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The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, 12 volumes, Third
Edition, by Frazer, James George. Part I. The Magic Art and the
Evolution of Kings, Vol. I.
THE GOLDEN BOUGH
A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION
_THIRD EDITION_
PART I
THE MAGIC ART
AND THE EVOLUTION OF KINGS
VOL. I
[Illustration]
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[Illustration: _The Golden Bough._
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THE MAGIC ART
AND THE EVOLUTION OF KINGS
BY
SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER
D.C.L., LL.D., LITT.D.
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1917
“_Nec indigeste tamquam in acervum congessimus digna memoratu: sed
variarum rerum disparilitas, auctoribus diversa confusa temporibus,
ita in quoddam digesta corpus est, ut quae indistincte atque promiscue
ad subsidium memoriae annotaveramus in ordinem instar membrorum
cohaerentia convenirent. Nec mihi vitio vertas, si res quas ex lectione
varia mutuabor ipsis saepe verbis quibus ab ipsis auctoribus enarratae
sunt explicabo, quia praesens opus non eloquentiae ostentationem sed
noscendorum congeriem pollicetur: et boni consulas oportet, si notitiam
vetustatis modo nostris non obscure modo ipsis antiquorum fideliter
verbis recognoscas, prout quaeque se vel enarranda vel transferenda
suggesserint. Apes enim quodammodo debemus imitari, quae vagantur
et flores carpunt, deinde quicquid attulere disponunt ac per favos
dividunt et sucum varium in unum saporem mixtura quadam et proprietate
spiritus sui mutant._”
MACROBIUS, _Saturnalia, Praefatio_.
COPYRIGHT
_Third Edition March 1911_
_Reprinted July 1911, 1913, 1917_
TO
MY FRIEND
WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH
IN
GRATITUDE AND ADMIRATION
{vii}
PREFACE
When I originally conceived the idea of the work, of which the first
part is now laid before the public in a third and enlarged edition, my
intention merely was to explain the strange rule of the priesthood or
sacred kingship of Nemi and with it the legend of the Golden Bough,
immortalised by Virgil, which the voice of antiquity associated with
the priesthood. The explanation was suggested to me by some similar
rules formerly imposed on kings in Southern India, and at first I
thought that it might be adequately set forth within the compass of
a small volume. But I soon found that in attempting to settle one
question I had raised many more: wider and wider prospects opened out
before me; and thus step by step I was lured on into far-spreading
fields of primitive thought which had been but little explored by my
predecessors. Thus the book grew on my hands, and soon the projected
essay became in fact a ponderous treatise, or rather a series of
separate dissertations loosely linked together by a slender thread
of connexion with my original subject. With each successive edition
these dissertations have grown in number and swollen in bulk by the
accretion of fresh materials, till the thread on which they are strung
at last threatened to snap under their weight. Accordingly, following
the hint of a friendly critic, I decided to resolve my overgrown book
into its elements, and to publish separately the various disquisitions
of which {viii} it is composed. The present volumes, forming the first
part of the whole, contain a preliminary enquiry into the principles
of Magic and the evolution of the Sacred Kingship in general. They
will be followed shortly by a volume which discusses the principles of
Taboo in their special application to sacred or priestly kings. The
remainder of the work will be mainly devoted to the myth and ritual of
the Dying God, and as the subject is large and fruitful, my discussion
of it will, for the sake of convenience, be divided into several parts,
of which one, dealing with some dying gods of antiquity in Egypt and
Western Asia, has already been published under the title of _Adonis,
Attis, Osiris_.
But while I have thus sought to dispose my book in its proper form as a
collection of essays on a variety of distinct, though related, topics,
I have at the same time preserved its unity, as far as possible, by
retaining the original title for the whole series of volumes, and by
pointing out from time to time the bearing of my general conclusions
on the particular problem which furnished the starting-point of the
enquiry. It seemed to me that this mode of presenting the subject
offered some advantages which outweighed certain obvious drawbacks. By
discarding the austere form, without, I hope, sacrificing the solid
substance, of a scientific treatise, I thought to cast my materials
into a more artistic mould and so perhaps to attract readers, who
might have been repelled by a more strictly logical and systematic
arrangement of the facts. Thus I put the mysterious priest of Nemi,
so to say, in the forefront of the picture, grouping the other sombre
figures of the same sort behind him in the background, not certainly
because I deemed them of less moment but because the picturesque
natural surroundings of the priest of Nemi among the wooded hills of
Italy, the very mystery which enshrouds him, and not least the haunting
magic of Virgil’s verse, all combine to shed a glamour on the tragic
figure with the Golden Bough, which fits him to {ix} stand as the
centre of a gloomy canvas. But I trust that the high relief into which
he has thus been thrown in my pages will not lead my readers either
to overrate his historical importance by comparison with that of some
other figures which stand behind him in the shadow, or to attribute
to my theory of the part he played a greater degree of probability
than it deserves. Even if it should appear that this ancient Italian
priest must after all be struck out from the long roll of men who have
masqueraded as gods, the single omission would not sensibly invalidate
the demonstration, which I believe I have given, that human pretenders
to divinity have been far commoner and their credulous worshippers
far more numerous than had been hitherto suspected. Similarly, should
my whole theory of this particular priesthood collapse—and I fully
acknowledge the slenderness of the foundations on which it rests—its
fall would hardly shake my general conclusions as to the evolution of
primitive religion and society, which are founded on large collections
of entirely independent and well-authenticated facts.
Friends versed in German philosophy have pointed out to me that my
views of magic and religion and their relations to each other in
history agree to some extent with those of Hegel. The agreement is
quite independent and to me unexpected, for I have never studied the
philosopher’s writings nor attended to his speculations. As, however,
we have arrived at similar results by very different roads, the partial
coincidence of our conclusions may perhaps be taken to furnish a
certain presumption in favour of their truth. To enable my readers to
judge of the extent of the coincidence, I have given in an appendix
some extracts from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion. The
curious may compare them with my chapter on Magic and Religion, which
was written in ignorance of the views of my illustrious predecessor.
With regard to the history of the sacred kingship which {x} I have
outlined in these volumes, I desire to repeat a warning which I have
given in the text. While I have shewn reason to think that in many
communities sacred kings have been developed out of magicians, I am
far from supposing that this has been universally true. The causes
which have determined the establishment of monarchy have no doubt
varied greatly in different countries and at different times: I make no
pretence to discuss or even enumerate them all: I have merely selected
one particular cause because it bore directly on my special enquiry;
and I have laid emphasis on it because it seems to have been overlooked
by writers on the origin of political institutions, who, themselves
sober and rational according to modern standards, have not reckoned
sufficiently with the enormous influence which superstition has exerted
in shaping the human past. But I have no wish to exaggerate the
importance of this particular cause at the expense of others which may
have been equally or even more influential. No one can be more sensible
than I am of the risk of stretching an hypothesis too far, of crowding
a multitude of incongruous particulars under one narrow formula, of
reducing the vast, nay inconceivable complexity of nature and history
to a delusive appearance of theoretical simplicity. It may well be that
I have erred in this direction again and again; but at least I have
been well aware of the danger of error and have striven to guard myself
and my readers against it. How far I have succeeded in that and the
other objects I have set before me in writing this work, I must leave
to the candour of the public to determine.
J. G. FRAZER.
CAMBRIDGE,
_5th December 1910_.
{xi}
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF _THE GOLDEN BOUGH_
For some time I have been preparing a general work on primitive
superstition and religion. Among the problems which had attracted my
attention was the hitherto unexplained rule of the Arician priesthood;
and last spring it happened that in the course of my reading I came
across some facts which, combined with others I had noted before,
suggested an explanation of the rule in question. As the explanation,
if correct, promised to throw light on some obscure features of
primitive religion, I resolved to develop it fully, and, detaching it
from my general work, to issue it as a separate study. This book is the
result.
Now that the theory, which necessarily presented itself to me at first
in outline, has been worked out in detail, I cannot but feel that in
some places I may have pushed it too far. If this should prove to have
been the case, I will readily acknowledge and retract my error as soon
as it is brought home to me. Meantime my essay may serve its purpose as
a first attempt to solve a difficult problem, and to bring a variety of
scattered facts into some sort of order and system.
A justification is perhaps needed of the length at which I have dwelt
upon the popular festivals observed by European peasants in spring, at
midsummer, and at harvest. It can hardly be too often repeated, since
it is not yet generally recognised, that in spite of their fragmentary
character the {xii} popular superstitions and customs of the peasantry
are by far the fullest and most trustworthy evidence we possess as to
the primitive religion of the Aryans. Indeed the primitive Aryan, in
all that regards his mental fibre and texture, is not extinct. He is
amongst us to this day. The great intellectual and moral forces which
have revolutionised the educated world have scarcely affected the
peasant. In his inmost beliefs he is what his forefathers were in the
days when forest trees still grew and squirrels played on the ground
where Rome and London now stand.
Hence every enquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans should
either start from the superstitious beliefs and observances of the
peasantry, or should at least be constantly checked and controlled
by reference to them. Compared with the evidence afforded by living
tradition, the testimony of ancient books on the subject of early
religion is worth very little. For literature accelerates the advance
of thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word
of mouth at an immeasurable distance behind. Two or three generations
of literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand
years of traditional life. But the mass of the people who do not read
books remain unaffected by the mental revolution wrought by literature;
and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the
superstitious beliefs and practices which have been handed down by word
of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion
depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race.
It is on these grounds that, in discussing the meaning and origin of
an ancient Italian priesthood, I have devoted so much attention to the
popular customs and superstitions of modern Europe. In this part of my
subject I have made great use of the works of the late W. Mannhardt,
without which, indeed, my book could scarcely have been written.
Fully recognising the truth of the principles which I have {xiii}
imperfectly stated, Mannhardt set himself systematically to collect,
compare, and explain the living superstitions of the peasantry. Of
this wide field the special department which he marked out for himself
was the religion of the woodman and the farmer, in other words, the
superstitious beliefs and rites connected with trees and cultivated
plants. By oral enquiry, and by printed questions scattered broadcast
over Europe, as well as by ransacking the literature of folk-lore, he
collected a mass of evidence, part of which he published in a series
of admirable works. But his health, always feeble, broke down before
he could complete the comprehensive and really vast scheme which he
had planned, and at his too early death much of his precious materials
remained unpublished. His manuscripts are now deposited in the
University Library at Berlin, and in the interest of the study to which
he devoted his life it is greatly to be desired that they should be
examined, and that such portions of them as he has not utilised in his
books should be given to the world.
Of his published works the most important are, first, two tracts,
_Roggenwolf und Roggenhund_, Danzig, 1865 (second edition, Danzig,
1866), and _Die Korndämonen_, Berlin, 1868. These little works were put
forward by him tentatively, in the hope of exciting interest in his
enquiries and thereby securing the help of others in pursuing them.
But, except from a few learned societies, they met with very little
attention. Undeterred by the cold reception accorded to his efforts
he worked steadily on, and in 1875 published his chief work, _Der
Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme_. This was followed in
1877 by _Antike Wald- und Feldkulte_. His _Mythologische Forschungen_,
a posthumous work, appeared in 1884.
Much as I owe to Mannhardt, I owe still more to my friend Professor
W. Robertson Smith. My interest in the early history of society was
first excited by the works of {xiv} Dr. E. B. Tylor, which opened up
a mental vista undreamed of by me before. But it is a long step from a
lively interest in a subject to a systematic study of it; and that I
took this step is due to the influence of my friend W. Robertson Smith.
The debt which I owe to the vast stores of his knowledge, the abundance
and fertility of his ideas, and his unwearied kindness, can scarcely be
overestimated. Those who know his writings may form some, though a very
inadequate, conception of the extent to which I have been influenced by
him. The views of sacrifice set forth in his article “Sacrifice” in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_, and further developed in his recent work,
_The Religion of the Semites_, mark a new departure in the historical
study of religion, and ample traces of them will be found in this
book. Indeed the central idea of my essay—the conception of the slain
god—is derived directly, I believe, from my friend. But it is due to
him to add that he is in no way responsible for the general explanation
which I have offered of the custom of slaying the god. He has read
the greater part of the proofs in circumstances which enhanced the
kindness, and has made many valuable suggestions which I have usually
adopted; but except where he is cited by name, or where the views
expressed coincide with those of his published works, he is not to be
regarded as necessarily assenting to any of the theories propounded in
this book.
The works of Professor G. A. Wilken of Leyden have been of great
service in directing me to the best original authorities on the Dutch
East Indies, a very important field to the ethnologist. To the courtesy
of the Rev. Walter Gregor, M.A., of Pitsligo, I am indebted for some
interesting communications which will be found acknowledged in their
proper places. Mr. Francis Darwin has kindly allowed me to consult
him on some botanical questions. The manuscript authorities to which
I occasionally refer are answers to a list of ethnological questions
which I am circulating. Most {xv} of them will, I hope, be published
in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_.
The drawing of the Golden Bough which adorns the cover is from the
pencil of my friend Professor J. H. Middleton. The constant interest
and sympathy which he has shewn in the progress of the book have been a
great help and encouragement to me in writing it.
The Index has been compiled by Mr. A. Rogers, of the University
Library, Cambridge.
J. G. FRAZER.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
_8th March 1890_.
{xvii}
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF _THE GOLDEN BOUGH_
The kind reception accorded by critics and the public to the first
edition of _The Golden Bough_ has encouraged me to spare no pains to
render the new one more worthy of their approbation. While the original
book remains almost entire, it has been greatly expanded by the
insertion of much fresh illustrative matter, drawn chiefly from further
reading, but in part also from previous collections which I had made,
and still hope to use, for another work. Friends and correspondents,
some of them personally unknown to me, have kindly aided me in
various ways, especially by indicating facts or sources which I had
overlooked and by correcting mistakes into which I had fallen. I thank
them all for their help, of which I have often availed myself. Their
contributions will be found acknowledged in their proper places. But I
owe a special acknowledgment to my friends the Rev. Lorimer Fison and
the Rev. John Roscoe, who have sent me valuable notes on the Fijian and
Waganda customs respectively. Most of Mr. Fison’s notes, I believe,
are incorporated in my book. Of Mr. Roscoe’s only a small selection
has been given; the whole series, embracing a general account of the
customs and beliefs of the Waganda, will be published, I hope, in the
_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_. Further, I ought to add
that Miss Mary E. B. Howitt has kindly allowed me to make some extracts
{xviii} from a work by her on Australian folklore and legends which I
was privileged to read in manuscript.
I have seen no reason to withdraw the explanation of the priesthood
of Aricia which forms the central theme of my book. On the contrary,
the probability of that explanation appears to me to be greatly
strengthened by some important evidence which has come to light
since my theory was put forward. Readers of the first edition may
remember that I explained the priest of Aricia—the King of the
Wood—as an embodiment of a tree-spirit, and inferred from a variety
of considerations that at an earlier period one of these priests had
probably been slain every year in his character of an incarnate deity.
But for an undoubted parallel to such a custom of killing a human god
annually I had to go as far as ancient Mexico. Now from the _Martyrdom
of St. Dasius_, unearthed and published a few years ago by Professor
Franz Cumont of Ghent (_Analecta Bollandiana_, xvi. 1897), it is
practically certain that in ancient Italy itself a human representative
of Saturn—the old god of the seed—was put to death every year at his
festival of the Saturnalia, and that though in Rome itself the custom
had probably fallen into disuse before the classical era, it still
lingered on in remote places down at least to the fourth century after
Christ. I cannot but regard this discovery as a confirmation, as
welcome as it was unlooked for, of the theory of the Arician priesthood
which I had been led independently to propound.
Further, the general interpretation which, following W. Mannhardt,
I had given of the ceremonies observed by our European peasantry in
spring, at midsummer, and at harvest, has also been corroborated by
fresh and striking analogies. If we are right, these ceremonies were
originally magical rites designed to cause plants to grow, cattle
to thrive, rain to fall, and the sun to shine. Now the remarkable
researches of Professor Baldwin Spencer and Mr. F. J. Gillen {xix}
among the native tribes of Central Australia have proved that these
savages regularly perform magical ceremonies for the express purpose of
bringing down rain and multiplying the plants and animals on which they
subsist, and further that these ceremonies are most commonly observed
at the approach of the rainy season, which in Central Australia answers
to our spring. Here then, at the other side of the world, we find an
exact counterpart of those spring and midsummer rites which our rude
forefathers in Europe probably performed with a full consciousness
of their meaning, and which many of their descendants still keep up,
though the original intention of the rites has been to a great extent,
but by no means altogether, forgotten. The harvest customs of our
European peasantry have naturally no close analogy among the practices
of the Australian aborigines, since these savages do not till the
ground. But what we should look for in vain among the Australians we
find to hand among the Malays. For recent enquiries, notably those of
Mr. J. L. van der Toorn in Sumatra and of Mr. W. W. Skeat in the Malay
Peninsula, have supplied us with close parallels to the harvest customs
of Europe, as these latter were interpreted by the genius of Mannhardt.
Occupying a lower plane of culture than ourselves, the Malays have
retained a keen sense of the significance of rites which in Europe have
sunk to the level of more or less meaningless survivals.
Thus on the whole I cannot but think that the course of subsequent
investigation has tended to confirm the general principles followed and
the particular conclusions reached in this book. At the same time I am
as sensible as ever of the hypothetical nature of much that is advanced
in it. It has been my wish and intention to draw as sharply as possible
the line of demarcation between my facts and the hypotheses by which I
have attempted to colligate them. Hypotheses are necessary but often
temporary bridges built to connect isolated facts. If my light bridges
should sooner or later {xx} break down or be superseded by more solid
structures, I hope that my book may still have its utility and its
interest as a repertory of facts.
But while my views, tentative and provisional as they probably are,
thus remain much what they were, there is one subject on which they
have undergone a certain amount of change, unless indeed it might
be more exact to say that I seem to see clearly now what before was
hazy. I mean the relation of magic to religion. When I first wrote
this book I failed, perhaps inexcusably, to define even to myself my
notion of religion, and hence was disposed to class magic loosely
under it as one of its lower forms. I have now sought to remedy this
defect by framing as clear a definition of religion as the difficult
nature of the subject and my apprehension of it allowed. Hence I have
come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising
a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between
magic and religion. More than that, I believe that in the evolution
of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has
probably everywhere preceded religion. I do not claim any originality
for this latter view. It has been already plainly suggested, if not
definitely formulated, by Professor H. Oldenberg in his able book _Die
Religion des Veda_, and for aught I know it may have been explicitly
stated by many others before and since him. I have not collected the
opinions of the learned on the subject, but have striven to form my own
directly from the facts. And the facts which bespeak the priority of
magic over religion are many and weighty. Some of them the reader will
find stated in the following pages; but the full force of the evidence
can only be appreciated by those who have made a long and patient study
of primitive superstition. I venture to think that those who submit to
this drudgery will come more and more to the opinion I have indicated.
That all my readers should agree either with my definition {xxi} of
religion or with the inferences I have drawn from it is not to be
expected. But I would ask those who dissent from my conclusions to make
sure that they mean the same thing by religion that I do; for otherwise
the difference between us may be more apparent than real.
As the scope and purpose of my book have been seriously misconceived by
some courteous critics, I desire to repeat in more explicit language,
what I vainly thought I had made quite clear in my original preface,
that this is not a general treatise on primitive superstition, but
merely the investigation of one particular and narrowly limited
problem, to wit, the rule of the Arician priesthood, and that
accordingly only such general principles are explained and illustrated
in the course of it as seemed to me to throw light on that special
problem. If I have said little or nothing of other principles of equal
or even greater importance, it is assuredly not because I undervalue
them in comparison with those which I have expounded at some length,
but simply because it appeared to me that they did not directly bear
on the question I had set myself to answer. No one can well be more
sensible than I am of the immense variety and complexity of the
forces which have gone towards the building up of religion; no one
can recognise more frankly the futility and inherent absurdity of any
attempt to explain the whole vast organism as the product of any one
simple factor. If I have hitherto touched, as I am quite aware, only
the fringe of a great subject—fingered only a few of the countless
threads that compose the mighty web,—it is merely because neither my
time nor my knowledge has hitherto allowed me to do more. Should I live
to complete the works for which I have collected and am collecting
materials, I dare to think that they will clear me of any suspicion of
treating the early history of religion from a single narrow point of
view. But the future is necessarily uncertain, and at the best {xxii}
many years must elapse before I can execute in full the plan which I
have traced out for myself. Meanwhile I am unwilling by keeping silence
to leave some of my readers under the impression that my outlook on
so large a subject does not reach beyond the bounds of the present
enquiry. This is my reason for noticing the misconceptions to which I
have referred. I take leave to add that some part of my larger plan
would probably have been completed before now, were it not that out of
the ten years which have passed since this book was first published
nearly eight have been spent by me in work of a different kind.
There is a misunderstanding of another sort which I feel constrained
to set right. But I do so with great reluctance, because it compels me
to express a measure of dissent from the revered friend and master to
whom I am under the deepest obligations, and who has passed beyond the
reach of controversy. In an elaborate and learned essay on sacrifice
(_L’Année Sociologique_, Deuxième Année, 1897–1898), Messrs. H. Hubert
and M. Mauss have represented my theory of the slain god as intended to
supplement and complete Robertson Smith’s theory of the derivation of
animal sacrifice in general from a totem sacrament. On this I have to
say that the two theories are quite independent of each other. I never
assented to my friend’s theory, and so far as I can remember he never
gave me a hint that he assented to mine. My reason for suspending my
judgment in regard to his theory was a simple one. At the time when
the theory was propounded, and for many years afterwards, I knew of no
single indubitable case of a totem sacrament, that is, of a custom of
killing and eating the totem animal as a solemn rite. It is true that
in my _Totemism_, and again in the present work, I noted a few cases
(four in all) of solemnly killing a sacred animal which, following
Robertson Smith, I regarded as probably a totem. But none even of these
four cases included the {xxiii} eating of the sacred animal by the
worshippers, which was an essential part of my friend’s theory, and
in regard to all of them it was not positively known that the slain
animal was a totem. Hence as time went on and still no certain case
of a totem sacrament was reported, I became more and more doubtful
of the existence of such a practice at all, and my doubts had almost
hardened into incredulity when the long-looked-for rite was discovered
by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen in full force among the aborigines
of Central Australia, whom I for one must consider to be the most
primitive totem tribes as yet known to us. This discovery I welcomed
as a very striking proof of the sagacity of my brilliant friend, whose
rapid genius had outstripped our slower methods and anticipated what
it was reserved for subsequent research positively to ascertain. Thus
from being little more than an ingenious hypothesis the totem sacrament
has become, at least in my opinion, a well-authenticated fact. But from
the practice of the rite by a single set of tribes it is still a long
step to the universal practice of it by all totem tribes, and from that
again it is a still longer stride to the deduction therefrom of animal
sacrifice in general. These two steps I am not yet prepared to take.
No one will welcome further evidence of the wide prevalence of a totem
sacrament more warmly than I shall, but until it is forthcoming I shall
continue to agree with Professor E. B. Tylor that it is unsafe to make
the custom the base of far-reaching speculations.
To conclude this subject, I will add that the doctrine of the
universality of totemism, which Messrs. Hubert and Mauss have
implicitly attributed to me, is one which I have never enunciated or
assumed, and that, so far as my knowledge and opinion go, the worship
of trees and cereals, which occupies so large a space in these volumes,
is neither identical with nor derived from a system of totemism. It is
possible that further enquiry may lead me to regard as {xxiv} probable
the universality of totemism and the derivation from it of sacrifice
and of the whole worship both of plants and animals. I hold myself
ready to follow the evidence wherever it may lead; but in the present
state of our knowledge I consider that to accept these conclusions
would be, not to follow the evidence, but very seriously to outrun it.
In thinking so I am happy to be at one with Messrs. Hubert and Mauss.
When I am on this theme I may as well say that I am by no means
prepared to stand by everything in my little apprentice work,
_Totemism_. That book was a rough piece of pioneering in a field that,
till then, had been but little explored, and some inferences in it
were almost certainly too hasty. In particular there was a tendency,
perhaps not unnatural in the circumstances, to treat as totems, or as
connected with totemism, things which probably were neither the one nor
the other. If ever I republish the volume, as I hope one day to do, I
shall have to retrench it in some directions as well as to enlarge it
in others.
Such as it is, with all its limitations, which I have tried to indicate
clearly, and with all its defects, which I leave to the critics to
discover, I offer my book in its new form as a contribution to that
still youthful science which seeks to trace the growth of human
thought and institutions in those dark ages which lie beyond the
range of history. The progress of that science must needs be slow and
painful, for the evidence, though clear and abundant on some sides,
is lamentably obscure and scanty on others, so that the cautious
enquirer is every now and then brought up sharp on the edge of some
yawning chasm across which he may be quite unable to find a way. All
he can do in such a case is to mark the pitfall plainly on his chart
and to hope that others in time may be able to fill it up or bridge
it over. Yet the very difficulty and novelty of the investigation,
coupled with the extent of the intellectual prospect which suddenly
opens {xxv} up before us whenever the mist rises and unfolds the
far horizon, constitute no small part of its charm. The position of
the anthropologist of to-day resembles in some sort the position
of classical scholars at the revival of learning. To these men the
rediscovery of ancient literature came like a revelation, disclosing to
their wondering eyes a splendid vision of the antique world, such as
the cloistered student of the Middle Ages never dreamed of under the
gloomy shadow of the minster and within the sound of its solemn bells.
To us moderns a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a greater panorama
is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us the faith
and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted
races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the
long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to
civilisation. And as the scholar of the Renaissance found not merely
fresh food for thought but a new field of labour in the dusty and faded
manuscripts of Greece and Rome, so in the mass of materials that is
steadily pouring in from many sides—from buried cities of remotest
antiquity as well as from the rudest savages of the desert and the
jungle—we of to-day must recognise a new province of knowledge which
will task the energies of generations of students to master. The study
is still in its rudiments, and what we do now will have to be done
over again and done better, with fuller knowledge and deeper insight,
by those who come after us. To recur to a metaphor which I have
already made use of, we of this age are only pioneers hewing lanes and
clearings in the forest where others will hereafter sow and reap.
But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind
is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened
curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the
learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite
progress if it lays bare certain weak spots in the foundations on which
modern {xxvi} society is built—if it shews that much which we are
wont to regard as solid rests on the sands of superstition rather than
on the rock of nature. It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects
thankless task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which, as
in a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long
ages have sought a refuge from the storm and stress of life. Yet sooner
or later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method
should breach these venerable walls, mantled over with the ivy and
mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations.
At present we are only dragging the guns into position: they have
hardly yet begun to speak. The task of building up into fairer and more
enduring forms the old structures so rudely shattered is reserved for
other hands, perhaps for other and happier ages. We cannot foresee, we
can hardly even guess, the new forms into which thought and society
will run in the future. Yet this uncertainty ought not to induce us,
from any consideration of expediency or regard for antiquity, to spare
the ancient moulds, however beautiful, when these are proved to be
out-worn. Whatever comes of it, wherever it leads us, we must follow
truth alone. It is our only guiding star: _hoc signo vinces_.
To a passage in my book it has been objected by a distinguished scholar
that the church-bells of Rome cannot be heard, even in the stillest
weather, on the shores of the Lake of Nemi. In acknowledging my blunder
and leaving it uncorrected, may I plead in extenuation of my obduracy
the example of an illustrious writer? In _Old Mortality_ we read how
a hunted Covenanter, fleeing before Claverhouse’s dragoons, hears the
sullen boom of the kettledrums of the pursuing cavalry borne to him
on the night wind. When Scott was taken to task for this description,
because the drums are not beaten by cavalry at night, he replied in
effect that he liked to hear the drums sounding there, and {xxvii}
that he would let them sound on so long as his book might last. In the
same spirit I make bold to say that by the Lake of Nemi I love to hear,
if it be only in imagination, the distant chiming of the bells of Rome,
and I would fain believe that their airy music may ring in the ears of
my readers after it has ceased to vibrate in my own.
J. G. FRAZER.
CAMBRIDGE,
_18th September 1900_.
{xxix}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.—THE KING OF THE WOOD • Pp. 1–43
§ 1. _Diana and Virbius_, pp. 1–24.—The lake and sanctuary of Diana
at Nemi, 1–6; the character of Diana at Nemi, 6–8; rule of succession
to the priesthood, 8–10; legends of its origin, 10 _sq._; features of
the worship of Diana at Nemi, 12–14; Diana’s festival on the 13th of
August, 14–17; the companions of Diana, Egeria, 17–19; Virbius, 19–21;
unhistorical character of the traditions, 21–23; antiquity of the
grove, 23 _sq._
§ 2. _Artemis and Hippolytus_, pp. 24–40.—Hippolytus at Troezen,
24–28; hair-offerings to Hippolytus and others, 28–32; graves of
Apollo and Artemis at Delos, 33–35; Artemis a goddess of the wild life
of nature, 35–38; Hippolytus the consort of Artemis, 38–40.
§ 3. _Recapitulation_, pp. 40–43.—Virbius the consort of Diana, 40
_sq._; the leafy bust at Nemi, 41–43.
CHAPTER II.—PRIESTLY KINGS • Pp. 44–51
Priestly kings in ancient Italy, Greece, and other parts of the world,
44–48; divinity of Spartan and other early kings, 48–51; magical
powers of early kings, 51.
CHAPTER III.—SYMPATHETIC MAGIC • Pp. 52–219
§ 1. _The Principles of Magic_, pp. 52–54.—The Law of Similarity
and the Law of Contact or Contagion, 52 _sq._; the two principles
misapplications of the association of ideas, 53 _sq._; Sympathetic
Magic in its two branches, Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic, and
Contagious Magic, 54.
§ 2. _Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic_, pp. 55–174.—Magical images to
injure enemies, 55–70; magical images to procure offspring, 70–74;
simulation of birth at adoption and circumcision, 74–77; magical
images to procure love, 77 _sq._; homoeopathic magic in medicine,
78–84; homoeopathic magic to ensure the food supply, 85 _sqq._;
magical ceremonies (_intichiuma_) in Central Australia for the
multiplication of the totems, 85–89; use of {xxx} human blood in
Australian ceremonies, 89–94; suggested origin of circumcision and
of other Australian initiatory rites, particularly the extraction
of teeth, 95–101; certain funeral rites designed to ensure rebirth,
101–105; rites to secure rebirth of animals and plants, 105 _sq._;
general theory of magical (_intichiuma_) and initiatory rites in
Australia, 106–108; homoeopathic magic in fishing and hunting,
108–111; negative magic or taboo, 111–113; examples of homoeopathic
taboos, 113–117; homoeopathic taboos on food, 117–119; magical
telepathy, 119 _sq._; telepathy in hunting, 120–126; telepathy
in war, 126–134; various cases of homoeopathic magic, 134 _sq._;
homoeopathic magic to make plants grow, 136–144; persons influenced
homoeopathically by plants, 144–147; homoeopathic magic of the dead,
147–150; homoeopathic magic of animals, 150–157; homoeopathic magic
of inanimate things, 157–159; homoeopathic magic of iron, 159 _sq._;
homoeopathic magic of stones, 160–165; homoeopathic magic of sun,
moon, and stars, 165 _sq._; homoeopathic magic of the tides, 167
_sq._; homoeopathic magic of grave-clothes and city sites in China,
168–170; homoeopathic magic to avert misfortune, 170–174.
§ 3. _Contagious Magic_, pp. 174–214.—Supposed physical basis of
sympathetic magic, 174 _sq._; effect of contagious magic in fostering
cleanliness, 175; contagious magic of teeth, 176–182; contagious magic
of navel-string and afterbirth or placenta, 182–200; afterbirth or
navel-string a seat of the external soul, 200 _sq._; contagious magic
of wounds and spilt blood, 201–205; contagious magic of garments,
205–207; contagious magic of footprints and other bodily impressions,
207–214.
§ 4. _The Magician’s Progress_, pp. 214–219.—Elevation of public
magicians to the position of chiefs and kings, 214–216; rise of
monarchy essential to the emergence of mankind from savagery, 216–219.
CHAPTER IV.—MAGIC AND RELIGION • Pp. 220–243
Affinity of magic to science, 220 _sq._; its fatal flaw, 221 _sq._;
relation of magic to religion, definition of religion, 222–224;
opposition of principle between magic and science on the one side
and religion on the other, 224–226; hostility of religion to magic
in later history, 226; confusion of magic and religion in early
times and among savages, 226–231; confusion of magic and religion in
modern Europe, 231–233; confusion of magic and religion preceded by
an earlier age in which magic existed without religion, 233 _sq._;
universality of the belief in magic among the ignorant classes at
the present day, 234–236; resulting danger to civilisation, 236
_sq._; change from magic to religion following the recognition of the
inefficacy of magic, 237–240; the early gods viewed as magicians,
240–242; difficulty of detecting the fallacy of magic, 242 _sq._
CHAPTER V.—THE MAGICAL CONTROL OF THE WEATHER • Pp. 244–331
§ 1. _The Public Magician_, pp. 244–247.—Two types of man-god, the
religious and the magical, 244 _sq._; rise of a class of public
magicians a step in social and intellectual progress, 245–247. {xxxi}
§ 2. _Magical Control of Rain_, pp. 247–311.—Importance of the magical
control of the weather, especially of rain, 247; rain-making based on
homoeopathic or imitative magic, 247 _sq._; examples of rain-making
by homoeopathic or imitative magic, 247–251; stopping rain by fire,
252 _sq._; rain-making among the Australian aborigines, 254–261;
belief that twins control the weather, especially the rain, 262–269;
the rain-maker makes himself wet, the maker of dry weather keeps
himself dry, 269–272; rain-making by means of leaf-clad girls or boys
in south-eastern Europe and India, 272–275; rain-making by means of
puppets in Armenia and Syria, 275 _sq._; rain-making by bathing and
sprinkling of water, 277 _sq._; beneficial effects of curses, 279–282;
rain-making by women ploughing, 282–284; rain-making by means of the
dead, 284–287; rain-making by means of animals, especially black
animals, 287–292; rain-making by means of frogs, 292–295; stopping
rain by rabbits and serpents, 295 _sq._; doing violence to the
rain-god in order to extort rain, 296–299; compelling saints in Sicily
to give rain, 299 _sq._; disturbing the rain-god in his haunts, 301
_sq._; appealing to the pity of the rain-gods, 302 _sq._; rain-making
by means of stones, 304–309; rain-making in classical antiquity, 309
_sq._
§ 3. _The Magical Control of the Sun_, pp. 311–319.—Helping the sun
in eclipse, 311 _sq._; various charms to make sunshine, 312–314;
human sacrifices to the sun in ancient Mexico, 314 _sq._; sacrifice
of horses to the sun, 315 _sq._; staying the sun by means of a net or
string or by putting a stone or sod in a tree, 316–318; accelerating
the moon, 319.
§ 4. _The Magical Control of the Wind_, pp. 319–331.—Various charms
for making the wind blow or be still, 319–323; winds raised by wizards
and witches, 323–327; fighting the spirit of the wind, 327–331.
CHAPTER VI.—MAGICIANS AS KINGS • Pp. 332–372
Magic not the only road to a throne, 332 _sq._; danger of too
simple and comprehensive theories, 332 _sq._; discredit which such
theories have brought on mythology, 333 _sq._; magic only a partial
explanation of the rise of kings, 334; social importance of magicians
among the aborigines of Australia, 334–337; social importance of
magicians in New Guinea, 337 _sq._; magical powers of chiefs and
others in Melanesia, 338–342; evolution of chiefs or kings out of
magicians, especially out of rain-makers, in Africa, 342–352; kings
in Africa and elsewhere punished for drought and dearth, 352–355;
power of medicine-men among the American Indians, 355–360; power of
medicine-men among the pagan tribes of the Malay Peninsula, 360 _sq._;
development of kings out of magicians among the Malays, 361 _sq._;
magical virtue of regalia, 362–365; magical powers of kings among the
Aryan races, 366–368; touching for the King’s Evil, 368–371; general
conclusion, 371 _sq._
CHAPTER VII.—INCARNATE HUMAN GODS • Pp. 373–421
Conception of gods slowly evolved, 373 _sq._; decline of magic,
374; conception of incarnate human gods an early stage of religious
history, 374–376; {xxxii} incarnation either temporary or
permanent, 376 _sq._; temporary incarnation of gods in human form in
Polynesia, Fiji, Bali, and Celebes, 377–380; temporary deification
of sacrificer in Brahman ritual, 380; the new birth, 380 _sq._;
temporary incarnation or inspiration produced by drinking blood,
381–383; temporary inspiration produced by sacred tree or plant, 383
_sq._; inspired sacrificial victims, 384 _sq._; divine power acquired
by temporary inspiration, 385 _sq._; human gods in the Pacific,
386–389; human gods in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Germany, 389–392;
human gods in Africa, 392–397; divinity of kings in Madagascar, 397
_sq._; divinity of kings and men in the East Indies, 398–400; divine
kings and men in Burma, Siam, and Tonquin, 400–402; human gods in
India, 402–407; pretenders to divinity among Christians, 407–410;
transmigrations of human divinities, especially of the divine Lamas,
410–412; incarnate human gods in the Chinese empire, 412–415; divine
kings of Peru and Mexico, 415 _sq._; divinity of the emperors of China
and Japan, 417 _sq._; divinity of early kings, 417 _sq._; divinity of
Egyptian kings, 418–420; conclusion, development of sacred kings out
of magicians, 420 _sq._
APPENDIX.—HEGEL ON MAGIC AND RELIGION • Pp. 423–426
{p1}
CHAPTER I
THE KING OF THE WOOD
“_The still glassy lake that sleeps_
_Beneath Aricia’s trees—_
_Those trees in whose dim shadow_
_The ghastly priest doth reign,_
_The priest who slew the slayer,_
_And shall himself be slain._”
MACAULAY.
§ 1. _Diana and Virbius_
[Sidenote: The lake of Nemi.]
Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene,
suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind
of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape,
is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi—“Diana’s
Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that
calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever
forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on
its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens
descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the
solitariness of the scene. Dian herself might still linger by this
lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
[Sidenote: Its tragic memories]
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and
recurring tragedy. In order to understand it aright we must try to form
in our minds an accurate picture of the place where it happened; for,
as we shall see later on, a subtle link subsisted between the natural
beauty of the spot and the dark crimes which under the mask of religion
were often perpetrated there, crimes which after the lapse of {p2} so
many ages still lend a touch of melancholy to these quiet woods and
waters, like a chill breath of autumn on one of those bright September
days “while not a leaf seems faded.”
[Sidenote: The Alban hills.]
The Alban hills are a fine bold group of volcanic mountains which rise
abruptly from the Campagna in full view of Rome, forming the last spur
sent out by the Apennines towards the sea. Two of the extinct craters
are now filled by two beautiful waters, the Alban lake and its lesser
sister the lake of Nemi. Both lie far below the monastery-crowned top
of Monte Cavo, the summit of the range, but yet so high above the plain
that standing on the rim of the larger crater at Castel Gandolfo, where
the Popes had their summer palace, you look down on the one hand into
the Alban lake, and on the other away across the Campagna to where, on
the western horizon, the sea flashes like a broad sheet of burnished
gold in the sun.
[Sidenote: The sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis.]
The lake of Nemi is still as of old embowered in woods, where in spring
the wild flowers blow as fresh as no doubt they did two thousand
springs ago. It lies so deep down in the old crater that the calm
surface of its clear water is seldom ruffled by the wind. On all sides
but one the banks, thickly mantled with luxuriant vegetation, descend
steeply to the water’s edge. Only on the north a stretch of flat ground
intervenes between the lake and the foot of the hills. This was the
scene of the tragedy. Here, in the very heart of the wooded hills,
under the abrupt declivity now crested by the village of Nemi, the
sylvan goddess Diana had an old and famous sanctuary, the resort of
pilgrims from all parts of Latium. It was known as the sacred grove of
Diana Nemorensis, that is, Diana of the Wood, or, perhaps more exactly,
Diana of the Woodland Glade.[1] Sometimes the lake and grove were
called, after the nearest town, the lake {p3} and grove of Aricia.[2]
But the town, the modern Ariccia, lay three miles away at the foot of
the mountains, and separated from the lake by a long and steep descent.
A spacious terrace or platform contained the sanctuary. On the north
and east it was bounded by great retaining walls which cut into the
hillsides and served to support them. Semicircular niches sunk in
the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels, which
in modern times have yielded a rich harvest of votive offerings. On
the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven
hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses,
like those which we see in front of the piers of bridges to break
floating ice. At present this terrace-wall stands back some hundred
yards from the lake; in other days its buttresses may have been lapped
by the water. Compared with the extent of the sacred precinct, the
temple itself was not large; but its remains prove it to have been
neatly and solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned
with Doric columns of the same material. Elaborate cornices of marble
and friezes of terra-cotta contributed to the outward splendour of the
edifice, which appears to have been further enhanced by tiles of gilt
bronze.[3] {p4}
[Sidenote: Wealth and popularity of the shrine.]
The great wealth and popularity of the sanctuary in antiquity are
attested by ancient writers as well as by the remains which have come
to light in modern times. In the civil war its sacred treasures went
to replenish the empty coffers of Octavian,[4] who well understood
the useful art of thus securing the divine assistance, if not the
divine blessing, for the furtherance of his ends. But we are not told
that he treated Diana on this occasion as civilly as his divine uncle
Julius Caesar once treated Capitoline Jupiter himself, borrowing three
thousand pounds’ weight of solid gold from the god, and scrupulously
paying him back with the same weight of gilt copper.[5] However, the
sanctuary at Nemi recovered from this drain on its resources, for two
centuries later it was still reputed one of the richest in Italy.[6]
Ovid has described the walls hung with fillets and commemorative
tablets;[7] and the abundance of cheap votive offerings and copper
coins, which the site has yielded in our own day, speaks volumes for
the piety and numbers, if not for the opulence and liberality, of
the worshippers. Swarms of beggars used to stream forth daily from
the slums of Aricia and take their stand on the long slope up which
the labouring horses dragged well-to-do pilgrims to the shrine; and
according to the response which their whines and importunities met with
they blew kisses or hissed curses after the carriages as they swept
rapidly down hill again.[8] {p5} Even peoples and potentates of the
East did homage to the lady of the lake by setting up monuments in
her sanctuary; and within the precinct stood shrines of the Egyptian
goddesses Isis and Bubastis, with a store of gorgeous jewellery.[9]
[Sidenote: Roman villas at Nemi.]
The retirement of the spot and the beauty of the landscape naturally
tempted some of the luxurious Roman nobles to fix their summer
residences by the lake.[10] Here Lucius Caesar had a house to
which, on a day in early summer, only two months after the murder
of his illustrious namesake, he invited Cicero to meet the assassin
Brutus.[11] The emperors themselves appear to have been partial to a
retreat where they could find repose from the cares of state and the
bustle of the great city in the fresh air of the lake and the stillness
of the woods. Here Julius Caesar built himself a costly villa, but
pulled it down because it was not to his mind.[12] Here Caligula had
two magnificent barges, or rather floating palaces, launched for him
on the lake;[13] and it was while dallying in the woods of Nemi that
the sluggard Vitellius received the tidings of revolt which woke him
from his dream of pleasure and called him to arms.[14] Vespasian had
a monument dedicated to his honour in the {p6} grove by the senate and
people of Aricia: Trajan condescended to fill the chief magistracy of
the town; and Hadrian indulged his taste for architecture by restoring
a structure which had been erected in the precinct by a prince of the
royal house of Parthia.[15]
[Sidenote: Diana as the mistress of wild animals.
Diana as the patroness of cattle.
Analogy of St. Leonhard in Germany.]
Such, then, was the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, a fitting home for
the “mistress of mountains, and forests green, and lonely glades,
and sounding rivers,” as Catullus calls her.[16] Multitudes of her
statuettes, appropriately clad in the short tunic and high buskins of
a huntress, with the quiver slung over her shoulder, have been found
on the spot. Some of them represent her with her bow in her hand or
her hound at her side.[17] Bronze and iron spears, and images of
stags and hinds, discovered within the precinct,[18] may have been
offerings of huntsmen to the huntress goddess for success in the
chase. Similarly the bronze tridents, which have also come to light at
Nemi, were perhaps presented by fishermen who had speared fish in the
lake, or maybe by hunters who had stabbed boars in the forest.[19]
The wild boar was still hunted in Italy down to the end of the first
century of our era; for the younger Pliny tells us how, with his usual
charming affectation, he sat meditating and reading by the nets, while
three fine boars fell into them.[20] Indeed, some fourteen-hundred
years later boar-hunting was a favourite pastime of Pope {p7} Leo the
Tenth.[21] A frieze of painted reliefs in terra-cotta, which was
found in the sanctuary at Nemi, and may have adorned Diana’s temple,
portrays the goddess in the character of what is called the Asiatic
Artemis, with wings sprouting from her waist and a lion resting its
paws on each of her shoulders.[22] A few rude images of cows, oxen,
horses, and pigs dug up on the site may perhaps indicate that Diana
was here worshipped as the patroness of domestic animals as well as
of the wild creatures of the wood.[23] In like manner her Greek
counterpart Artemis was a goddess not only of game but of herds. Thus
her sanctuary in the highlands of north-western Arcadia, between Clitor
and Cynaethae, owned sacred cattle which were driven off by Aetolian
freebooters on one of their forays.[24] When Xenophon returned from
the wars and settled on his estate among the wooded hills and green
meadows of the rich valley through which the Alpheus flows past
Olympia, he dedicated to Artemis a little temple on the model of her
great temple at Ephesus, surrounded it with a grove of all kinds of
fruit-trees, and endowed it not only with a chase but also with a
sacred pasture. The chase abounded in fish and game of all sorts,
and the pasture sufficed to rear swine, goats, oxen, and horses; and
on her yearly festival the pious soldier sacrificed to the goddess
a tithe both of the cattle from the sacred pasture and of the game
from the sacred chase.[25] Again, the people of Hyampolis in Phocis
worshipped Artemis and thought that no cattle throve like those which
they dedicated to her.[26] Perhaps then the images of cattle found in
Diana’s precinct at Nemi were offered to her by herdsmen to ensure her
blessing on their herds. In Catholic Germany at the present time the
great patron of cattle, horses, and pigs is St. Leonhard, and models
of cattle, horses, and pigs are dedicated to him, sometimes in order
to ensure the health and increase of the flocks and herds through the
coming year, sometimes in order to {p8} obtain the recovery of sick
animals.[27] And, curiously enough, like Diana of Aricia, St. Leonhard
is also expected to help women in travail and to bless barren wives
with offspring.[28] Nor do these points exhaust the analogy between
St. Leonard and Diana of Aricia; for like the goddess the saint heals
the sick; he is the patron of prisoners, as she was of runaway slaves;
and his shrines, like hers, enjoyed the right of asylum.[29]
[Sidenote: Nemi an image of Italy in the olden time.]
So to the last, in spite of a few villas peeping out here and there
from among the trees, Nemi seems to have remained in some sense an
image of what Italy had been in the far-off days when the land was
still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering
herdsmen, when the beechwoods and oakwoods, with their deciduous
foliage, reddening in autumn and bare in winter, had not yet begun,
under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the
laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those
intruders of a later age, which nowadays we are apt to think of as
characteristically Italian, the lemon and the orange.[30]
[Sidenote: Rule of succession to the priesthood of Diana at Nemi.]
However, it was not merely in its natural surroundings that this
ancient shrine of the sylvan goddess continued to be a type or
miniature of the past. Down to the decline of Rome a custom was
observed there which seems to transport us at once from civilisation
to savagery. In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which
at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure
might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he
kept peering warily about him as if {p9} at every instant he expected
to be set upon by an enemy.[31] He was a priest and a murderer; and
the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold
the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A
candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying
the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was
himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
[Sidenote: The priest who slew the slayer.]
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it
the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or
was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in year out, in
summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his
lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at
the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the
smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him
in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. His eyes probably
acquired that restless, watchful look which, among the Esquimaux of
Bering Strait, is said to betray infallibly the shedder of blood; for
with that people revenge is a sacred duty, and the manslayer carries
his life in his hand.[32] To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine
the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as
when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The dreamy blue
of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle
of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and
sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may
have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn
nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem
to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to
melancholy music—the background of forest shewing black and jagged
against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the
branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of
the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro,
now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter {p10}
of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the
cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.
[Sidenote: Possibility of explaining the rule of succession by the
comparative method.]
The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical
antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation we
must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a custom
savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial times, stands
out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the
day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn. It is the
very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of
explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have
revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial
differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy
of life. Accordingly, if we can shew that a barbarous custom, like
that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can
detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that
these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human
society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions
specifically different but generically alike; if we can shew, lastly,
that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions,
were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer
that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood
of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of direct evidence as to how
the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration.
But it will be more or less probable according to the degree of
completeness with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The
object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly
probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.
[Sidenote: Legend of the origin of the Nemi worship: Orestes and the
Tauric Diana.
The King of the Wood.]
I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come
down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship of Diana
at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas, King of
the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy,
bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of
sticks. After his death his bones were transported from Aricia to Rome
and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the {p11} Capitoline
slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual which legend
ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; it is
said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed on her
altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within
the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be
broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one
of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest
in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the
title of King of the Wood (_Rex Nemorensis_). According to the public
opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden Bough which,
at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous
journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented,
it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a
reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana.
This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial
times; for amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest
of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to
slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the
Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the
prize of victory in a single combat.[33] {p12}
[Sidenote: Chief features of the worship of Diana at Nemi.
Importance of fire in her ritual.
Diana as Vesta.]
Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be made
out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the site, it
appears that she was conceived of especially as a huntress, and further
as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting expectant
mothers an easy delivery.[34] Again, fire seems to have played a
foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual festival, held on
the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove
shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by
the lake; and throughout the length and breadth of Italy the day was
kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth.[35] Bronze statuettes
found in her precinct represent the goddess herself holding a torch
in her raised right hand;[36] and women whose prayers had been heard
by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing lighted torches to the
sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows.[37] Some one unknown {p13}
dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine at Nemi for the
safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family.[38] The terra-cotta
lamps which have been discovered in the grove[39] may perhaps have
served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the analogy of the
custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy candles in churches
would be obvious.[40] Further, the title of Vesta borne by Diana at
Nemi[41] points clearly to the maintenance of a perpetual holy fire
in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at the north-east corner
of the temple, raised on three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic
pavement, probably supported a round temple of Diana in her character
of Vesta, like the round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum.[42] Here
the sacred fire would seem to have been tended by Vestal Virgins, for
the head of a Vestal in terra-cotta was found on the spot,[43] and the
worship of a perpetual fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have
been common in Latium from the earliest to the latest times.[44] Thus
we know that among the ruins of Alba the Vestal fire was kept burning
by Vestal Virgins, bound to strict chastity, until the end of the
fourth century of our era.[45] There were Vestals at {p14} Tibur[46]
and doubtless also at Lavinium, for the Roman consuls, praetors, and
dictators had to sacrifice to Vesta at that ancient city when they
entered on or laid down their office.[47]
[Sidenote: Diana’s festival on August 13 converted by the Christian
Church into the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15.
The Virgin Mary seems to have succeeded Artemis and Diana as the
patroness of the ripening fruits.
Survivals of Diana’s festival in Italy, Sicily, and Scandinavia.
The Virgin Mary and the goddess Anaitis.]
At her annual festival, which, as we have just seen, was celebrated all
over Italy on the thirteenth of August, hunting dogs were crowned and
wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a purificatory
ceremony in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted
of a kid, cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still
hanging in clusters on the boughs.[48] The Christian Church appears to
have sanctified this great festival of the virgin goddess by adroitly
converting it into the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin
on the fifteenth of August.[49] The discrepancy of two days between
the dates of the festivals is not a fatal argument against their
identity; for a similar displacement of two days occurs in the case of
St. George’s festival on the twenty-third of April, which is probably
identical with the ancient Roman festival of the Parilia on April
twenty-first.[50] On the reasons which prompted this conversion of
the festival of the Virgin Diana into the festival of the Virgin Mary,
some light is thrown by a passage in the Syriac text of _The Departure
of My Lady Mary from this World_, which runs thus: “And the apostles
also ordered that there should be a commemoration of the blessed one
on the thirteenth of Ab [that is, August; another MS. reads the 15th
of Ab], on account of the vines bearing bunches (of grapes), and on
account of the trees bearing fruit, that clouds of hail, bearing stones
of wrath, might not come, and the trees be broken, and their fruits,
and the vines with their clusters.”[51] Here the festival of {p15}
the Assumption of the Virgin is definitely said to have been fixed on
the thirteenth or fifteenth of August for the sake of protecting the
ripening grapes and other fruits. Similarly in the Arabic text of the
apocryphal work _On the Passing of the Blessed Virgin Mary_, which is
attributed to the Apostle John, there occurs the following passage:
“Also a festival in her honour was instituted on the fifteenth day of
the month Ab [that is, August], which is the day of her passing from
this world, the day on which the miracles were performed, and the time
when the fruits of trees are ripening.”[52] Further, in the calendars
of the Syrian Church the fifteenth of August is repeatedly designated
as the festival of the Mother of God “for the vines”;[53] and to this
day in Greece the ripening grapes and other fruits are brought to the
churches to be blest by the priests on the fifteenth of August.[54]
Now we hear of vineyards and plantations dedicated to Artemis, fruits
offered to her, and her temple standing in an orchard.[55] Hence
we may conjecture that her Italian sister Diana was also revered as
a patroness of vines and fruit-trees, and that on the thirteenth of
August the {p16} owners of vineyards and orchards paid their respects
to her at Nemi along with other classes of the community. We have just
seen that wine and apples still hanging on the boughs formed part of
the festal cheer on that day; in an ancient fresco found at Ostia a
statue of Diana is depicted in company with a procession of children,
some of whom bear clusters of grapes;[56] and in a series of gems the
goddess is represented with a branch of fruit in one hand and a cup,
which is sometimes full of fruit, in the other.[57] Catullus, too,
tells us that Diana filled the husbandman’s barns with a bounteous
harvest.[58] In some parts of Italy and Sicily the day of the
Assumption of the Virgin is still celebrated, like Diana’s day of old,
with illuminations and bonfires; in many Sicilian parishes the corn is
then brought in sacks to the churches to be blessed, and many persons,
who have a favour to ask of the Virgin, vow to abstain from one or
more kinds of fruit during the first fifteen days of August.[59] Even
in Scandinavia a relic of the worship of Diana survived in the custom
of blessing the fruits of the earth of every sort, which in Catholic
times was annually observed on the festival of the Assumption of the
Virgin.[60] There is no intrinsic improbability in the view that for
the sake of edification the church may have converted a real heathen
festival into a nominal Christian one. Similarly in the Armenian
Church “according to the express evidence of the Armenian fathers of
the year 700 and later, the day of the Virgin was placed on September
the fifteenth, because that was the day of Anahite, the magnificence
of whose feast the Christian doctors hoped thereby to transfer to
Mary.”[61] This Anahite or Anaitis, as the Greeks called her, the
Armenian predecessor of the Virgin Mary, was a great Oriental goddess,
{p17} whose worship was exceedingly popular not only in Armenia but in
the adjoining countries. The loose character of her rites is plainly
indicated by Strabo, himself a native of these regions.[62]
[Sidenote: The 13th of August a harvest festival among the Celts of
Gaul.]
Among the ancient Celts of Gaul, who, to judge by their speech, were
near kinsmen of the ancient Latins, the thirteenth of August appears
to have been the day when the harvest was dedicated to the harvest-god
Rivos.[63] If that was so, we may conjecture that the choice of a day
in mid-August for the solemn celebration of the harvest-home dates from
the remote time when the ancestors of the Celtic and Italian peoples,
having renounced the wandering life of the huntsman and herdsman,
had settled down together in some land of fertile soil and temperate
climate, where harvest fell neither so late as after the cool rainy
summers of the North nor so early as before the torrid and rainless
summers of southern Europe.
[Sidenote: Egeria, water-nymph and wife of Numa.]
But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi.[64] Two lesser
divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of
the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to fall
in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole, because
here were established the mills of the modern village of Nemi. The
purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is mentioned by Ovid,
who tells us that he had often drunk of its water.[65] {p18} Women
with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she was believed, like
Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery.[66] Tradition ran
that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the wise king Numa,
that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the sacred grove, and
that the laws which he gave the Romans had been inspired by communion
with her divinity.[67] Plutarch compares the legend with other tales
of the loves of goddesses for mortal men, such as the love of Cybele
and the Moon for the fair youths Attis and Endymion.[68] According
to some, the trysting-place of the lovers was not in the woods of
Nemi but in a grove outside the dripping Porta Capena at Rome, where
another sacred spring of Egeria gushed from a dark cavern.[69] Every
day the Roman Vestals fetched water from this spring to wash the temple
of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitchers on their heads.[70] In
Juvenal’s time the natural rock had been encased in marble, and the
hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of poor Jews, who were suffered
to squat, like gypsies, in the grove. We may suppose that the spring
which fell into the lake of Nemi was the true original Egeria, and that
when the first settlers moved down from the Alban hills to the banks
of the Tiber they brought {p19} the nymph with them and found a new
home for her in a grove outside the gates.[71] The remains of baths
which have been discovered within the sacred precinct,[72] together
with many terra-cotta models of various parts of the human body,[73]
suggest that the waters of Egeria were used to heal the sick, who may
have signified their hopes or testified their gratitude by dedicating
likenesses of the diseased members to the goddess, in accordance with
a custom which is still observed in many parts of Europe.[74] To this
day it would seem that the spring retains medicinal virtues.[75]
[Sidenote: Virbius, the male companion of Diana.]
The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it that
Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair, who
learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and spent all his
days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the virgin huntress
Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his only comrade. Proud of
her divine society, he spurned the love of women,[76] and this proved
his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn, inspired his stepmother
Phaedra with love of him; and when he disdained her wicked advances she
falsely accused him to his father Theseus. The slander was believed,
and Theseus prayed to his sire Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong.
So while Hippolytus drove in a chariot by the shore of the Saronic
Gulf, the sea-god {p20} sent a fierce bull forth from the waves. The
terrified horses bolted, threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged
him at their hoofs to death.[77] But Diana, for the love she bore
Hippolytus, persuaded the leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young
hunter back to life by his simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal
man should return from the gates of death, thrust down the meddling
leech himself to Hades. But Diana hid her favourite from the angry god
in a thick cloud, disguised his features by adding years to his life,
and then bore him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted
him to the nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under
the name of Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he
reigned a king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had a
comely son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father’s fate, drove a team
of fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against Aeneas and the
Trojans.[78] Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi but
elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special priest devoted to his
service.[79] Horses were excluded from the Arician grove and sanctuary
because horses had killed Hippolytus.[80] It was unlawful to touch his
image. Some thought that he was the sun.[81] “But the {p21} truth is,”
says Servius, “that he is a deity associated with Diana, as Attis is
associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius with Minerva,
and Adonis with Venus.”[82] What the nature of that association was we
shall enquire presently. Here it is worth observing that in his long
and chequered career this mythical personage has displayed a remarkable
tenacity of life. For we can hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus
of the Roman calendar, who was dragged by horses to death on the
thirteenth of August, Diana’s own day, is no other than the Greek hero
of the same name, who after dying twice over as a heathen sinner has
been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint.[83]
[Sidenote: The legends of Nemi invented to explain the ritual.
Tradition that the grove of Nemi was dedicated by a Latin dictator.]
It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories
told to account for Diana’s worship at Nemi are unhistorical. Clearly
they belong to that large class of myths which are made up to explain
the origin of a religious ritual and have no other foundation than
the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be traced between it
and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these Nemi myths is
indeed transparent, since the foundation of the worship is traced now
to Orestes and now to Hippolytus, according as {p22} this or that
feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real value of such
tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of the worship by
providing a standard with which to compare it; and further, that they
bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by shewing that the true
origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous antiquity. In the latter
respect these Nemi legends are probably more to be trusted than the
apparently historical tradition, vouched for by Cato the Elder, that
the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana by a certain Egerius Baebius
or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin dictator, on behalf of the peoples
of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and
Ardea.[84] This tradition indeed speaks for the great age of the
sanctuary, since it seems to date its foundation sometime before 495
B.C., the year in which Pometia was sacked by the Romans and disappears
from history.[85] But we cannot suppose that so barbarous a rule
as that of the Arician priesthood was deliberately instituted by a
league of civilised communities, such as the Latin cities undoubtedly
were. It must have been handed down from a time beyond the memory
of man, when Italy was still in a far ruder state than any known to
us in the historical period. The credit of the tradition is rather
shaken than confirmed by another story which ascribes the foundation
of the sanctuary to a certain Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the
saying, “There are many Manii at Aricia.” This proverb some explained
by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and
distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were
many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name
Manius from _Mania_, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children.[86] A
Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay
in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes.[87] These differences of
opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia
and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both
names to the mythical Egeria,[88] excite {p23} our suspicion. Yet the
tradition recorded by Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor
too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction.[89]
Rather we may suppose that it refers to some ancient restoration or
reconstruction of the sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the
confederate states.[90] At any rate it testifies to a belief that
the grove had been from early times a common place of worship for
many of the oldest cities of the country, if not for the whole Latin
confederacy.[91]
[Sidenote: Evidence of the antiquity of the grove.]
Another argument of antiquity may be drawn from some of the votive
offerings found on the spot, such as a sacrificial ladle of bronze
bearing Diana’s name in archaic Greek letters,[92] and pieces of
the oldest kind of Italian money, being merely shapeless bits of
copper, unstamped and valued by weight.[93] But as the use of such
old-fashioned money {p24} survived in offerings to the gods long after
it vanished from daily life,[94] no great stress can be laid on its
occurrence at Nemi as evidence of the age of the shrine.
§ 2. _Artemis and Hippolytus_
[Sidenote: Origin of the Arician myths of Orestes and Hippolytus.]
I have said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus, though
worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they may help
us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it with the
ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask ourselves, Why
did the authors of these legends pitch upon Orestes and Hippolytus
in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood? In regard to
Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the Tauric Diana,
which could only be appeased with human blood,[95] were dragged in to
render intelligible the murderous rule of succession to the Arician
priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not so plain. The
manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason for the exclusion
of horses from the grove; but this by itself seems hardly enough
to account for the identification. We must try to probe deeper by
examining the worship as well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus.
[Sidenote: Worship of Hippolytus at Troezen.
Hippolytus a mythical being of the Adonis type.]
He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated
on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges and
lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the garden
of the Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the foot
of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil bay,
which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon’s sacred island,
its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this fair coast
Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an
ancient image. His service was performed by a priest who held office
for life: every year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour; and
his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with weeping and {p25} doleful
chants, by unwedded maids, who also dedicated locks of their hair in
his temple before marriage.[96] His grave existed at Troezen, though
the people would not shew it.[97] It has been suggested, with great
plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut
off in his youthful prime, and yearly mourned by damsels, we have one
of those mortal lovers of a goddess who appear so often in ancient
religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The rivalry
of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus reproduces,
it is said, under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and
Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of
Aphrodite.[98] Certainly in the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides the tragedy
of the hero’s death is traced directly to the anger of Aphrodite at
his contempt for her power, and Phaedra is nothing but a tool of the
goddess. Moreover, within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there
stood a temple of Peeping Aphrodite, which was so named, we are told,
because from this spot the amorous Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus
at his manly sports. Clearly the name would be still more appropriate
if it was Aphrodite herself who peeped. And beside this temple of
Aphrodite grew a myrtle-tree with pierced leaves, which the hapless
Phaedra, in the pangs of love, had pricked with her bodkin.[99]
Now the myrtle, with its glossy evergreen leaves, its red and white
blossom, and its fragrant perfume, was Aphrodite’s own tree, and legend
associated it with the birth of Adonis.[100] At Athens also Hippolytus
was intimately associated with Aphrodite, for on the south side of the
Acropolis, looking towards Troezen, a barrow or sepulchral mound in
his memory was shewn, and beside it stood a temple of Aphrodite, said
to have been founded by Phaedra, which bore the name of the temple of
Aphrodite at {p26} Hippolytus.[101] The conjunction, both in Troezen
and in Athens, of his grave with a temple of the goddess of love is
significant. Later on we shall meet with mounds in which the lovers of
the great Asiatic goddess were said to lie buried.
[Sidenote: The divine mistresses of Hippolytus associated with oaks.]
If this view of the relation of Hippolytus to Artemis and Aphrodite is
right, it is somewhat remarkable that both his divine mistresses appear
to have been associated at Troezen with oaks. For Aphrodite was here
worshipped under the title of Askraia, that is, she of the Fruitless
Oak;[102] and Hippolytus was said to have met his death not far from a
sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, that is, Artemis of the Hollow Oak, for
here the wild olive-tree was shewn in which the reins of his chariot
became entangled, and so brought him to the ground.[103]
[Sidenote: Orestes at Troezen.]
It may not be without significance that Orestes, the other mythical
hero of Nemi, also appears in the legendary history of Troezen. For
at Troezen there was a temple of Wolfish Artemis, said to have been
dedicated by Hippolytus, and in front of the temple stood a sacred
stone upon which nine men, according to the legend, had cleansed
Orestes from the guilt of his mother’s murder. In the solemn rite they
made use of water drawn from the Horse’s Fount; and as late as the
second century of our era their descendants dined together on certain
set days in a building called the Booth of Orestes. Before the building
there grew a laurel-tree which was said to have sprung on the spot
where the things used in purifying the matricide were buried. The old
traveller Pausanias, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of ancient
Greece, could not learn why {p27} Hippolytus dedicated a temple to
Wolfish Artemis; but he conjectured that it might have been because he
extirpated the packs of wolves that used to scour the country.[104]
[Sidenote: Hippolytus in relation to horses and wolves.]
Another point in the myth of Hippolytus which deserves attention is
the frequent recurrence of horses in it. His name signifies either
“horse-loosed” or “horse-looser”;[105] he consecrated twenty horses to
Aesculapius at Epidaurus;[106] he was killed by horses; the Horse’s
Fount probably flowed not far from the temple which he built for
Wolfish Artemis; and horses were sacred to his grandsire Poseidon, who
had an ancient sanctuary in the wooded island across the bay, where
the ruins of it may still be seen in the pine-forest.[107] Lastly,
Hippolytus’s sanctuary at Troezen was said to have been founded by
Diomede, whose mythical connexion both with horses and wolves is
attested. For the Veneti, at the head of the Adriatic, were famed for
their breed of horses, and they had a sacred grove of Diomede, at the
spot where many springs burst forth from the foot of a lofty cliff,
forming at once the broad and deep river Timavus (the modern Timao),
which flows with a still and tranquil current into the neighbouring
sea. Here the Veneti sacrificed a white horse to Diomede; and
associated with his grove were two others, sacred to Argive Hera and
Aetolian Artemis. In these groves wild beasts were reported to lose
their ferocity, and deer to herd with wolves. Moreover, the horses of
the district, famed for their speed, were said to have been branded
with the mark of a wolf.[108] Thus Hippolytus was associated with the
horse in many ways, and this association may have been used to explain
more features of the Arician ritual than the mere exclusion of the
animal from the sacred grove.[109] {p28} To this point we shall return
later on. Whether his relation to wolves was also invoked to account
for any other aspect of the worship at Nemi we cannot say, since the
wolf plays no part in the scanty notices of that worship which have
come down to us.[110] But doubtless, as one of the wild creatures of
the wood, the beast would be under the special care of Diana.
[Sidenote: Hair offered before marriage to Hippolytus and others.]
The custom observed by Troezenian girls of offering tresses of their
hair to Hippolytus before their wedding brings him into a relation with
marriage, which at first sight seems out of keeping with his reputation
as a confirmed bachelor. According to Lucian, youths as well as maidens
at Troezen were forbidden to wed till they had shorn their hair in
honour of Hippolytus, and we gather from the context that it was their
first beard which the young men thus polled.[111] However we may
explain it, a custom of this sort appears to have prevailed widely both
in Greece and the East. Plutarch tells us that formerly it was the wont
of boys at puberty to go to Delphi and offer of their hair to Apollo;
Theseus, the father of Hippolytus, complied with the custom,[112]
which lasted down into historical times.[113] Argive maidens, grown to
womanhood, dedicated their tresses to Athena before marriage.[114] On
the same occasion Megarian girls poured libations and laid clippings of
their hair on the tomb of the maiden Iphinoe.[115] At the entrance to
the temple of Artemis in Delos the grave of two maidens was shewn under
an olive-tree. It was said that long ago they had come as pilgrims
from a far northern land with offerings to Apollo, and dying in the
sacred isle were buried there. The Delian virgins before marriage
used to cut off a lock of their hair, wind it on a spindle, and lay
it on the maidens’ grave. The young men did the same, except that
they twisted the down of their first beard round a wisp of grass or a
green shoot.[116] In some places it was Artemis who {p29} received
the offering of a maiden’s hair before marriage.[117] At Panamara in
Caria men dedicated locks of their hair in the temple of Zeus. The
locks were enclosed in little stone boxes, some of them fitted with a
marble lid or shutter, and the name of the dedicator was engraved on
a square sinking in the stone, together with the name of the priest
for the time being. Many of these inscribed boxes have been found of
late years on the spot. None of them bear the names of women; some of
them are inscribed with the names of a father and his sons. All the
dedications are to Zeus alone, though Hera was also worshipped with him
at Panamara.[118] At Hierapolis, on the Euphrates, youths offered of
their beards and girls of their tresses to the great Syrian goddess,
and left the shorn hair in caskets of gold or silver, inscribed with
their names, and nailed to the walls of the temple.[119] The custom of
dedicating the first beard seems to have been common at Rome under the
Empire.[120] Thus Nero consecrated his first beard in a golden box,
studded with costly pearls, on the Capitol.[121]
[Sidenote: Such offerings intended to communicate strength and
fertility.
Egyptian practice.]
Some light is perhaps thrown on the meaning of these practices by two
ancient Oriental customs, the one Egyptian, the other Phoenician. When
Egyptian boys or girls had recovered from sickness, their parents used
to shave the children’s heads, weigh the hair against gold or silver,
and give the precious metal to the keepers of the sacred beasts, who
bought food with it for the animals according to their tastes. These
tastes varied with the nature of the beast, and the beast varied with
the district. Where hawks were worshipped, the keepers chopped up
flesh, and calling the birds in a loud voice, flung the gobbets up
into the air, till the hawks stooped and caught them. Where cats, or
ichneumons, or {p30} fish were the local deities, the keepers crumbled
bread in milk and set it before them, or threw it into the Nile. And
similarly with the rest of the divine menagery.[122] Thus in Egypt the
offerings of hair went to feed the worshipful animals.
[Sidenote: Syrian practice; sacrifice of chastity regarded as a
substitute for the sacrifice of hair.]
In the sanctuary of the great Phoenician goddess Astarte at Byblus
the practice was different. Here, at the annual mourning for the
dead Adonis, the women had to shave their heads, and such of them as
refused to do so were bound to prostitute themselves to strangers
and to sacrifice to the goddess with the wages of their shame.[123]
Though Lucian, who mentions the custom, does not say so, there are
some grounds for thinking that the women in question were generally
maidens, of whom this act of devotion was required as a preliminary
to marriage.[124] In any case, it is clear that the goddess accepted
the sacrifice of chastity as a substitute for the sacrifice of
hair.[125] Why? By many people, as we shall afterwards see, the hair
is regarded as in a special sense the seat of strength; and at puberty
it might well be thought to contain a double portion of vital energy,
since at that season it is the outward sign and manifestation of the
newly-acquired power of reproducing the species. For that reason, we
may suppose, the beard rather than the hair of the head is offered
by males on this occasion. Thus the substitution permitted at Byblus
becomes intelligible: the women gave of their fecundity to the goddess,
whether they offered their hair or their chastity. But why, it may be
asked, should they make such an offering to Astarte, who was herself
the great goddess of love and fertility? What need had she to receive
fecundity from {p31} her worshippers? Was it not rather for her to
bestow it on them? Thus put, the question overlooks an important side
of polytheism, perhaps we may say of ancient religion in general. The
gods stood as much in need of their worshippers as the worshippers in
need of them. The benefits conferred were mutual. If the gods made
the earth to bring forth abundantly, the flocks and herds to teem,
and the human race to multiply, they expected that a portion of their
bounty should be returned to them in the shape of tithe or tribute. On
this tithe, indeed, they subsisted, and without it they would starve.
Their divine bellies had to be filled, and their divine reproductive
energies to be recruited; hence men had to give of their meat and
drink to them, and to sacrifice for their benefit what is most manly
in man and womanly in woman. Sacrifices of the latter kind have too
often been overlooked or misunderstood by the historians of religion.
Other examples of them will meet us in the course of our enquiry. At
the same time it may well be that the women who offered their hair to
Astarte hoped to benefit through the sympathetic connexion which they
thus established between themselves and the goddess; they may in fact
have expected to fecundate themselves by contact with the divine source
of fecundity. And it is probable that a similar motive underlay the
sacrifice of chastity as well as the sacrifice of hair.
[Sidenote: Hair offered to rivers as sources of fertility.
Delos and Delphi as centres of fertilisation and of fire.]
If the sacrifice of hair, especially of hair at puberty, is sometimes
intended to strengthen the divine beings to whom it is offered by
feeding or fertilising them, we can the better understand, not only
the common practice of offering hair to the shadowy dead,[126] but
also the Greek usage of shearing it for rivers, as the Arcadian boys of
Phigalia did for the stream that runs in the depths of the tremendous
woody glen below the city.[127] For next perhaps to rain and sunshine,
nothing in nature so obviously contributes to fertilise a country as
its rivers. Again, this view may set in a clearer light the custom of
the Delian youths and maidens, {p32} who offered their hair on the
maidens’ tomb under the olive-tree. For at Delos, as at Delphi, one
of Apollo’s many functions was to make the crops grow and to fill
the husbandman’s barns; hence at the time of harvest tithe-offerings
poured in to him from every side in the form of ripe sheaves, or,
what was perhaps still more acceptable, golden models of them, which
went by the name of the “golden summer.”[128] The festival at which
these first-fruits were dedicated may have been the 6th and 7th of the
harvest-month Thargelion, corresponding to the 24th and 25th of May,
for these were the birthdays of Artemis and Apollo respectively.[129]
In Hesiod’s day the corn-reaping began at the morning rising of the
Pleiades, which then answered to our 9th of May,[130] and in Greece
the wheat is still ripe about that time.[131] In return for these
offerings the god sent out a sacred new fire from both his great
sanctuaries at Delos and Delphi, thus radiating from them, as from
central suns, the divine blessings of heat and light. A ship brought
the new fire every year from Delos to Lemnos, the sacred island of the
fire-god Hephaestus, where all fires were put out before its arrival,
to be afterwards rekindled at the pure flame.[132] The fetching of
the new fire from Delphi to Athens appears to have been a ceremony of
great solemnity and pomp. All the chief Athenian magistrates repaired
to Delphi for the purpose. The holy fire blazed or smouldered in a
sacred {p33} tripod borne on a chariot and tended by a woman who was
called the Fire-bearer. Soldiers, both horse and foot, escorted it;
magistrates, priests, and heralds accompanied it; and the procession
moved to the music of trumpet and fife.[133] We do not know on what
occasion the fire was thus solemnly sent from Delphi to Athens, but we
may conjecture that it was when the Pythaists at Athens, watching from
the hearth of Lightning Zeus, saw lightning flash over Harma on Mount
Parnes, for then they sent a sacrifice to Delphi and may have received
the fire in return.[134] After the great defeat of the Persians at
Plataea, the people of that city extinguished all the fires in the
country, deeming them defiled by the presence of the barbarians. Having
done so they relit them at a pure new fire fetched by a runner from the
altar of the common hearth at Delphi.[135]
[Sidenote: The graves of Apollo and Artemis at Delos.]
Now the maidens on whose grave the Delian youths and damsels laid their
shorn locks before marriage, were said to have died in the island after
bringing the harvest offering, wrapt in wheaten straw, from the land
of the Hyperboreans in the far north.[136] Thus they were in popular
opinion the mythical representatives of those bands of worshippers who
bore, year by year, the yellow sheaves with dance and song to Delos.
But in fact they had once been much more than this. For an examination
of their names, which are commonly given as Hekaerge and Opis, has led
modern scholars to conclude, with every appearance of probability, that
these maidens were originally mere duplicates of Artemis herself.[137]
Perhaps indeed we may {p34} go a step farther. For sometimes one of
this pair of Hyperboreans appears as a male, not a female, under the
name of the Far-shooter (Hekaergos), which was a common epithet of
Apollo.[138] This suggests that the two were originally the heavenly
twins themselves, Apollo and Artemis, and that the two graves which
were shewn at Delos, one before and the other behind the sanctuary of
Artemis, may have been at first the tombs of these great deities, who
were thus laid to their rest on the spot where they had been born.
As the one grave received offerings of hair, so the other received
the ashes of the victims which were burned on the altar.[139] Both
sacrifices, if I am right, were designed to strengthen and fertilise
the divine powers who made the earth to wave with the golden harvest,
and whose mortal remains, like the miracle-working bones of saints
in the Middle Ages, brought wealth to their fortunate possessors.
Ancient piety was not shocked by the sight of the tomb of a dead god.
The grave of Apollo himself was shewn at his other great sanctuary of
Delphi,[140] and this perhaps explains its disappearance at Delos.
The priests of the rival shrines may have calculated that one tomb
sufficed even for a god, and that two might prove a stumbling-block to
any but the most robust faith. Acting on this prudent conviction, they
may have adjusted their respective claims to the possession of the holy
sepulchre {p35} by leaving Apollo to sleep undisturbed at Delphi, while
his grave at Delos was dexterously converted into the tomb of a blessed
virgin by the easy grammatical change of _Hekaergos_ into _Hekaerge_.
[Sidenote: Hippolytus and Artemis.
Artemis a goddess of the wild life of nature.
Artemis not originally regarded as a virgin.
Artemis a goddess of childbirth.
The Ephesian Artemis.]
But how, it may be asked, does all this apply to Hippolytus? Why
attempt to fertilise the grave of a bachelor who paid all his devotions
to a barren virgin? What seed could take root and spring up in so
stony a soil? The question implies the popular modern notion of Diana
or Artemis as the pattern of a straight-laced maiden lady with a
taste for hunting. No notion could well be further from the truth.
To the ancients, on the contrary, she was the ideal and embodiment
of the wild life of nature—the life of plants, of animals, and of
men—in all its exuberant fertility and profusion. As a recent German
writer has admirably put it: “From of old a great goddess of nature
was everywhere worshipped in Greece. She was revered on the mountain
heights as in the swampy lowlands, in the rustling woods and by the
murmuring spring. To the Greek her hand was everywhere apparent. He saw
her gracious blessing in the sprouting meadow, in the ripening corn,
in the healthful vigour of all living things on earth, whether the
wild creatures of the wood and the fell, or the cattle which man has
tamed to his service, or man’s own offspring from the cradle upward.
Her destroying anger he perceived in the blight of vegetation, in the
inroads of wild beasts on his fields and orchards, as well as in the
last mysterious end of life, in death. No empty personification, like
the earth conceived as a goddess, was this deity, for such abstractions
are foreign to every primitive religion; she was an all-embracing power
of nature, everywhere the object of a similar faith, however her names
differed with the place in which she was believed to abide, with the
emphasis laid on her gloomy or kindly aspect, or with the particular
side of her energy which was specially revered. And as the Greek
divided everything in animated nature into male and female, he could
not imagine this female power of nature without her male counterpart.
Hence in a number of her older worships we find Artemis associated
with a nature-god of similar character, to whom tradition assigned
{p36} different names in different places. In Laconia, for instance,
she was mated with the old Peloponnesian god Karneios, in Arcadia more
than once with Poseidon, elsewhere with Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus, and so
on.”[141] The truth is, that the word _parthenos_ applied to Artemis,
which we commonly translate virgin, means no more than an unmarried
woman,[142] and in early days the two things were by no means the
same. With the growth of a purer morality among men a stricter code
of ethics is imposed by them upon their gods; the stories of the
cruelty, deceit, and lust of these divine beings are glossed lightly
over or flatly rejected as blasphemies, and the old ruffians are set
to guard the laws which before they broke. In regard to Artemis, even
the ambiguous _parthenos_ seems to have been merely a popular epithet,
not an official title. As Dr. Farnell has well pointed out, there was
no public worship of Artemis the chaste; so far as her sacred titles
bear on the relation of the sexes, they shew that, on the contrary,
she was, like Diana in Italy, specially concerned with the {p37} loss
of virginity and with child-bearing, and that she not only assisted
but encouraged women to be fruitful and multiply; indeed, if we may
take Euripides’s word for it, in her capacity of midwife she would
not even speak to childless women. Further, it is highly significant
that while her titles and the allusions to her functions mark her out
clearly as the patroness of childbirth, we find none that recognise
her distinctly as a deity of marriage.[143] Nothing, however, sets
the true character of Artemis as a goddess of fecundity, though not of
wedlock, in a clearer light than her constant identification with the
unmarried, but not chaste, Asiatic goddesses of love and fertility, who
were worshipped with rites of notorious profligacy at their popular
sanctuaries.[144] At Ephesus, the most celebrated of all the seats of
her worship,[145] her universal motherhood was set forth unmistakably
in her sacred image. Copies of it have come down to us which agree
in their main features, though they differ from each other in some
details. They represent the goddess with a multitude of protruding
breasts; the heads of animals of many kinds, both wild and tame, spring
from the front of her body in a series of bands that extend from the
breasts to the feet; bees, roses, {p38} and sometimes butterflies,
decorate her sides from the hips downward. The animals that thus appear
to issue from her person vary in the different copies of the statue;
they include lions, bulls, stags, horses, goats, and rams. Moreover,
lions rest on her upper arms; in at least one copy, serpents twine
round her lower arms; her bosom is festooned with a wreath of blossoms,
and she wears a necklace of acorns. In one of the statues the breast of
her robe is decorated with two winged male figures, who hold sheaves in
both hands.[146] It would be hard to devise a more expressive symbol
of exuberant fertility, of prolific maternity, than these remarkable
images. No doubt the Ephesian Artemis, with her eunuch priests and
virgin priestesses,[147] was an Oriental, whose worship the Greek
colonists took over from the aborigines.[148] But that they should
have adopted it and identified the goddess with their own Artemis is
proof enough that the Grecian divinity, like her Asiatic sister, was at
bottom a personification of the teeming life of nature.
[Sidenote: Hippolytus the male consort of Artemis.]
To return now to Troezen, we shall probably be doing no injustice
either to Hippolytus or to Artemis if we suppose that the relation
between them was once of a tenderer nature {p39} than appears in
classical literature. We may conjecture that if he spurned the love of
women, it was because he enjoyed the love of a goddess.[149] On the
principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself
be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort.
If I am right, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and
the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and maidens
before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess,
and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of
mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the precinct
of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped two female powers named
Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the fertility of the ground
is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered from a dearth, the people,
in obedience to an oracle, carved images of Damia and Auxesia out of
sacred olive wood, and no sooner had they done so and set them up than
the earth bore fruit again. Moreover, at Troezen itself, and apparently
within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing
was held in honour of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them;
and it is easy to show that similar customs have been practised in many
lands for the express purpose of ensuring good crops.[150] In the
story of the tragic death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an
analogy with similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid
with their lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal
goddess. These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and
the legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the
violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of the
rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty {p40} fleeting
as the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the
relation of the life of man to the life of nature—a sad philosophy
which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that
practice were we shall learn later on.
§ 3. _Recapitulation_
[Sidenote: Virbius the male consort of Diana.]
We can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified Hippolytus,
the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to Servius,
stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother of the
Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in general,
and of childbirth in particular.[151] As such she, like her Greek
counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius is right,
was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred grove and
first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical predecessor or
archetype of the line of priests who served Diana under the title of
Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one after the other, to
a violent end.[152] It is natural, therefore, to conjecture that
they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same relation in which
Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal King of the Wood had
for his queen the woodland Diana herself.[153] If the sacred tree
which he guarded with his life was supposed, as seems probable, to be
her special embodiment, her priest may not only have worshipped it as
his goddess but embraced it as his wife. There is at least nothing
absurd in the supposition, since even in the time of Pliny a noble
Roman used thus to treat a beautiful beech-tree in another sacred grove
of Diana on the Alban hills. He embraced it, he kissed it, he lay
under its shadow, he poured wine on its trunk. Apparently he took the
tree for the goddess.[154] The custom of physically marrying men and
women to trees is still practised in India and other {p41} parts of the
East.[155] Why should it not have obtained in ancient Latium?
[Sidenote: Summary of results.]
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship
of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and
immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands
and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the
fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women
with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her holy fire,
tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round temple within
the precinct; that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria who
discharged one of Diana’s own functions by succouring women in travail,
and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king
in the sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a
male companion, Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to
Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was
represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of
the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and
whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove,
because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.
[Sidenote: The double-headed bust at Nemi probably a portrait of the
King of the Wood and his successor.]
A curious monument of the ill-fated dynasty appears to have come
down to us in a double-headed bust which was found in the sanctuary
at Nemi. It represents two men of heavy and somewhat coarse features
and a grim expression. The type of face is similar in both heads, but
there are marked differences between them; for while the one is young
and beardless with shut lips and a steadfast gaze, the other is a man
of middle life with a tossed and matted beard, wrinkled brows, a wild
anxious look in the eyes, and an open grinning mouth. But perhaps the
most singular thing about the two heads are the leaves with scalloped
edges which are plastered, so to say, on the necks of both busts and
apparently also under the eyes of the younger figure. The leaves have
been interpreted as oak leaves, and this interpretation, which is not
free from doubt, is confirmed by the resemblance to an oak leaf which
the {p42} moustache of the older figure clearly presents when viewed
in profile. Various explanations of this remarkable monument have
been proposed; but the most probable theory appears to be that the
older figure represents the priest of Nemi, the King of the Wood, in
possession, while the other face is that of his youthful adversary and
possible successor. This theory would explain the coarse heavy type of
both faces, which is neither Greek nor Roman but apparently barbarian;
for as the priest of Nemi had always to be a runaway slave, he would
commonly be a member of an alien and barbarous race. Further, it would
explain the striking contrast between the set determined gaze of the
younger man and the haggard, scared look of the older; on the one
face we seem to read the resolution to kill, on the other the fear to
die. Lastly, it would explain very simply the leaves that cling like
cerements to the necks and breasts of both; for we shall see later on
that the priest was probably regarded as an embodiment of the tree
which he guarded, and human representatives of tree spirits are most
naturally draped in the foliage of the tree which they personate. Hence
if the leaves on the two heads are indeed oak leaves, as they have been
thought to be, we should have to conclude that the tree which the King
of the Wood guarded and personated was an oak. There are independent
reasons for holding that this was so, but the consideration of them
must be deferred for the present.[156]
[Sidenote: A wider survey required to solve the problem of Nemi.]
Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain the
peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But perhaps the survey
of a wider field may lead us to {p43} think that they contain in germ
the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now address
ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but may possess something
of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in which we shall
visit many strange foreign lands, with strange foreign peoples, and
still stranger customs. The wind is in the shrouds: we shake out our
sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy behind us for a time.
{p44}