PRIESTLY KINGS
[Sidenote: The two questions to be answered.]
The questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two:
first, why had Diana’s priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay
his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the
branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients
identified with Virgil’s Golden Bough? The two questions are to some
extent distinct, and it will be convenient to consider them separately.
We begin with the first, which, with the preliminary enquiries, will
occupy this and several following volumes. In the last part of the book
I shall suggest an answer to the second question.
The first point on which we fasten is the priest’s title. Why was he
called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a kingdom?
[Sidenote: Priestly kings in ancient Italy and Greece.
Traditional origin of these priestly kings.]
The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in ancient
Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium there was
a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred Rites,
and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.[157] In
republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was
called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were
religious. For example, the king superintended the celebration of
the Eleusinian mysteries, the Lenaean festival of Dionysus, and the
torch-races, which were held at several of {p45} the great Athenian
festivals. Moreover, he presided at the curious trials of animals and
inanimate objects, which had caused the death of a human being. To
him in short were assigned, in the words of Plato, “the most solemn
and most truly ancestral rites of the ancient sacrifices.”[158] Many
other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as
they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to have centred round
the Common Hearth of the state.[159] For example, in Cos the King
sacrificed to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the equivalent of
the Italian Vesta; and he received the hide and one leg of the victim
as his perquisite.[160] In Mytilene the kings, of whom there were
several, invited to banquets at the Common Hearth those guests whom the
state delighted to honour.[161] In Chios, if any herdsman or shepherd
drove his cows, his sheep, or his swine to pasture in a sacred grove,
the first person who witnessed the transgression was bound to denounce
the transgressor to the kings, under pain of incurring the wrath of
the god and, what was perhaps even worse, of having to pay a fine to
the offended deity.[162] In the same island the king was charged
with the duty of pronouncing the public curses,[163] a spiritual
weapon of which much use was made by the ancients.[164] Every eighth
year the King at Delphi took part in a quaint {p46} ceremony. He sat
in public distributing barley-meal and pulse to all who chose to
apply for the bounty, whether citizens or strangers. Then an image
of a girl was brought to him, and he slapped it with his shoe. After
that the president of the Thyiads, a college of women devoted to the
orgiastic worship of Bacchus, carried away the image to a ravine and
there buried it with a rope round its neck. The ceremony was said to
be an expiation for the death of a girl who in a time of famine had
been publicly buffeted by the king and, smarting under the insult,
had hanged herself.[165] In some cities, such as Megara, Aegosthena,
and Pagae, the kingship was an annual office and the years were dated
by the kings’ names.[166] The people of Priene appointed a young man
king for the purpose of sacrificing a bull to Poseidon at the Panionian
festival.[167] Some Greek states had several of these titular kings,
who held office simultaneously.[168] At Rome the tradition was that
the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the abolition of the
monarchy in order to offer the sacrifices which before had been offered
by the kings.[169] A similar view as to the origin of the priestly
kings appears to have prevailed in Greece.[170] In itself the opinion
is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta,
almost the only purely Greek state which retained the kingly form of
government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were
offered by the kings as descendants of the god.[171] One of the two
Spartan kings held {p47} the priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other
the priesthood of Heavenly Zeus.[172] Sometimes the descendants of
the old kings were allowed to retain this shadowy royalty after the
real power had departed from them. Thus at Ephesus the descendants
of the Ionian kings, who traced their pedigree to Codrus of Athens,
kept the title of king and certain privileges, such as the right to
occupy a seat of honour at the games, to wear a purple robe and carry a
staff instead of a sceptre, and to preside at the rites of Eleusinian
Demeter.[173] So at Cyrene, when the monarchy was abolished, the
deposed King Battus was assigned certain domains and allowed to retain
some priestly functions.[174] Thus the classical evidence points
to the conclusion that in prehistoric ages, before the rise of the
republican form of government, the various tribes or cities were ruled
by kings, who discharged priestly duties and probably enjoyed a sacred
character as reputed descendants of deities.
[Sidenote: Priestly kings in various parts of the world.]
This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar
to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great
religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred slaves, and ruled by
pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like
the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and
Pessinus.[175] Teutonic kings, again, in the old heathen days seem
to have stood in the position, and to have exercised the powers, of
high priests.[176] The Emperors of China offer public sacrifices,
the details of which are regulated by the ritual books.[177] The
King of Madagascar was {p48} high-priest of the realm. At the great
festival of the new year, when a bullock was sacrificed for the good
of the kingdom, the king stood over the sacrifice to offer prayer and
thanksgiving, while his attendants slaughtered the animal.[178] In
the monarchical states which still maintain their independence among
the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the king sacrifices on the mountain tops
and regulates the immolation of human victims;[179] and the dim light
of tradition reveals a similar union of temporal and spiritual power,
of royal and priestly duties, in the kings of that delightful region
of Central America whose ancient capital, now buried under the rank
growth of the tropical forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious
ruins of Palenque.[180] Among the Matabeles the king is high-priest.
Every year he offers sacrifices at the great and the little dance,
and also at the festival of the new fruits, which ends the dances. On
these occasions he prays to the spirits of his forefathers and likewise
to his own spirit; for it is from these higher powers that he expects
every blessing.[181]
[Sidenote: Divinity of kings.
The Spartan kings supposed to be attended by Castor and Pollux, who
were thought to manifest themselves in certain electric lights.]
This last example is instructive because it shews that the king is
something more than a priest. He prays not only to the spirits of his
fathers but to his own spirit. He is clearly raised above the standard
of mere humanity; there is something divine about him. Similarly we may
suppose that the Spartan kings were thought not only to be descended
from the great god Zeus but also to partake of his holy spirit. This is
indeed indicated by a curious Spartan belief which has been recorded
by Herodotus. The old historian tells us that formerly both of the
Spartan kings went forth with the army to battle, but that in later
times a rule was made that when one king marched out to fight the other
should stay at home. “And accordingly,” says {p49} Herodotus, “one of
the kings remaining at home, one of the Tyndarids is left there too;
for hitherto both of them were invoked and followed the kings.”[182]
The Tyndarids are, of course, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, the
sons of Zeus; and it should be remembered that the two Spartan kings
themselves were believed to be descended from twins[183] and hence
may have been credited with the wondrous powers which superstition
often associates with twins.[184] The belief described by Herodotus
plainly implies that one of the heavenly twins was supposed to be in
constant attendance on each of their human kinsmen the two Spartan
kings, staying with them where they stayed and going with them wherever
they went; hence they were probably thought to aid the kings with their
advice in time of need. Now Castor and Pollux are commonly represented
as spearmen, and they were constantly associated or identified,
not only with stars, but also with those lurid lights which, in an
atmosphere charged with electricity, are sometimes seen to play round
the masts of ships under a murky sky.[185] Moreover, similar lights
were observed by the ancients to glitter in the darkness on the points
of spears. Pliny tells us that he had seen such lambent flames on the
spears of Roman sentinels {p50} as they paced their rounds by night in
front of the camp;[186] and it is said that Cossacks riding across
the steppes on stormy nights perceive flickerings of the same sort at
their lance-heads.[187] Since, therefore, the divine brothers Castor
and Pollux were believed to attend the Spartan kings, it seems not
impossible that they may have been thought to accompany the march of a
Spartan army in a visible form, appearing to the awe-stricken soldiers
in the twilight or the darkness either as stars in the sky or as the
sheen of spears on earth. Perhaps the stories of the appearance of the
heavenly twins in battle, charging on their milk-white steeds at the
head of the earthly chivalry, may have originated in similar lights
seen to glitter in the gloaming on a point here and there in the long
hedge of levelled or ported spears; for any two riders on white horses
whose spearheads happened to be touched by the mystic light might
easily be taken for Castor and Pollux in person. If there is any truth
in this conjecture, we should conclude that the divine brothers were
never seen in broad day, but only at dusk or in the darkness of night.
Now their most famous appearance was at the battle of Lake Regillus,
as to which we are expressly told that it was late in the evening of a
summer day before the fighting was over.[188] Such statements should
not be lightly dismissed as late inventions of a rhetorical historian.
The memories of great battles linger long among the peasantry of the
neighbourhood.
[Sidenote: The divinity of kings in early society.]
But when we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests
also, we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their
office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty form
of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were revered,
in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between
man and god, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects
and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be
beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer
and sacrifice {p51} offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus
kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season, to
make the crops grow, and so on. Strange as this expectation appears
to us, it is quite of a piece with early modes of thought. A savage
hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced
peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is
to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal
beings acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to
be moved by appeals to their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a
world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the
course of nature to his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats
may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and
if a god should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate
in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the
savage, possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his
own well-being and that of his fellow-men.
[Sidenote: Sympathetic magic.]
This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there
is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual
forces, savage man has a different, and probably still older,
conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of
natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an
invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The germ
of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be
called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. In
early society the king is frequently a magician as well as a priest;
indeed he appears to have often attained to power by virtue of his
supposed proficiency in the black or white art. Hence in order to
understand the evolution of the kingship and the sacred character with
which the office has commonly been invested in the eyes of savage or
barbarous peoples, it is essential to have some acquaintance with the
principles of magic and to form some conception of the extraordinary
hold which that ancient system of superstition has had on the human
mind in all ages and all countries. Accordingly I propose to consider
the subject in some detail.
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