon. It has been plausibly interpreted as a description of the

bursting of the first storms of rain and thunder after the torrid heat of

an Indian summer.(333) At such times all nature, exhausted by the drought,

longs for coolness and moisture. Day after day men and cattle may be

tormented by the sight of clouds that gather and then pass away without

disburdening themselves of their contents. At last the long-drawn struggle

between the rival forces comes to a crisis. The sky darkens, thunder

peals, lightning flashes, and the welcome rain descends in sheets,

drenching the parched earth and flooding the rivers. Such a battle of the

elements might well present itself to the primitive mind in the guise of a

conflict between a maleficent dragon of drought and a beneficent god of

thunder and rain. The cloud-dragon has swallowed the waters and keeps them

shut up in the black coils of his sinuous body; the god cleaves the

monster’s belly with his thunder-bolt, and the imprisoned waters escape,

in the form of dripping rain and rushing stream.

(M82) In other countries a similar myth might, with appropriate variations

of detail, express in like manner the passage of one season into another.

For example, in more rigorous climates the dragon might stand for the

dreary winter and the dragon-slayer for the genial summer. The myths of

Apollo and the Python, of St. George and the Dragon have thus been

interpreted as symbolising the victory of summer over winter.(334)

Similarly it has been held with much probability that the Babylonian

legend of Marduk and Tiamat reflects the annual change which transforms

the valley of the Euphrates in spring. During the winter the wide

Babylonian plain, flooded by the heavy rains, looks like a sea, for which

the Babylonian word is _tiamtu_, _tiamat_. Then comes the spring, when

with the growing power of the sun the clouds vanish, the waters subside,

and dry land and vegetation appear once more. On this hypothesis the

dragon Tiamat represents the clouds, the rain, the floods of winter, while

Marduk stands for the vernal or summer sun which dispels the powers of

darkness and moisture.(335)

(M83) But if the combat of Marduk and Tiamat was primarily a mythical

description of the Babylonian spring, it would seem that its cosmogonical

significance as an account of creation must have been an after-thought.

The early philosophers who meditated on the origin of things may have

pictured to themselves the creation or evolution of the world on the

analogy of the great changes which outside the tropics pass over the face

of nature every year. In these changes it is not hard to discern or to

imagine a conflict between two hostile forces or principles, the principle

of construction or of life and the principle of destruction or of death,

victory inclining now to the one and now to the other, according as winter

yields to spring or summer fades into autumn. It would be natural enough

to suppose that the same mighty rivals which still wage war on each other

had done so from the beginning, and that the formation of the universe as

it now exists had resulted from the shock of their battle. On this theory

the creation of the world is repeated every spring, and its dissolution is

threatened every autumn: the one is proclaimed by summer’s gay heralds,

the opening flowers; the other is whispered by winter’s sad harbingers,

the yellow leaves. Here as elsewhere the old creed is echoed by the poet’s

fancy:—

“_Non alios prima crescentis origine mundi_

_Inluxisse dies aliumve habuisse tenorem_

_Crediderim: ver illud erat, ver magnus agebat_

_Orbis, et hibernis parcebant flatibus Euri:_

_Cum primae lucem pecudes hausere, virumque_

_Ferrea progenies duris caput extulit arvis,_

_Inmissaeque ferae silvis et sidera caelo._”(336)

(M84) Thus the ceremonies which in many lands have been performed to

hasten the departure of winter or stay the flight of summer are in a sense

attempts to create the world afresh, to “re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s

desire.” But if we would set ourselves at the point of view of the old

sages who devised means so feeble to accomplish a purpose so immeasurably

vast, we must divest ourselves of our modern conceptions of the immensity

of the universe and of the pettiness and insignificance of man’s place in

it. We must imagine the infinitude of space shrunk to a few miles, the

infinitude of time contracted to a few generations. To the savage the

mountains that bound the visible horizon, or the sea that stretches away

to meet it, is the world’s end. Beyond these narrow limits his feet have

never strayed, and even his imagination fails to conceive what lies across

the waste of waters or the far blue hills. Of the future he hardly thinks,

and of the past he knows only what has been handed down to him by word of

mouth from his savage forefathers. To suppose that a world thus

circumscribed in space and time was created by the efforts or the fiat of

a being like himself imposes no great strain on his credulity; and he may

without much difficulty imagine that he himself can annually repeat the

work of creation by his charms and incantations. And once a horde of

savages had instituted magical ceremonies for the renewal or preservation

of all things, the force of custom and tradition would tend to maintain

them in practice long after the old narrow ideas of the universe had been

superseded by more adequate conceptions, and the tribe had expanded into a

nation.

(M85) Neither in Babylonia nor in India, indeed, so far as I am aware, is

there any direct evidence that the story of the Slaughter of the Dragon

was ever acted as a miracle-play or magical rite for the sake of bringing

about those natural events which it describes in figurative language. But

analogy leads us to conjecture that in both countries the myth may have

been recited, if not acted, as an incantation, for the purpose I have

indicated. At Babylon the recitation may have formed part of the great New

Year festival of Marduk, which under the name of Zagmuk was celebrated

with great pomp about the vernal equinox.(337) In this connexion it may

not be without significance that one version of the Babylonian legend of

creation has been found inscribed on a tablet, of which the reverse

exhibits an incantation intended to be recited for the purification of the

temple of E-zida in Borsippa.(338) Now E-zida was the temple of Nabu or

Nebo, a god closely associated, if not originally identical, with Marduk;

indeed Hammurabi, the great king of Babylon, dedicated the temple in

question to Marduk and not to Nabu.(339) It seems not improbable,

therefore, that the creation legend, in which Marduk played so important a

part, was recited as an incantation at the purification of the temple

E-zida. The ceremony perhaps took place at the Zagmuk festival, when the

image of Nabu was solemnly brought in procession from his temple in

Borsippa to the great temple of Marduk in Babylon.(340) Moreover, it was

believed that at this great festival the fates were determined by Marduk

or Nabu for the ensuing year.(341) Now, the creation myth relates how,

after he had slain the dragon, Marduk wrested the tablets of destiny from

Ningu, the paramour of Tiamat, sealed them with a seal, and laid them on

his breast.(342) We may conjecture that the dramatic representation of

this incident formed part of the annual determination of the fates at

Zagmuk. In short, it seems probable that the whole myth of creation was

annually recited and acted at this great spring festival as a charm to

dispel the storms and floods of winter, and to hasten the coming of

summer.(343)

(M86) Wherever sacred dramas of this sort were acted as magical rites for

the regulation of the seasons, it would be natural that the chief part

should be played by the king, at first in his character of head magician,

and afterwards as representative and embodiment of the beneficent god who

vanquishes the powers of evil. If, therefore, the myth of the Slaughter of

the Dragon was ever acted with this intention, the king would

appropriately figure in the play as the victorious champion, while the

defeated monster would be represented by an actor of inferior rank. But it

is possible that under certain circumstances the distribution of parts in

the drama might be somewhat different. Where the tenure of the regal

office was limited to a fixed time, at the end of which the king was

inexorably put to death, the fatal part of the dragon might be assigned to

the monarch as the representative of the old order, the old year, or the

old cycle which was passing away, while the part of the victorious god or

hero might be supported by his successor and executioner.

(M87) An hypothesis of this latter sort would to a certain extent

reconcile the two apparently discrepant interpretations of the myth which

have been discussed in the preceding pages, and which for the sake of

distinction may be called the totemic and the cosmological interpretations

respectively. The serpent or dragon might be the sacred animal or totem of

the royal house at the same time that it stood mythically for certain

cosmological phenomena, whether moisture or drought, cold or heat, winter

or summer. In like manner any other species of animal which served as the

totem of the royal family might simultaneously possess a cosmological

significance as the symbol of an elemental power. Thus at Cnossus, as we

have seen reason to think, the bull was at once the king’s crest and an

emblem of the sun. Similarly in Egypt the hawk was the symbol both of the

sun and of the king. The oldest royal capital known to us was

Hieraconpolis or Hawk-town, and the first Egyptian king of whom we hear

had for his only royal title the name of hawk.(344) At the same time the

hawk was with the Egyptians an emblem of the sun.(345) Hawks were kept in

the sun-god’s temple, and the deity himself was commonly represented in

art as a man with a hawk’s head and the disc of the sun above it.(346)

However, I am fully sensible of the slipperiness and uncertainty of the

ground I am treading, and it is with great diffidence that I submit these

speculations to the judgment of my readers. The subject of ancient

mythology is involved in dense mists which it is not always possible to

penetrate and illumine even with the lamp of the Comparative Method.

Demonstration in such matters is rarely, if ever, attainable; the utmost

that a candid enquirer can claim for his conclusions is a reasonable

degree of probability. Future researches may clear up the obscurity which

still rests on the myth of the Slaughter of the Dragon, and may thereby

ascertain what measure of truth, if any, there is in the suggested

interpretations.

§ 7. Triennial Tenure of the Kingship.

In the province of Lagos, which forms part of Southern Nigeria, the Ijebu

tribe of the Yoruba race is divided into two branches, which are known

respectively as the Ijebu Ode and the Ijebu Remon. The Ode branch of the

tribe is ruled by a chief who bears the title of Awujale and is surrounded

by a great deal of mystery. Down to recent times his face might not be

seen even by his own subjects, and if circumstances obliged him to

communicate with them he did so through a screen which hid him from view.

The other or Remon branch of the Ijebu tribe is governed by a chief, who

ranks below the Awujale. Mr. John Parkinson was informed that in former

times this subordinate chief used to be killed with ceremony after a rule

of three years. As the country is now under British protection the custom

of putting the chief to death at the end of a three years’ reign has long

been abolished, and Mr. Parkinson was unable to ascertain any particulars

on the subject.(347)

§ 8. Annual Tenure of the Kingship.

(M88) At Babylon, within historical times, the tenure of the kingly office

was in practice lifelong, yet in theory it would seem to have been merely

annual. For every year at the festival of Zagmuk the king had to renew his

power by seizing the hands of the image of Marduk in his great temple of

Esagil at Babylon. Even when Babylon passed under the power of Assyria,

the monarchs of that country were expected to legalise their claim to the

throne every year by coming to Babylon and performing the ancient ceremony

at the New-year festival, and some of them found the obligation so

burdensome that rather than discharge it they renounced the title of king

altogether and contented themselves with the humbler one of Governor.(348)

Further, it would appear that in remote times, though not within the

historical period, the kings of Babylon or their barbarous predecessors

forfeited not merely their crown but their life at the end of a year’s

tenure of office. At least this is the conclusion to which the following

evidence seems to point. According to the historian Berosus, who as a

Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually

celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. It began on the

sixteenth day of the month Lous, and lasted for five days. During these

five days masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders

and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in

the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever

commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the

king’s concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his

royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. During his brief term of

office he bore the title of Zoganes.(349) This custom might perhaps have

been explained as merely a grim jest perpetrated in a season of jollity at

the expense of an unhappy criminal. But one circumstance—the leave given

to the mock king to enjoy the king’s concubines—is decisive against this

interpretation. Considering the jealous seclusion of an oriental despot’s

harem we may be quite certain that permission to invade it would never

have been granted by the despot, least of all to a condemned criminal,

except for the very gravest cause. This cause could hardly be other than

that the condemned man was about to die in the king’s stead, and that to

make the substitution perfect it was necessary he should enjoy the full

rights of royalty during his brief reign. There is nothing surprising in

this substitution. The rule that the king must be put to death either on

the appearance of any symptom of bodily decay or at the end of a fixed

period is certainly one which, sooner or later, the kings would seek to

abolish or modify. We have seen that in Ethiopia, Sofala, and Eyeo the

rule was boldly set aside by enlightened monarchs; and that in Calicut the

old custom of killing the king at the end of twelve years was changed into

a permission granted to any one at the end of the twelve years’ period to

attack the king, and, in the event of killing him, to reign in his stead;

though, as the king took care at these times to be surrounded by his

guards, the permission was little more than a form. Another way of

modifying the stern old rule is seen in the Babylonian custom just

described. When the time drew near for the king to be put to death (in

Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year’s reign) he

abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and

suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may have been an

innocent person, possibly a member of the king’s own family; but with the

growth of civilisation the sacrifice of an innocent person would be

revolting to the public sentiment, and accordingly a condemned criminal

would be invested with the brief and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we

shall find other examples of a dying criminal representing a dying god.

For we must not forget that, as the case of the Shilluk kings clearly

shews,(350) the king is slain in his character of a god or a demigod, his

death and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life

unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people and the

world.

(M89) If at Babylon before the dawn of history the king himself used to be

slain at the festival of the Sacaea, it is natural to suppose that the

Sacaea was no other than Zagmuk or Zakmuk, the great New-year festival at

which down to historical times the king’s power had to be formally renewed

by a religious ceremony in the temple of Marduk. The theory of the

identity of the festivals is indeed strongly supported by many

considerations and has been accepted by some eminent scholars,(351) but it

has to encounter a serious chronological difficulty, since Zagmuk fell

about the equinox in spring, whereas the Sacaea according to Berosus was

held on the sixteenth of the month Lous, which was the tenth month of the

Syro-Macedonian calendar and appears to have nearly coincided with July.

The question of the sameness or difference of these festivals will be

discussed later on.(352) Here it is to be observed that Zagmuk was

apparently celebrated in Assyria as well as in Babylonia. For at the end

of his great inscription Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, expresses a wish

that it may be granted to him to muster all his riding-horses and so forth

every year at Zagmuk in his palace.(353) But whether the power of the

Assyrian kings had, like that of the Babylonian monarchs, to be annually

renewed at this festival, we do not know. However, a trace of an annual

tenure of the kingly office in Assyria may perhaps, as Dr. C. Brockelmann

thinks,(354) be detected in the rule that an Assyrian king regularly gave

his name only to a single year of his reign, while all the other years

were named after certain officers and provincial governors, about thirty

in number, who were appointed for this purpose and succeeded each other

according to a fixed rotation.(355) But we know too little about the

institution of the _limu_ or eponymate to allow us to press this argument

for an annual tenure of the kingship in Assyria.(356) A reminiscence of

Zagmuk seems to linger in the belief of the Yezidis that on New-year’s day

God sits on his throne arranging the decrees for the coming year,

assigning to dignitaries their various offices, and delivering to them

their credentials under his signature and seal.(357)

(M90) The view that at Babylon the condemned prisoner who wore the royal

robes was slain as a substitute for the king may be supported by the

practice of West Africa, where at the funeral of a king slaves used

sometimes to be dressed up as ministers of state and then sacrificed in

that character instead of the real ministers, their masters, who purchased

for a sum of money the privilege of thus dying by proxy. Such vicarious

sacrifices were witnessed by Catholic missionaries at Porto Novo on the

Slave Coast.(358)

(M91) A vestige of a practice of putting the king to death at the end of a

year’s reign appears to have survived in the festival called Macahity,

which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the last month of the year.

About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager described the custom as

follows: “The taboo Macahity is not unlike to our festival of Christmas.

It continues a whole month, during which the people amuse themselves with

dances, plays, and sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this

festival wherever he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in

his richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the shore,

followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks early, and must

finish his excursion at sun-rise. The strongest and most expert of the

warriors is chosen to receive him on his landing. This warrior watches the

canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king lands, and has thrown off

his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from a distance of about thirty

paces, and the king must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer

from it: there is no jesting in the business. Having caught it, he carries

it under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or heavoo.

On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and

immediately the air is obscured by clouds of spears, made for the occasion

with blunted ends. Hamamea [the king] has been frequently advised to

abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in which he risks his life every year;

but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to catch a

spear as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity,

all punishments are remitted throughout the country; and no person can

leave the place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair be

ever so important.”(359)

§ 9. Diurnal Tenure of the Kingship.

(M92) That a king should regularly have been put to death at the close of

a year’s reign will hardly appear improbable when we learn that to this

day there is still a kingdom in which the reign and the life of the

sovereign are limited to a single day. In Ngoio, a province of the ancient

kingdom of Congo in West Africa, the rule obtains that the chief who

assumes the cap of sovereignty is always killed on the night after his

coronation. The right of succession lies with the chief of the Musurongo;

but we need not wonder that he does not exercise it, and that the throne

stands vacant. “No one likes to lose his life for a few hours’ glory on

the Ngoio throne.”(360)