The Kapus or Reddis are a large caste of cultivators and landowners

in the Madras Presidency. When rain fails, women of the caste will

catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan made of bamboo.

On this fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go from door to

door singing, "Lady frog must have her bath. Oh! rain-god, give a

little water for her at least." While the Kapu women sing this song,

the woman of the house pours water over the frog and gives an alms,

convinced that by so doing she will soon bring rain down in

torrents.

Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the

usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too

angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and

curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of

heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off

at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity had

long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw

down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it head

foremost into a stinking rice-field. "There," they said, "you may

stay yourself for a while, to see how _you_ will feel after a few

days' scorching in this broiling sun that is burning the life from

our cracking fields." In the like circumstances the Feloupes of

Senegambia cast down their fetishes and drag them about the fields,

cursing them till rain falls.

The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by

storm. Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon of paper or

wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it about in procession;

but if no rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated and torn to

pieces. At other times they threaten and beat the god if he does not

give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of

deity. On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls, the god is

promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree. In April 1888 the

mandarins of Canton prayed to the god Lung-wong to stop the

incessant downpour of rain; and when he turned a deaf ear to their

petitions they put him in a lock-up for five days. This had a

salutary effect. The rain ceased and the god was restored to

liberty. Some years before, in time of drought, the same deity had

been chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of his

temple in order that he might feel for himself the urgent need of

rain. So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in the

blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples

and let the rain pour down on the idols. They think that the

inconvenience to which the gods are thus subjected will induce them

to grant the wishes of their worshippers.

The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but

precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in

Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end of April 1893

there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought

had lasted six months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of

cloudless blue. The gardens of the Conca d'Oro, which surround

Palermo with a magnificent belt of verdure, were withering. Food was

becoming scarce. The people were in great alarm. All the most

approved methods of procuring rain had been tried without effect.

Processions had traversed the streets and the fields. Men, women,

and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the

holy images. Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the

churches. Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on

the trees. At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old custom, the

dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the

fields. In ordinary years these holy sweepings preserve the crops;

but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever.

At Nicosia the inhabitants, bare-headed and bare-foot, carried the

crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other

with iron whips. It was all in vain. Even the great St. Francis of

Paolo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is

carried every spring through the market-gardens, either could not or

would not help. Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations,

fire-works--nothing could move him. At last the peasants began to

lose patience. Most of the saints were banished. At Palermo they

dumped St. Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for

himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain

fell. Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their

faces to the wall. Others again, stripped of their beautiful robes,

were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted,

ducked in horse-ponds. At Caltanisetta the golden wings of St.

Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with

wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout

wrapt about him instead. At Licata the patron saint, St. Angelo,

fared even worse, for he was left without any garments at all; he

was reviled, he was put in irons, he was threatened with drowning or

hanging. "Rain or the rope!" roared the angry people at him, as they

shook their fists in his face.

Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods. When their corn

is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a "heaven

bird," kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with

tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining,

wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their

children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a

distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed

to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out

and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to

"the lord above" and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare

that "Usondo rains." In times of drought the Guanches of Teneriffe

led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they separated the lambs

from their dams, that their plaintive bleating might touch the heart

of the god. In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in

the left ear of a dog. The animal howls with pain, his howls are

heard by Indra, and out of pity for the beast's sufferings the god

stops the rain. Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain as

follows. They place the stalks of certain plants in water, saying,

"Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain falls I will not plant

you again, but there shall you die." Also they string some

fresh-water snails on a cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say

to the snails, "Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain comes, I

will not take you back to the water." Then the snails go and weep,

and the gods take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing

ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an

appeal to the compassion of higher powers.

Stones are often supposed to possess the property of bringing on

rain, provided they be dipped in water or sprinkled with it, or

treated in some other appropriate manner. In a Samoan village a

certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the

rain-making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the

stone in procession and dipped it in a stream. Among the Ta-ta-thi

tribe of New South Wales, the rain-maker breaks off a piece of

quartz-crystal and spits it towards the sky; the rest of the crystal

he wraps in emu feathers, soaks both crystal and feathers in water,

and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales

the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round

flat stone, then covers up and conceals it. Among some tribes of

North-western Australia the rain-maker repairs to a piece of ground

which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There he builds a

heap of stones or sand, places on the top of it his magic stone, and

walks or dances round the pile chanting his incantations for hours,

till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken

by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are

kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic

ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to

procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits

and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the

sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with

stones, while a spell is chanted. After that rain should follow. In

Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a

stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella. When rain

is wanted, the rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles

it on the stone. At Sagami in Japan there is a stone which draws

down rain whenever water is poured on it. When the Wakondyo, a tribe

of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell

at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a

"rain-stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash

the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of

water. After that the rain cannot fail to come. In the arid wastes

of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by

carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular

point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds

would soon gather, and that rain would begin to fall.

But customs of this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa and

Asia or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They have

been practised in the cool air and under the grey skies of Europe.

There is a fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in those

"wild woods of Broceliande," where, if legend be true, the wizard

Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in the hawthorn shade. Thither

the Breton peasants used to resort when they needed rain. They

caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab near

the spring. On Snowdon there is a lonely tarn called Dulyn, or the

Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and

dangerous rocks." A row of stepping-stones runs out into the lake,

and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet the

farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance

that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather."

In these cases it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is

regarded as more or less divine. This appears from the custom

sometimes observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain of Barenton to

procure rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old

pagan way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in

France it is, or used till lately to be, the practice to dip the

image of a saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside

the old priory of Commagny, there is a spring of St. Gervais,

whither the inhabitants go in procession to obtain rain or fine

weather according to the needs of the crops. In times of great

drought they throw into the basin of the fountain an ancient stone

image of the saint that stands in a sort of niche from which the

fountain flows. At Collobrières and Carpentras a similar practice

was observed with the images of St. Pons and St. Gens respectively.

In several villages of Navarre prayers for rain used to be offered

to St. Peter, and by way of enforcing them the villagers carried the

image of the saint in procession to the river, where they thrice

invited him to reconsider his resolution and to grant their prayers;

then, if he was still obstinate, they plunged him in the water,

despite the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded with as much

truth as piety that a simple caution or admonition administered to

the image would produce an equally good effect. After this the rain

was sure to fall within twenty-four hours. Catholic countries do not

enjoy a monopoly of making rain by ducking holy images in water. In

Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take

a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a

shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of

Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such

cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm,

however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or

a threat.

Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by

magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual. For

example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with

drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain

spring on Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty

cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode of

making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near

New Guinea. The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot

which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower they shook

the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of the

chariot was meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that mock

thunder and lightning form part of a rain-charm in Russia and Japan.

The legendary Salmoneus, King of Elis, made mock thunder by dragging

bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving over a bronze

bridge, while he hurled blazing torches in imitation of lightning.

It was his impious wish to mimic the thundering car of Zeus as it

rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed he declared that he was

actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as

such. Near a temple of Mars, outside the walls of Rome, there was

kept a certain stone known as the _lapis manalis._ In time of

drought the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was supposed to

bring down rain immediately.

3. The Magical Control of the Sun

AS THE MAGICIAN thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can cause

the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down. At an

eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun was being

extinguished. So they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping

thus to rekindle his expiring light. The Sencis of Peru also shot

burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they did

this not so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage beast

with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely during an

eclipse of the moon some tribes of the Orinoco used to bury lighted

brands in the ground; because, said they, if the moon were to be

extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished with her,

except such as was hidden from her sight. During an eclipse of the

sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to bring out fire from their huts and

pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer addressed

to the sun shows that this ceremony was religious rather than

magical. Purely magical, on the other hand, was the ceremony

observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin Indians. Men and

women tucked up their robes, as they do in travelling, and then

leaning on staves, as if they were heavy laden, they continued to

walk in a circle till the eclipse was over. Apparently they thought

thus to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary

round in the sky. Similarly in ancient Egypt the king, as the

representative of the sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a

temple in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily

journey round the sky without the interruption of an eclipse or

other mishap. And after the autumnal equinox the ancient Egyptians

held a festival called "the nativity of the sun's walking-stick,"

because, as the luminary declined daily in the sky, and his light

and heat diminished, he was supposed to need a staff on which to

lean. In New Caledonia when a wizard desires to make sunshine, he

takes some plants and corals to the burial-ground, and fashions them

into a bundle, adding two locks of hair cut from a living child of

his family, also two teeth or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of

an ancestor. He then climbs a mountain whose top catches the first

rays of the morning sun. Here he deposits three sorts of plants on a

flat stone, places a branch of dry coral beside them, and hangs the

bundle of charms over the stone. Next morning he returns to the spot

and sets fire to the bundle at the moment when the sun rises from

the sea. As the smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with the dry

coral, invokes his ancestors and says: "Sun! I do this that you may

be burning hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky." The same

ceremony is repeated at sunset. The New Caledonians also make a

drought by means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the

moment when the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand

and passes a burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says:

"I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up

our land, so that it may produce nothing." The Banks Islanders make

sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very round stone,

called a _vat loa_ or sunstone, wind red braid about it, and stick

it with owls' feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell

in a low voice. Then they hang it on some high tree, such as a

banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.

The offering made by the Brahman in the morning is supposed to

produce the sun, and we are told that "assuredly it would not rise,

were he not to make that offering." The ancient Mexicans conceived

the sun as the source of all vital force; hence they named him

Ipalnemohuani, "He by whom men live." But if he bestowed life on the

world, he needed also to receive life from it. And as the heart is

the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men and animals were

presented to the sun to maintain him in vigour and enable him to run

his course across the sky. Thus the Mexican sacrifices to the sun

were magical rather than religious, being designed, not so much to

please and propitiate him, as physically to renew his energies of

heat, light, and motion. The constant demand for human victims to

feed the solar fire was met by waging war every year on the

neighbouring tribes and bringing back troops of captives to be

sacrificed on the altar. Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and

their cruel system of human sacrifices, the most monstrous on

record, sprang in great measure from a mistaken theory of the solar

system. No more striking illustration could be given of the

disastrous consequences that may flow in practice from a purely

speculative error. The ancient Greeks believed that the sun drove in

a chariot across the sky; hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun

as their chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses

to him, and flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they

thought that after a year's work his old horses and chariot would be

worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of

Judah dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the Spartans,

Persians, and Massagetae sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans

performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Taygetus, the beautiful

range behind which they saw the great luminary set every night. It

was as natural for the inhabitants of the valley of Sparta to do

this as it was for the islanders of Rhodes to throw the chariot and

horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed to them to sink at

evening. For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh

horses stood ready for the weary god where they would be most

welcome, at the end of his day's journey.

As some people think they can light up the sun or speed him on his

way, so others fancy they can retard or stop him. In a pass of the

Peruvian Andes stand two ruined towers on opposite hills. Iron hooks

are clamped into their walls for the purpose of stretching a net

from one tower to the other. The net is intended to catch the sun.

Stories of men who have caught the sun in a noose are widely spread.

When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinking lower and

lower in the Arctic sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play the game of

cat's cradle in order to catch him in the meshes of the string and

so prevent his disappearance. On the contrary, when the sun is

moving northward in the spring, they play the game of cup-and-ball

to hasten his return. When an Australian blackfellow wishes to stay

the sun from going down till he gets home, he puts a sod in the fork

of a tree, exactly facing the setting sun. On the other hand, to

make it go down faster, the Australians throw sand into the air and

blow with their mouths towards the sun, perhaps to waft the

lingering orb westward and bury it under the sands into which it

appears to sink at night.

As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy they

can jog the tardy moon. The natives of New Guinea reckon months by

the moon, and some of them have been known to throw stones and

spears at the moon, in order to accelerate its progress and so to

hasten the return of their friends, who were away from home for

twelve months working on a tobacco plantation. The Malays think that

a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a fever. Hence

they attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out water and

throwing ashes at it. The Shuswap Indians believe that they can

bring on cold weather by burning the wood of a tree that has been

struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the observation that

in their country cold follows a thunder-storm. Hence in spring, when

these Indians are travelling over the snow on high ground, they burn

splinters of such wood in the fire in order that the crust of the

snow may not melt.

4. The Magical Control of the Wind

ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to be

still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he

takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish,

winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick.

He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze

begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days the

stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and

then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns

contrary to the course of the luminary. If a Hottentot desires the

wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the

end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down the wind

will lose all its force and must itself fall. Fuegian wizards throw

shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island

of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with

their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say, "The Bibili

folk are at it again, blowing away." Another way of making wind

which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a "wind-stone" lightly

with a stick; to strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So in

Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water

and beating it thrice on a stone, saying:

"I knok this rag upone this stane

To raise the wind in the divellis name,

It sall not lye till I please againe."

In Greenland a woman in child-bed and for some time after delivery

is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to

go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming back into the

house blow it out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth

which enjoyed the reputation of being able to still the raging wind;

but we do not know in what manner its members exercised a useful

function, which probably earned for them a more solid recompense

than mere repute among the seafaring population of the isthmus. Even

in Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain

Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on a charge of binding the

winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and

Syria were detained afar off by calms or head-winds, to the rage and

disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used

to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was enclosed in

three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang

up; if the second, it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane.

Indeed the Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by

an arm of the sea, still believe in the magical powers of their

northern neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the

north and north-east, bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in

their train, are set down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the

machinations of the Finnish wizards and witches. In particular they

regard with special dread three days in spring to which they give

the name of Days of the Cross; one of them falls on the Eve of

Ascension Day. The people in the neighbourhood of Fellin fear to go

out on these days lest the cruel winds from Lappland should smite

them dead. A popular Esthonian song runs:

Wind of the Cross! rushing and mighty!

Heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping past!

Wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow,

Wizards of Finland ride by on the blast.

It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in the

Gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave in sight astern

and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a cloud of

canvas--all her studding-sails out--right in the teeth of the wind,

forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing back the spray

in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to bursting, every

rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she hails from

Finland.

The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so that the more knots

are loosed the stronger will blow the wind, has been attributed to

wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis, and the Isle

of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds in the shape of knotted

handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim to rule the

storms. There are said to be ancient crones in Lerwick now who live

by selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from

Aeolus, King of the Winds. The Motumotu in New Guinea think that

storms are sent by an Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind he has a bamboo

which he opens at pleasure. On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a

district of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is

supposed to control the wind and the rain. His priest is said to

keep the winds shut up in great pots.

Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be

intimidated, driven away, or killed. When storms and bad weather

have lasted long and food is scarce with the Central Esquimaux, they

endeavour to conjure the tempest by making a long whip of seaweed,

armed with which they go down to the beach and strike out in the

direction of the wind, crying "_Taba_ (it is enough)!" Once when

north-westerly winds had kept the ice long on the coast and food was

becoming scarce, the Esquimaux performed a ceremony to make a calm.

A fire was kindled on the shore, and the men gathered round it and

chanted. An old man then stepped up to the fire and in a coaxing

voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and warm

himself. When he was supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to

which each man present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by

an old man, and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot

where the fire had been. They thought that the demon would not stay

where he had been so badly treated. To complete the effect, guns

were discharged in various directions, and the captain of a European

vessel was invited to fire on the wind with cannon. On the

twenty-first of February 1883 a similar ceremony was performed by

the Esquimaux of Point Barrow, Alaska, with the intention of killing

the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from their houses with

clubs and knives, with which they made passes in the air; and the

men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles and crushed

him under a heavy stone the moment that steam rose in a cloud from

the smouldering embers, on which a tub of water had just been

thrown.

The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a

whirl-wind to the passage of a spirit and they fling sticks at it to

frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the Payaguas

of South America snatch up firebrands and run against the wind,

menacing it with the blazing brands, while others beat the air with

their fists to frighten the storm. When the Guaycurus are threatened

by a severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women and children

scream their loudest to intimidate the demon. During a tempest the

inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been seen to rush

from their houses armed with sword and lance. The rajah placed

himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and

hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be

specially active in the defence of her house, slashing the air right

and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the peals

sounding very near, the Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw

their swords threateningly half out of their scabbards, as if to

frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia the huge columns

of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by

the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young

black ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with

boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very

weary, saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but that Koochee

had growled at him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of Eastern

Africa it is said that "no whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path

without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who

stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the

evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast."

In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which his

modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible. He

says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that once

in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from

the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the people took

counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south wind. But

when they entered the desert the simoon swept down on them and

buried them to a man. The story may well have been told by one who

watched them disappearing, in battle array, with drums and cymbals

beating, into the red cloud of whirling sand.

VI. Magicians as Kings

THE FOREGOING evidence may satisfy us that in many lands and many

races magic has claimed to control the great forces of nature for

the good of man. If that has been so, the practitioners of the art

must necessarily be personages of importance and influence in any

society which puts faith in their extravagant pretensions, and it

would be no matter for surprise if, by virtue of the reputation

which they enjoy and of the awe which they inspire, some of them

should attain to the highest position of authority over their

credulous fellows. In point of fact magicians appear to have often

developed into chiefs and kings.

Let us begin by looking at the lowest race of men as to whom we

possess comparatively full and accurate information, the aborigines

of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings.

So far as their tribes can be said to have a political constitution,

it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men,

who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the

practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly

answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for

such a government of elders we might call it a _gerontocracy._ The

elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs

of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their

respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert

nature of the country and the almost complete isolation from foreign

influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives on the

whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various

totem clans are charged with the important task of performing

magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the

great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it

follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people

with food by means of magic. Others have to make the rain to fall or

to render other services to the community. In short, among the

tribes of Central Australia the headmen are public magicians.

Further, their most important function is to take charge of the

sacred storehouse, usually a cleft in the rocks or a hole in the

ground, where are kept the holy stones and sticks (_churinga_) with

which the souls of all the people, both living and dead, are

apparently supposed to be in a manner bound up. Thus while the

headmen have certainly to perform what we should call civil duties,

such as to inflict punishment for breaches of tribal custom, their

principal functions are sacred or magical.

When we pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though the

natives stand at a far higher level of culture than the Australian

aborigines, the constitution of society among them is still

essentially democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship exists only

in embryo. Thus Sir William MacGregor tells us that in British New

Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough, bold enough, and strong

enough to become the despot even of a single district. "The nearest

approach to this has been the very distant one of some person

becoming a renowned wizard; but that has only resulted in levying a

certain amount of blackmail."

According to a native account, the origin of the power of Melanesian

chiefs lies entirely in the belief that they have communication with

mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power whereby they can

bring the influence of the ghosts to bear. If a chief imposed a

fine, it was paid because the people universally dreaded his ghostly

power, and firmly believed that he could inflict calamity and

sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as any considerable

number of his people began to disbelieve in his influence with the

ghosts, his power to levy fines was shaken. Again, Dr. George Brown

tells us that in New Britain "a ruling chief was always supposed to

exercise priestly functions, that is, he professed to be in constant

communication with the _tebarans_ (spirits), and through their

influence he was enabled to bring rain or sunshine, fair winds or

foul ones, sickness or health, success or disaster in war, and

generally to procure any blessing or curse for which the applicant

was willing to pay a sufficient price."

Still rising in the scale of culture we come to Africa, where both

the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and here the

evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magician, and

especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus

among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form

of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the

sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank

of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country

in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle

they possessed came to them almost wholly in the shape of presents

bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art

was that of rain-making. The chiefs of the Wataturu, another people

of East Africa, are said to be nothing but sorcerers destitute of

any direct political influence. Again, among the Wagogo of East

Africa the main power of the chiefs, we are told, is derived from

their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot make rain himself, he

must procure it from some one who can.

Again, among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are

generally the chiefs. Their authority rests above all upon their

supposed power of making rain, for "rain is the one thing which

matters to the people in those districts, as if it does not come

down at the right time it means untold hardships for the community.

It is therefore small wonder that men more cunning than their

fellows should arrogate to themselves the power of producing it, or

that having gained such a reputation, they should trade on the

credulity of their simpler neighbours." Hence "most of the chiefs of

these tribes are rain-makers, and enjoy a popularity in proportion

to their powers to give rain to their people at the proper season. .

. . Rain-making chiefs always build their villages on the slopes of

a fairly high hill, as they no doubt know that the hills attract the

clouds, and that they are, therefore, fairly safe in their weather

forecasts." Each of these rain-makers has a number of rain-stones,

such as rock-crystal, aventurine, and amethyst, which he keeps in a

pot. When he wishes to produce rain he plunges the stones in water,

and taking in his hand a peeled cane, which is split at the top, he

beckons with it to the clouds to come or waves them away in the way

they should go, muttering an incantation the while. Or he pours

water and the entrails of a sheep or goat into a hollow in a stone

and then sprinkles the water towards the sky. Though the chief

acquires wealth by the exercise of his supposed magical powers, he

often, perhaps generally, comes to a violent end; for in time of

drought the angry people assemble and kill him, believing that it is

he who prevents the rain from falling. Yet the office is usually

hereditary and passes from father to son. Among the tribes which

cherish these beliefs and observe these customs are the Latuka,

Bari, Laluba, and Lokoiya.

In Central Africa, again, the Lendu tribe, to the west of Lake

Albert, firmly believe that certain people possess the power of

making rain. Among them the rain-maker either is a chief or almost

invariably becomes one. The Banyoro also have a great respect for

the dispensers of rain, whom they load with a profusion of gifts.

The great dispenser, he who has absolute and uncontrollable power

over the rain, is the king; but he can depute his power to other

persons, so that the benefit may be distributed and the heavenly

water laid on over the various parts of the kingdom.

In Western as well as in Eastern and Central Africa we meet with the

same union of chiefly with magical functions. Thus in the Fan tribe

the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man does not

exist. The chief is also a medicine-man and a smith to boot; for the

Fans esteem the smith's craft sacred, and none but chiefs may meddle

with it.

As to the relation between the offices of chief and rain-maker in

South Africa a well-informed writer observes: "In very old days the

chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some chiefs allowed no

one else to compete with them, lest a successful Rain-maker should

be chosen as chief. There was also another reason: the Rain-maker

was sure to become a rich man if he gained a great reputation, and

it would manifestly never do for the chief to allow any one to be

too rich. The Rain-maker exerts tremendous control over the people,

and so it would be most important to keep this function connected

with royalty. Tradition always places the power of making rain as

the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems

probable that it may have been the origin of chieftainship. The man

who made the rain would naturally become the chief. In the same way

Chaka [the famous Zulu despot] used to declare that he was the only

diviner in the country, for if he allowed rivals his life would be

insecure." Similarly speaking of the South African tribes in

general, Dr. Moffat says that "the rain-maker is in the estimation

of the people no mean personage, possessing an influence over the

minds of the people superior even to that of the king, who is

likewise compelled to yield to the dictates of this arch-official."

The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the king

has often been developed out of the public magician, and especially

out of the rain-maker. The unbounded fear which the magician

inspires and the wealth which he amasses in the exercise of his

profession may both be supposed to have contributed to his

promotion. But if the career of a magician and especially of a

rain-maker offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of

the art, it is beset with many pitfalls into which the unskilful or

unlucky artist may fall. The position of the public sorcerer is

indeed a very precarious one; for where the people firmly believe

that he has it in his power to make the rain to fall, the sun to

shine, and the fruits of the earth to grow, they naturally impute

drought and dearth to his culpable negligence or wilful obstinacy,

and they punish him accordingly. Hence in Africa the chief who fails

to procure rain is often exiled or killed. Thus, in some parts of

West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the king have

failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him with ropes and take

him by force to the grave of his forefathers that he may obtain from

them the needed rain. The Banjars in West Africa ascribe to their

king the power of causing rain or fine weather. So long as the

weather is fine they load him with presents of grain and cattle. But

if long drought or rain threatens to spoil the crops, they insult

and beat him till the weather changes. When the harvest fails or the

surf on the coast is too heavy to allow of fishing, the people of

Loango accuse their king of a "bad heart" and depose him. On the

Grain Coast the high priest or fetish king, who bears the title of

Bodio, is responsible for the health of the community, the fertility

of the earth, and the abundance of fish in the sea and rivers; and

if the country suffers in any of these respects the Bodio is deposed

from his office. In Ussukuma, a great district on the southern bank

of the Victoria Nyanza, "the rain and locust question is part and

parcel of the Sultan's government. He, too, must know how to make

rain and drive away the locusts. If he and his medicine-men are

unable to accomplish this, his whole existence is at stake in times

of distress. On a certain occasion, when the rain so greatly desired

by the people did not come, the Sultan was simply driven out (in

Ututwa, near Nassa). The people, in fact, hold that rulers must have

power over Nature and her phenomena." Again, we are told of the

natives of the Nyanaza region generally that "they are persuaded

that rain only falls as a result of magic, and the important duty of

causing it to descend devolves on the chief of the tribe. If rain

does not come at the proper time, everybody complains. More than one

petty king has been banished his country because of drought." Among

the Latuka of the Upper Nile, when the crops are withering, and all

the efforts of the chief to draw down rain have proved fruitless,

the people commonly attack him by night, rob him of all he

possesses, and drive him away. But often they kill him.

In many other parts of the world kings have been expected to

regulate the course of nature for the good of their people and have

been punished if they failed to do so. It appears that the

Scythians, when food was scarce, used to put their king in bonds. In

ancient Egypt the sacred kings were blamed for the failure of the

crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsible for the

course of nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen on

the land, in consequence of a long and severe drought, the priests

took the animals by night and threatened them, but if the evil did

not abate they slew the beasts. On the coral island of Niue¯ or

Savage Island, in the South Pacific, there formerly reigned a line

of kings. But as the kings were also high priests, and were supposed

to make the food grow, the people became angry with them in times of

scarcity and killed them; till at last, as one after another was

killed, no one would be king, and the monarchy came to an end.

Ancient Chinese writers inform us that in Corea the blame was laid

on the king whenever too much or too little rain fell and the crops

did not ripen. Some said that he must be deposed, others that he

must be slain.

Among the American Indians the furthest advance towards civilisation

was made under the monarchical and theocratic governments of Mexico

and Peru; but we know too little of the early history of these

countries to say whether the predecessors of their deified kings

were medicine-men or not. Perhaps a trace of such a succession may

be detected in the oath which the Mexican kings, when they mounted

the throne, swore that they would make the sun to shine, the clouds

to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring forth

fruits in abundance. Certainly, in aboriginal America the sorcerer

or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of mystery and an atmosphere

of awe, was a personage of great influence and importance, and he

may well have developed into a chief or king in many tribes, though

positive evidence of such a development appears to be lacking. Thus

Catlin tells us that in North America the medicine-men "are valued

as dignitaries in the tribe, and the greatest respect is paid to

them by the whole community; not only for their skill in their

_materia medica,_ but more especially for their tact in magic and

mysteries, in which they all deal to a very great extent. . . . In

all tribes their doctors are conjurers--are magicians--are

sooth-sayers, and I had like to have said high-priests, inasmuch as

they superintend and conduct all their religious ceremonies; they

are looked upon by all as oracles of the nation. In all councils of

war and peace, they have a seat with the chiefs, are regularly

consulted before any public step is taken, and the greatest

deference and respect is paid to their opinions." Similarly in

California "the shaman was, and still is, perhaps the most important

individual among the Maidu. In the absence of any definite system of

government, the word of a shaman has great weight: as a class they

are regarded with much awe, and as a rule are obeyed much more than

the chief."

In South America also the magicians or medicine-men seem to have

been on the highroad to chieftainship or kingship. One of the

earliest settlers on the coast of Brazil, the Frenchman Thevet,

reports that the Indians "hold these _pages_ (or medicine-men) in

such honour and reverence that they adore, or rather idolise them.

You may see the common folk go to meet them, prostrate themselves,

and pray to them, saying, 'Grant that I be not ill, that I do not

die, neither I nor my children,' or some such request. And he

answers, 'You shall not die, you shall not be ill,' and such like

replies. But sometimes if it happens that these _pages_ do not tell

the truth, and things turn out otherwise than they predicted, the

people make no scruple of killing them as unworthy of the title and

dignity of _pages._" Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco

every clan has its cazique or chief, but he possesses little

authority. In virtue of his office he has to make many presents, so

he seldom grows rich and is generally more shabbily clad than any of

his subjects. "As a matter of fact the magician is the man who has

most power in his hands, and he is accustomed to receive presents

instead of to give them." It is the magician's duty to bring down

misfortune and plagues on the enemies of his tribe, and to guard his

own people against hostile magic. For these services he is well

paid, and by them he acquires a position of great influence and

authority.

Throughout the Malay region the rajah or king is commonly regarded

with superstitious veneration as the possessor of supernatural

powers, and there are grounds for thinking that he too, like

apparently so many African chiefs, has been developed out of a

simple magician. At the present day the Malays firmly believe that

the king possesses a personal influence over the works of nature,

such as the growth of the crops and the bearing of fruit-trees. The

same prolific virtue is supposed to reside, though in a lesser

degree, in his delegates, and even in the persons of Europeans who

chance to have charge of districts. Thus in Selangor, one of the

native states of the Malay Peninsula, the success or failure of the

rice-crops is often attributed to a change of district officers. The

Toorateyas of Southern Celebes hold that the prosperity of the rice

depends on the behaviour of their princes, and that bad government,

by which they mean a government which does not conform to ancient

custom, will result in a failure of the crops.

The Dyaks of Sarawak believed that their famous English ruler, Rajah

Brooke, was endowed with a certain magical virtue which, if properly

applied, could render the rice-crops abundant. Hence when he visited

a tribe, they used to bring him the seed which they intended to sow

next year, and he fertilised it by shaking over it the women's

necklaces, which had been previously dipped in a special mixture.

And when he entered a village, the women would wash and bathe his

feet, first with water, and then with the milk of a young coco-nut,

and lastly with water again, and all this water which had touched

his person they preserved for the purpose of distributing it on

their farms, believing that it ensured an abundant harvest. Tribes

which were too far off for him to visit used to send him a small

piece of white cloth and a little gold or silver, and when these

things had been impregnated by his generative virtue they buried

them in their fields, and confidently expected a heavy crop. Once

when a European remarked that the rice-crops of the Samban tribe

were thin, the chief immediately replied that they could not be

otherwise, since Rajah Brooke had never visited them, and he begged

that Mr. Brooke might be induced to visit his tribe and remove the

sterility of their land.

The belief that kings possess magical or supernatural powers by

virtue of which they can fertilise the earth and confer other

benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared by the

ancestors of all the Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has

left clear traces of itself in our own country down to modern times.

Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called _The Laws of Manu_ describes

as follows the effects of a good king's reign: "In that country

where the king avoids taking the property of mortal sinners, men are

born in due time and are long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen

spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no

misshaped offspring is born." In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs

were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine

and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a

good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley,

the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the

sea to yield fish. In the Middle Ages, when Waldemar I., King of

Denmark, travelled in Germany, mothers brought their infants and

husbandmen their seed for him to lay his hands on, thinking that

children would both thrive the better for the royal touch, and for a

like reason farmers asked him to throw the seed for them. It was the

belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the

customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops

plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and

the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of

their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among

the blessings that attend the reign of a just king "fine weather,

calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit." On the other

hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of corn

were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad.

Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about

our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula by

their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King's Evil.

Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous gift of healing. On

Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a hundred patients at

one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood. But it was under his son

Charles the Second that the practice seems to have attained its

highest vogue. It is said that in the course of his reign Charles

the Second touched near a hundred thousand persons for scrofula. The

press to get near him was sometimes terrific. On one occasion six or

seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death. The

cool-headed William the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself

to the hocuspocus; and when his palace was besieged by the usual

unsavoury crowd, he ordered them to be turned away with a dole. On

the only occasion when he was importuned into laying his hand on a

patient, he said to him, "God give you better health and more

sense." However, the practice was continued, as might have been

expected, by the dull bigot James the Second and his dull daughter

Queen Anne.

The kings of France also claimed to possess the same gift of healing

by touch, which they are said to have derived from Clovis or from

St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it from Edward the

Confessor. Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed to

heal scrofula and cases of indurated liver by the touch of their

feet; and the cure was strictly homoeopathic, for the disease as

well as the cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal

person or with anything that belonged to it.

On the whole, then, we seem to be justified in inferring that in

many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old

magician or medicine-man. When once a special class of sorcerers has

been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the

discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are

believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power,

till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great

social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in

despotism is attended by an intellectual revolution which affects

both the conception and the functions of royalty. For as time goes

on, the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent to the

acuter minds and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words,

the magician gives way to the priest, who, renouncing the attempt to

control directly the processes of nature for the good of man, seeks

to attain the same end indirectly by appealing to the gods to do for

him what he no longer fancies he can do for himself. Hence the king,

starting as a magician, tends gradually to exchange the practice of

magic for the priestly functions of prayer and sacrifice. And while

the distinction between the human and the divine is still

imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined that men may themselves

attain to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their

lifetime, through the temporary or permanent possession of their

whole nature by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the

community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the

possible incarnation of a god in human form. The doctrine of that

incarnation, and with it the theory of the divinity of kings in the

strict sense of the word, will form the subject of the following

chapter.

VII. Incarnate Human Gods

THE INSTANCES which in the preceding chapters I have drawn from the

beliefs and practices of rude peoples all over the world, may

suffice to prove that the savage fails to recognise those

limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In

a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less

with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the

distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has

scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings

endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in

degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the

course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are

not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be

frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of

thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in it,

whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing

of tolerable equality. But with the growth of his knowledge man

learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his own

littleness and feebleness in presence of it. The recognition of his

helplessness does not, however, carry with it a corresponding belief

in the impotence of those supernatural beings with which his

imagination peoples the universe. On the contrary, it enhances his

conception of their power. For the idea of the world as a system of

impersonal forces acting in accordance with fixed and invariable

laws has not yet fully dawned or darkened upon him. The germ of the

idea he certainly has, and he acts upon it, not only in magic art,

but in much of the business of daily life. But the idea remains

undeveloped, and so far as he attempts to explain the world he lives

in, he pictures it as the manifestation of conscious will and

personal agency. If then he feels himself to be so frail and slight,

how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control the

gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old sense of equality with

the gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of

directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that

is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole

repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to

share with them. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer

and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and

magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is

gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a

black art. It is not regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and

impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the

steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence

rise or fall with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period

the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we

find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and

enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of

the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the

conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way

to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it

implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of

cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the

obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by

investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the

way for science. Alchemy leads up to chemistry.

The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or

supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period of

religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as beings

of much the same order, and before they are divided by the

impassable gulf which, to later thought, opens out between them.

Strange, therefore, as may seem to us the idea of a god incarnate in

human form, it has nothing very startling for early man, who sees in

a man-god or a god-man only a higher degree of the same supernatural

powers which he arrogates in perfect good faith to himself. Nor does

he draw any very sharp distinction between a god and a powerful

sorcerer. His gods are often merely invisible magicians who behind

the veil of nature work the same sort of charms and incantations

which the human magician works in a visible and bodily form among

his fellows. And as the gods are commonly believed to exhibit

themselves in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is easy

for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire

the reputation of being an incarnate deity. Thus beginning as little

more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magician tends to

blossom out into a full-blown god and king in one. Only in speaking

of him as a god we must beware of importing into the savage

conception of deity those very abstract and complex ideas which we

attach to the term. Our ideas on this profound subject are the fruit

of a long intellectual and moral evolution, and they are so far from

being shared by the savage that he cannot even understand them when

they are explained to him. Much of the controversy which has raged

as to the religion of the lower races has sprung merely from a

mutual misunderstanding. The savage does not understand the thoughts

of the civilised man, and few civilised men understand the thoughts

of the savage. When the savage uses his word for god, he has in his

mind a being of a certain sort: when the civilised man uses his word

for god, he has in his mind a being of a very different sort; and

if, as commonly happens, the two men are equally unable to place

themselves at the other's point of view, nothing but confusion and

mistakes can result from their discussions. If we civilised men

insist on limiting the name of God to that particular conception of

the divine nature which we ourselves have formed, then we must

confess that the savage has no god at all. But we shall adhere more

closely to the facts of history if we allow most of the higher

savages at least to possess a rudimentary notion of certain

supernatural beings who may fittingly be called gods, though not in

the full sense in which we use the word. That rudimentary notion

represents in all probability the germ out of which the civilised

peoples have gradually evolved their own high conceptions of deity;

and if we could trace the whole course of religious development, we

might find that the chain which links our idea of the Godhead with

that of the savage is one and unbroken.

With these explanations and cautions I will now adduce some examples

of gods who have been believed by their worshippers to be incarnate

in living human beings, whether men or women. The persons in whom a

deity is thought to reveal himself are by no means always kings or

descendants of kings; the supposed incarnation may take place even

in men of the humblest rank. In India, for example, one human god

started in life as a cotton-bleacher and another as the son of a

carpenter. I shall therefore not draw my examples exclusively from

royal personages, as I wish to illustrate the general principle of

the deification of living men, in other words, the incarnation of a

deity in human form. Such incarnate gods are common in rude society.

The incarnation may be temporary or permanent. In the former case,

the incarnation--commonly known as inspiration or

possession--reveals itself in supernatural knowledge rather than in

supernatural power. In other words, its usual manifestations are

divination and prophecy rather than miracles. On the other hand,

when the incarnation is not merely temporary, when the divine spirit

has permanently taken up its abode in a human body, the god-man is

usually expected to vindicate his character by working miracles.

Only we have to remember that by men at this stage of thought

miracles are not considered as breaches of natural law. Not

conceiving the existence of natural law, primitive man cannot

conceive a breach of it. A miracle is to him merely an unusually

striking manifestation of a common power.

The belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is world-wide.

Certain persons are supposed to be possessed from time to time by a

spirit or deity; while the possession lasts, their own personality

lies in abeyance, the presence of the spirit is revealed by

convulsive shiverings and shakings of the man's whole body, by wild

gestures and excited looks, all of which are referred, not to the

man himself, but to the spirit which has entered into him; and in

this abnormal state all his utterances are accepted as the voice of

the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through him. Thus,

for example, in the Sandwich Islands, the king, personating the god,

uttered the responses of the oracle from his concealment in a frame

of wicker-work. But in the southern islands of the Pacific the god

"frequently entered the priest, who, inflated as it were with the

divinity, ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but moved and

spoke as entirely under supernatural influence. In this respect

there was a striking resemblance between the rude oracles of the

Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations of ancient Greece.

As soon as the god was supposed to have entered the priest, the

latter became violently agitated, and worked himself up to the

highest pitch of apparent frenzy, the muscles of the limbs seemed

convulsed, the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the

features distorted, and the eyes wild and strained. In this state he

often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring

under the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed, and,

in shrill cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed

the will of the god. The priests, who were attending, and versed in

the mysteries, received, and reported to the people, the

declarations which had been thus received. When the priest had

uttered the response of the oracle, the violent paroxysm gradually

subsided, and comparative composure ensued. The god did not,

however, always leave him as soon as the communication had been

made. Sometimes the same _taura,_ or priest, continued for two or

three days possessed by the spirit or deity; a piece of a native

cloth, of a peculiar kind, worn round one arm, was an indication of

inspiration, or of the indwelling of the god with the individual who

wore it. The acts of the man during this period were considered as

those of the god, and hence the greatest attention was paid to his

expressions, and the whole of his deportment. . . . When _uruhia_

(under the inspiration of the spirit), the priest was always

considered as sacred as the god, and was called, during this period,

_atua,_ god, though at other times only denominated _taura_ or

priest."

But examples of such temporary inspiration are so common in every

part of the world and are now so familiar through books on ethnology

that it is needless to multiply illustrations of the general

principle. It may be well, however, to refer to two particular modes

of producing temporary inspiration, because they are perhaps less

known than some others, and because we shall have occasion to refer

to them later on. One of these modes of producing inspiration is by

sucking the fresh blood of a sacrificed victim. In the temple of

Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a

month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of chastity, tasted the

blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied

or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of Earth drank the

fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to

prophesy. Similarly among the Kuruvikkarans, a class of

bird-catchers and beggars in Southern India, the goddess Kali is

believed to descend upon the priest, and he gives oracular replies

after sucking the blood which streams from the cut throat of a goat.

At a festival of the Alfoors of Minahassa, in Northern Celebes,

after a pig has been killed, the priest rushes furiously at it,

thrusts his head into the carcase, and drinks of the blood. Then he

is dragged away from it by force and set on a chair, whereupon he

begins to prophesy how the rice-crop will turn out that year. A

second time he runs at the carcase and drinks of the blood; a second

time he is forced into the chair and continues his predictions. It

is thought that there is a spirit in him which possesses the power

of prophecy.

The other mode of producing temporary inspiration, to which I shall

here refer, consists in the use of a sacred tree or plant. Thus in

the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the sacred cedar;

and the Dainyal or sibyl, with a cloth over her head, inhales the

thick pungent smoke till she is seized with convulsions and falls

senseless to the ground. Soon she rises and raises a shrill chant,

which is caught up and loudly repeated by her audience. So Apollo's

prophetess ate the sacred laurel and was fumigated with it before

she prophesied. The Bacchanals ate ivy, and their inspired fury was

by some believed to be due to the exciting and intoxicating

properties of the plant. In Uganda the priest, in order to be

inspired by his god, smokes a pipe of tobacco fiercely till he works

himself into a frenzy; the loud excited tones in which he then talks

are recognised as the voice of the god speaking through him. In

Madura, an island off the north coast of Java, each spirit has its

regular medium, who is oftener a woman than a man. To prepare

herself for the reception of the spirit she inhales the fumes of

incense, sitting with her head over a smoking censer. Gradually she

falls into a sort of trance accompanied by shrieks, grimaces, and

violent spasms. The spirit is now supposed to have entered into her,

and when she grows calmer her words are regarded as oracular, being

the utterances of the indwelling spirit, while her own soul is

temporarily absent.

The person temporarily inspired is believed to acquire, not merely

divine knowledge, but also, at least occasionally, divine power. In

Cambodia, when an epidemic breaks out, the inhabitants of several

villages unite and go with a band of music at their head to look for

the man whom the local god is supposed to have chosen for his

temporary incarnation. When found, the man is conducted to the altar

of the god, where the mystery of incarnation takes place. Then the

man becomes an object of veneration to his fellows, who implore him

to protect the village against the plague. A certain image of

Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae near Magnesia, was

thought to impart superhuman strength. Sacred men, inspired by it,

leaped down precipices, tore up huge trees by the roots, and carried

them on their backs along the narrowest defiles. The feats performed

by inspired dervishes belong to the same class.

Thus far we have seen that the savage, failing to discern the limits

of his ability to control nature, ascribes to himself and to all men

certain powers which we should now call supernatural. Further, we

have seen that, over and above this general supernaturalism, some

persons are supposed to be inspired for short periods by a divine

spirit, and thus temporarily to enjoy the knowledge and power of the

indwelling deity. From beliefs like these it is an easy step to the

conviction that certain men are permanently possessed by a deity, or

in some other undefined way are endued with so high a degree of

supernatural power as to be ranked as gods and to receive the homage

of prayer and sacrifice. Sometimes these human gods are restricted

to purely supernatural or spiritual functions. Sometimes they

exercise supreme political power in addition. In the latter case

they are kings as well as gods, and the government is a theocracy.

Thus in the Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men

who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a

supernatural power over the elements: they could give abundant

harvests or smite the ground with barrenness; and they could inflict

disease or death. Human sacrifices were offered to them to avert

their wrath. There were not many of them, at the most one or two in

each island. They lived in mystic seclusion. Their powers were

sometimes, but not always, hereditary. A missionary has described

one of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a

very old man who lived in a large house within an enclosure. In the

house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the

trees round it were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered

the enclosure except the persons dedicated to the service of the

god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary

people penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more

sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of

scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human

victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he

inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and

offerings were sent to him from every side. Again, of the South Sea

Islands in general we are told that each island had a man who

represented or personified the divinity. Such men were called gods,

and their substance was confounded with that of the deity. The

man-god was sometimes the king himself; oftener he was a priest or

subordinate chief.

The ancient Egyptians, far from restricting their adoration to cats

and dogs and such small deer, very liberally extended it to men. One

of these human deities resided at the village of Anabis, and burnt

sacrifices were offered to him on the altars; after which, says

Porphyry, he would eat his dinner just as if he were an ordinary

mortal. In classical antiquity the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles

gave himself out to be not merely a wizard but a god. Addressing his

fellow-citizens in verse he said:

"O friends, in this great city that climbs the yellow slope

Of Agrigentum's citadel, who make good works your scope,

Who offer to the stranger a haven quiet and fair,

All hail! Among you honoured I walk with lofty air.

With garlands, blooming garlands you crown my noble brow,

A mortal man no longer, a deathless godhead now.

Where e'er I go, the people crowd round and worship pay,

And thousands follow seeking to learn the better way.

Some crave prophetic visions, some smit with anguish sore

Would fain hear words of comfort and suffer pain no more."

He asserted that he could teach his disciples how to make the wind

to blow or be still, the rain to fall and the sun to shine, how to

banish sickness and old age and to raise the dead. When Demetrius

Poliorcetes restored the Athenian democracy in 307 B.C., the

Athenians decreed divine honours to him and his father Antigonus,

both of them being then alive, under the title of the Saviour Gods.

Altars were set up to the Saviours, and a priest appointed to attend

to their worship. The people went forth to meet their deliverer with

hymns and dances, with garlands and incense and libations; they

lined the streets and sang that he was the only true god, for the

other gods slept, or dwelt far away, or were not. In the words of a

contemporary poet, which were chanted in public and sung in private:

"Of all the gods the greatest and the dearest

To the city are come.

For Demeter and Demetrius

Together time has brought.

She comes to hold the Maiden's awful rites,

And he joyous and fair and laughing,

As befits a god.

A glorious sight, with all his friends about him,

He in their midst,

They like to stars, and he the sun.

Son of Poseidon the mighty, Aphrodite's son,

All hail!

The other gods dwell far away,

Or have no ears,

Or are not, or pay us no heed.

But thee we present see,

No god of wood or stone, but godhead true.

Therefore to thee we pray."

The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women,

and accordingly consulted them as oracles. Their sacred women, we

are told, looked on the eddying rivers and listened to the murmur or

the roar of the water, and from the sight and sound foretold what

would come to pass. But often the veneration of the men went

further, and they worshipped women as true and living goddesses. For

example, in the reign of Vespasian a certain Veleda, of the tribe of

the Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity, and in that character

reigned over her people, her sway being acknowledged far and wide.

She lived in a tower on the river Lippe, a tributary of the Rhine.

When the people of Cologne sent to make a treaty with her, the

ambassadors were not admitted to her presence; the negotiations were

conducted through a minister, who acted as the mouthpiece of her

divinity and reported her oracular utterances. The example shows how

easily among our rude forefathers the ideas of divinity and royalty

coalesced. It is said that among the Getae down to the beginning of

our era there was always a man who personified a god and was called

God by the people. He dwelt on a sacred mountain and acted as

adviser to the king.

According to the early Portuguese historian, Dos Santos, the Zimbas,

or Muzimbas, a people of South-eastern Africa, "do not adore idols

or recognize any god, but instead they venerate and honour their

king, whom they regard as a divinity, and they say he is the

greatest and best in the world. And the said king says of himself

that he alone is god of the earth, for which reason if it rains when

he does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots arrows at the

sky for not obeying him." The Mashona of Southern Africa informed

their bishop that they had once had a god, but that the Matabeles

had driven him away. "This last was in reference to a curious custom

in some villages of keeping a man they called their god. He seemed

to be consulted by the people and had presents given to him. There

was one at a village belonging to a chief Magondi, in the old days.

We were asked not to fire off any guns near the village, or we

should frighten him away." This Mashona god was formerly bound to

render an annual tribute to the king of the Matabele in the shape of

four black oxen and one dance. A missionary has seen and described

the deity discharging the latter part of his duty in front of the

royal hut. For three mortal hours, without a break, to the banging

of a tambourine, the click of castanettes, and the drone of a

monotonous song, the swarthy god engaged in a frenzied dance,

crouching on his hams like a tailor, sweating like a pig, and

bounding about with an agility which testified to the strength and

elasticity of his divine legs.

The Baganda of Central Africa believed in a god of Lake Nyanza, who

sometimes took up his abode in a man or woman. The incarnate god was

much feared by all the people, including the king and the chiefs.

When the mystery of incarnation had taken place, the man, or rather

the god, removed about a mile and a half from the margin of the

lake, and there awaited the appearance of the new moon before he

engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that the crescent moon

appeared faintly in the sky, the king and all his subjects were at

the command of the divine man, or _Lubare_ (god), as he was called,

who reigned supreme not only in matters of faith and ritual, but

also in questions of war and state policy. He was consulted as an

oracle; by his word he could inflict or heal sickness, withhold

rain, and cause famine. Large presents were made him when his advice

was sought. The chief of Urua, a large region to the west of Lake

Tanganyika, "arrogates to himself divine honours and power and

pretends to abstain from food for days without feeling its

necessity; and, indeed, declares that as a god he is altogether

above requiring food and only eats, drinks, and smokes for the

pleasure it affords him." Among the Gallas, when a woman grows tired

of the cares of housekeeping, she begins to talk incoherently and to

demean herself extravagantly. This is a sign of the descent of the

holy spirit Callo upon her. Immediately her husband prostrates

himself and adores her; she ceases to bear the humble title of wife

and is called "Lord"; domestic duties have no further claim on her,

and her will is a divine law.

The king of Loango is honoured by his people "as though he were a

god; and he is called Sambee and Pango, which mean god. They believe

that he can let them have rain when he likes; and once a year, in

December, which is the time they want rain, the people come to beg

of him to grant it to them." On this occasion the king, standing on

his throne, shoots an arrow into the air, which is supposed to bring

on rain. Much the same is said of the king of Mombasa. Down to a few

years ago, when his spiritual reign on earth was brought to an

abrupt end by the carnal weapons of English marines and bluejackets,

the king of Benin was the chief object of worship in his dominions.

"He occupies a higher post here than the Pope does in Catholic

Europe; for he is not only God's vicegerent upon earth, but a god

himself, whose subjects both obey and adore him as such, although I

believe their adoration to arise rather from fear than love." The

king of Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition,

"God made me after his own image; I am all the same as God; and he

appointed me a king."

A peculiarly bloodthirsty monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen,

whose very countenance reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature,

and under whose reign more victims perished by the executioner than

by the common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something more

than mortal, and that this high distinction had been granted him as

a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid aside the

title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With this view, and

in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a

divinity, had quitted his royal palace and seraglio and retired from

the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his palace to an immense

pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had been engaged in

constructing for many years. Here he held conferences with the most

learned monks, in which he sought to persuade them that the five

thousand years assigned for the observance of the law of Buddha were

now elapsed, and that he himself was the god who was destined to

appear after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting

his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook

to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with

his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an

ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and

drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is

venerated equally with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look

him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he

passes, and appear before him on their knees, their elbows resting

on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred

person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of

him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar

vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch's head, the soles of his feet,

the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his person,

both outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or

drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word indicates that these acts

are being performed by the sovereign, and such words cannot possibly

be applied to the acts of any other person whatever. There is no

word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or

greater dignity than a monarch can be described; and the

missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native

word for king.

But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of human

gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out in a

more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to

milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry

Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and the milkman

who attends to it has been described as a god. On being asked

whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine milkmen

replied, "Those poor fellows do so, but I," tapping his chest, "I, a

god! why should I salute the sun?" Every one, even his own father,

prostrates himself before the milkman, and no one would dare to

refuse him anything. No human being, except another milkman, may

touch him; and he gives oracles to all who consult him, speaking

with the voice of a god.

Further, in India "every king is regarded as little short of a

present god." The Hindoo law-book of Manu goes farther and says that

"even an infant king must not be despised from an idea that he is a

mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human form." There is said

to have been a sect in Orissa some years ago who worshipped the late

Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their chief divinity. And to this

day in India all living persons remarkable for great strength or

valour or for supposed miraculous powers run the risk of being

worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in the Punjaub worshipped a deity

whom they called Nikkal Sen. This Nikkal Sen was no other than the

redoubted General Nicholson, and nothing that the general could do

or say damped the ardour of his adorers. The more he punished them,

the greater grew the religious awe with which they worshipped him.

At Benares not many years ago a celebrated deity was incarnate in

the person of a Hindoo gentleman who rejoiced in the euphonious name

of Swami Bhaskaranandaji Saraswati, and looked uncommonly like the

late Cardinal Manning, only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with

kindly human interest, and he took what is described as an innocent

pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his confiding

worshippers.

At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in Western

India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is

believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an incarnation

of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity was first

made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a Brahman of Poona,

by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out his salvation by

abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its reward. The

god himself appeared to him in a vision of the night and promised

that a portion of his, that is, of Gunputty's holy spirit should

abide with him and with his seed after him even to the seventh

generation. The divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive

incarnations, transmitted from father to son, manifested the light

of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of the direct line, a

heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810. But

the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church

property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate with

equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a world

which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly they sought and found a holy

vessel in whom the divine spirit of the master had revealed itself

anew, and the revelation has been happily continued in an unbroken

succession of vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law

of spiritual economy, whose operation in the history of religion we

may deplore though we cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles

wrought by the god-man in these degenerate days cannot compare with

those which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it

is even reported that the only sign vouchsafed by him to the present

generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom he

annually entertains to dinner at Chinchvad.

A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and Central

India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as they are

called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on earth of

the god Krishna. And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most

favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors and vicars

on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been instituted,

whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies, their

souls, and, what is perhaps still more important, their worldly

substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are taught to

believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their families is

to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces of those

beings in whom the divine nature mysteriously coexists with the form

and even the appetites of true humanity.

Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these

unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the

extravagances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even

surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus

the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his

single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single

ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present day

many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate

in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this

belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian

records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in

the second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as

an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of

Toledo spoke of Christ as "a god among gods," meaning that all

believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of

each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed

hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in

the early part of the fourteenth century.

In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren and

Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous

contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable

manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and

that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his

beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son

of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed

thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and

divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion, though

outwardly presenting in their aspect and manners a shocking air of

lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to place,

attired in the most fantastic apparel and begging their bread with

wild shouts and clamour, spurning indignantly every kind of honest

labour and industry as an obstacle to divine contemplation and to

the ascent of the soul towards the Father of spirits. In all their

excursions they were followed by women with whom they lived on terms

of the closest familiarity. Those of them who conceived they had

made the greatest proficiency in the higher spiritual life dispensed

with the use of clothes altogether in their assemblies, looking upon

decency and modesty as marks of inward corruption, characteristics

of a soul that still grovelled under the dominion of the flesh and

had not yet been elevated into communion with the divine spirit, its

centre and source. Sometimes their progress towards this mystic

communion was accelerated by the Inquisition, and they expired in

the flames, not merely with unclouded serenity, but with the most

triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy.

About the year 1830 there appeared, in one of the States of the

American Union bordering on Kentucky, an impostor who declared that

he was the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, and that he had

reappeared on earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving, and

sinners to their duty. He protested that if they did not mend their

ways within a certain time, he would give the signal, and in a

moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant

pretensions were received with favour even by persons of wealth and

position in society. At last a German humbly besought the new

Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his

fellow-countrymen in the German language, as they did not understand

English, and it seemed a pity that they should be damned merely on

that account. The would-be Saviour in reply confessed with great

candour that he did not know German. "What!" retorted the German,

"you the Son of God, and don't speak all languages, and don't even

know German? Come, come, you are a knave, a hypocrite, and a madman.

Bedlam is the place for you." The spectators laughed, and went away

ashamed of their credulity.

Sometimes, at the death of the human incarnation, the divine spirit

transmigrates into another man. The Buddhist Tartars believe in a

great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the

head of the most important monasteries. When one of these Grand

Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he will

soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their only

anxiety is to discover the place of his birth. If at this time they

see a rainbow they take it as a sign sent them by the departed Lama

to guide them to his cradle. Sometimes the divine infant himself

reveals his identity. "I am the Grand Lama," he says, "the living

Buddha of such and such a temple. Take me to my old monastery. I am

its immortal head." In whatever way the birthplace of the Buddha is

revealed, whether by the Buddha's own avowal or by the sign in the

sky, tents are struck, and the joyful pilgrims, often headed by the

king or one of the most illustrious of the royal family, set forth

to find and bring home the infant god. Generally he is born in

Tibet, the holy land, and to reach him the caravan has often to

traverse the most frightful deserts. When at last they find the

child they fall down and worship him. Before, however, he is

acknowledged as the Grand Lama whom they seek he must satisfy them

of his identity. He is asked the name of the monastery of which he

claims to be the head, how far off it is, and how many monks live in

it; he must also describe the habits of the deceased Grand Lama and

the manner of his death. Then various articles, as prayer-books,

tea-pots, and cups, are placed before him, and he has to point out

those used by himself in his previous life. If he does so without a

mistake his claims are admitted, and he is conducted in triumph to

the monastery. At the head of all the Lamas is the Dalai Lama of

Lhasa, the Rome of Tibet. He is regarded as a living god, and at

death his divine and immortal spirit is born again in a child.

According to some accounts the mode of discovering the Dalai Lama is

similar to the method, already described, of discovering an ordinary

Grand Lama. Other accounts speak of an election by drawing lots from

a golden jar. Wherever he is born, the trees and plants put forth

green leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom and springs of water

rise; and his presence diffuses heavenly blessings.

But he is by no means the only man who poses as a god in these

regions. A register of all the incarnate gods in the Chinese empire

is kept in the _Li fan yiian_ or Colonial Office at Peking. The

number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred and

sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia

rejoices in nineteen, and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine of

no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government, with a paternal

solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the gods on the

register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet. They fear lest the

birth of a god in Mongolia should have serious political

consequences by stirring the dormant patriotism and warlike spirit

of the Mongols, who might rally round an ambitious native deity of

royal lineage and seek to win for him, at the point of the sword, a

temporal as well as a spiritual kingdom. But besides these public or

licensed gods there are a great many little private gods, or

unlicensed practitioners of divinity, who work miracles and bless

their people in holes and corners; and of late years the Chinese

government has winked at the rebirth of these pettifogging deities

outside of Tibet. However, once they are born, the government keeps

its eye on them as well as on the regular practitioners, and if any

of them misbehaves he is promptly degraded, banished to a distant

monastery, and strictly forbidden ever to be born again in the

flesh.

From our survey of the religious position occupied by the king in

rude societies we may infer that the claim to divine and

supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great historical

empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple

outcome of inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling

adulation; it was merely a survival and extension of the old savage

apotheosis of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the

Sun the Incas of Peru were revered like gods; they could do no

wrong, and no one dreamed of offending against the person, honour,

or property of the monarch or of any of the royal race. Hence, too,

the Incas did not, like most people, look on sickness as an evil.

They considered it a messenger sent from their father the Sun to

call them to come and rest with him in heaven. Therefore the usual

words in which an Inca announced his approaching end were these: "My

father calls me to come and rest with him." They would not oppose

their father's will by offering sacrifice for recovery, but openly

declared that he had called them to his rest. Issuing from the

sultry valleys upon the lofty tableland of the Colombian Andes, the

Spanish conquerors were astonished to find, in contrast to the

savage hordes they had left in the sweltering jungles below, a

people enjoying a fair degree of civilisation, practising

agriculture, and living under a government which Humboldt has

compared to the theocracies of Tibet and Japan. These were the

Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with

capitals at Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently in spiritual

allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long and

ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired

such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the

weather depended on his will. The Mexican kings at their accession,

as we have seen, took an oath that they would make the sun to shine,

the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring

forth fruits in abundance. We are told that Montezuma, the last king

of Mexico, was worshipped by his people as a god.

The early Babylonian kings, from the time of Sargon I. till the

fourth dynasty of Ur or later, claimed to be gods in their lifetime.

The monarchs of the fourth dynasty of Ur in particular had temples

built in their honour; they set up their statues in various

sanctuaries and commanded the people to sacrifice to them; the

eighth month was especially dedicated to the kings, and sacrifices

were offered to them at the new moon and on the fifteenth of each

month. Again, the Parthian monarchs of the Arsacid house styled

themselves brothers of the sun and moon and were worshipped as

deities. It was esteemed sacrilege to strike even a private member

of the Arsacid family in a brawl.

The kings of Egypt were deified in their lifetime, sacrifices were

offered to them, and their worship was celebrated in special temples

and by special priests. Indeed the worship of the kings sometimes

cast that of the gods into the shade. Thus in the reign of Merenra a

high official declared that he had built many holy places in order

that the spirits of the king, the ever-living Merenra, might be

invoked "more than all the gods." "It has never been doubted that

the king claimed actual divinity; he was the 'great god,' the'golden

Horus,' and son of Ra. He claimed authority not only over Egypt, but

over'all lands and nations,''the whole world in its length and its

breadth, the east and the west,''the entire compass of the great

circuit of the sun,''the sky and what is in it, the earth and all

that is upon it,''every creature that walks upon two or upon four

legs, all that fly or flutter, the whole world offers her

productions to him.' Whatever in fact might be asserted of the

Sun-god, was dogmatically predicable of the king of Egypt. His

titles were directly derived from those of the Sun-god." "In the

course of his existence," we are told, "the king of Egypt exhausted

all the possible conceptions of divinity which the Egyptians had

framed for themselves. A superhuman god by his birth and by his

royal office, he became the deified man after his death. Thus all

that was known of the divine was summed up in him."

We have now completed our sketch, for it is no more than a sketch,

of the evolution of that sacred kingship which attained its highest

form, its most absolute expression, in the monarchies of Peru and

Egypt. Historically, the institution appears to have originated in

the order of public magicians or medicine-men; logically it rests on

a mistaken deduction from the association of ideas. Men mistook the

order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined

that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their

thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over

things. The men who for one reason or another, because of the

strength or the weakness of their natural parts, were supposed to

possess these magical powers in the highest degree, were gradually

marked off from their fellows and became a separate class, who were

destined to exercise a most far-reaching influence on the political,

religious, and intellectual evolution of mankind. Social progress,

as we know, consists mainly in a successive differentiation of

functions, or, in simpler language, a division of labour. The work

which in primitive society is done by all alike and by all equally

ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes

of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far as the

products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are

shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing

specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute

the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution of

society. For sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us;

and among the lowest savages, such as the Australian aborigines,

they are the only professional class that exists. As time goes on,

and the process of differentiation continues, the order of

medicine-men is itself subdivided into such classes as the healers

of disease, the makers of rain, and so forth; while the most

powerful member of the order wins for himself a position as chief

and gradually develops into a sacred king, his old magical functions

falling more and more into the background and being exchanged for

priestly or even divine duties, in proportion as magic is slowly

ousted by religion. Still later, a partition is effected between the

civil and the religious aspect of the kingship, the temporal power

being committed to one man and the spiritual to another. Meanwhile

the magicians, who may be repressed but cannot be extirpated by the

predominance of religion, still addict themselves to their old

occult arts in preference to the newer ritual of sacrifice and

prayer; and in time the more sagacious of their number perceive the

fallacy of magic and hit upon a more effectual mode of manipulating

the forces of nature for the good of man; in short, they abandon

sorcery for science. I am far from affirming that the course of

development has everywhere rigidly followed these lines: it has

doubtless varied greatly in different societies. I merely mean to

indicate in the broadest outline what I conceive to have been its

general trend. Regarded from the industrial point of view the

evolution has been from uniformity to diversity of function:

regarded from the political point of view, it has been from

democracy to despotism. With the later history of monarchy,

especially with the decay of despotism and its displacement by forms

of government better adapted to the higher needs of humanity, we are

not concerned in this enquiry: our theme is the growth, not the

decay, of a great and, in its time, beneficent institution.

VIII. Departmental Kings of Nature

THE PRECEDING investigation has proved that the same union of sacred

functions with a royal title which meets us in the King of the Wood

at Nemi, the Sacrificial King at Rome, and the magistrate called the

King at Athens, occurs frequently outside the limits of classical

antiquity and is a common feature of societies at all stages from

barbarism to civilisation. Further, it appears that the royal priest

is often a king, not only in name but in fact, swaying the sceptre

as well as the crosier. All this confirms the traditional view of

the origin of the titular and priestly kings in the republics of

ancient Greece and Italy. At least by showing that the combination

of spiritual and temporal power, of which Graeco-Italian tradition

preserved the memory, has actually existed in many places, we have

obviated any suspicion of improbability that might have attached to

the tradition. Therefore we may now fairly ask, May not the King of

the Wood have had an origin like that which a probable tradition

assigns to the Sacrificial King of Rome and the titular King of

Athens? In other words, may not his predecessors in office have been

a line of kings whom a republican revolution stripped of their

political power, leaving them only their religious functions and the

shadow of a crown? There are at least two reasons for answering this

question in the negative. One reason is drawn from the abode of the

priest of Nemi; the other from his title, the King of the Wood. If

his predecessors had been kings in the ordinary sense, he would

surely have been found residing, like the fallen kings of Rome and

Athens, in the city of which the sceptre had passed from him. This

city must have been Aricia, for there was none nearer. But Aricia

was three miles off from his forest sanctuary by the lake shore. If

he reigned, it was not in the city, but in the greenwood. Again his

title, King of the Wood, hardly allows us to suppose that he had

ever been a king in the common sense of the word. More likely he was

a king of nature, and of a special side of nature, namely, the woods

from which he took his title. If we could find instances of what we

may call departmental kings of nature, that is of persons supposed

to rule over particular elements or aspects of nature, they would

probably present a closer analogy to the King of the Wood than the

divine kings we have been hitherto considering, whose control of

nature is general rather than special. Instances of such

departmental kings are not wanting.

On a hill at Bomma near the mouth of the Congo dwells Namvulu Vumu,

King of the Rain and Storm. Of some of the tribes on the Upper Nile

we are told that they have no kings in the common sense; the only

persons whom they acknowledge as such are the Kings of the Rain,

_Mata Kodou,_ who are credited with the power of giving rain at the

proper time, that is, the rainy season. Before the rains begin to

fall at the end of March the country is a parched and arid desert;

and the cattle, which form the people's chief wealth, perish for

lack of grass. So, when the end of March draws on, each householder

betakes himself to the King of the Rain and offers him a cow that he

may make the blessed waters of heaven to drip on the brown and

withered pastures. If no shower falls, the people assemble and

demand that the king shall give them rain; and if the sky still

continues cloudless, they rip up his belly, in which he is believed

to keep the storms. Amongst the Bari tribe one of these Rain Kings

made rain by sprinkling water on the ground out of a handbell.

Among tribes on the outskirts of Abyssinia a similar office exists

and has been thus described by an observer: "The priesthood of the

Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a remarkable one;

he is believed to be able to make rain. This office formerly existed

among the Algeds and appears to be still common to the Nuba negroes.

The Alfai of the Barea, who is also consulted by the northern

Kunama, lives near Tembadere on a mountain alone with his family.

The people bring him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and

cultivate for him a large field of his own. He is a kind of king,

and his office passes by inheritance to his brother or sister's son.

He is supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts.

But if he disappoints the people's expectation and a great drought

arises in the land, the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest

relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him. When we passed

through the country, the office of Alfai was still held by an old

man; but I heard that rain-making had proved too dangerous for him

and that he had renounced his office."

In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as

the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread

all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a

faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no

European, so far as is known, had ever seen either of them; and

their very existence might have passed for a fable, were it not that

till lately communications were regularly maintained between them

and the King of Cambodia, who year by year exchanged presents with

them. Their royal functions are of a purely mystic or spiritual

order; they have no political authority; they are simple peasants,

living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of the faithful.

According to one account they live in absolute solitude, never

meeting each other and never seeing a human face. They inhabit

successively seven towers perched upon seven mountains, and every

year they pass from one tower to another. People come furtively and

cast within their reach what is needful for their subsistence. The

kingship lasts seven years, the time necessary to inhabit all the

towers successively; but many die before their time is out. The

offices are hereditary in one or (according to others) two royal

families, who enjoy high consideration, have revenues assigned to

them, and are exempt from the necessity of tilling the ground. But

naturally the dignity is not coveted, and when a vacancy occurs, all

eligible men (they must be strong and have children) flee and hide

themselves. Another account, admitting the reluctance of the

hereditary candidates to accept the crown, does not countenance the

report of their hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it

represents the people as prostrating themselves before the mystic

kings whenever they appear in public, it being thought that a

terrible hurricane would burst over the country if this mark of

homage were omitted. Like many other sacred kings, of whom we shall

read in the sequel, the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to

die a natural death, for that would lower their reputation.

Accordingly when one of them is seriously ill, the elders hold a

consultation and if they think he cannot recover they stab him to

death. His body is burned and the ashes are piously collected and

publicly honoured for five years. Part of them is given to the

widow, and she keeps them in an urn, which she must carry on her

back when she goes to weep on her husband's grave.

We are told that the Fire King, the more important of the two, whose

supernatural powers have never been questioned, officiates at

marriages, festivals, and sacrifices in honour of the _Yan_ or

spirit. On these occasions a special place is set apart for him; and

the path by which he approaches is spread with white cotton cloths.

A reason for confining the royal dignity to the same family is that

this family is in possession of certain famous talismans which would

lose their virtue or disappear if they passed out of the family.

These talismans are three: the fruit of a creeper called _Cui,_

gathered ages ago at the time of the last deluge, but still fresh

and green; a rattan, also very old but bearing flowers that never

fade; and lastly, a sword containing a _Yan_ or spirit, who guards

it constantly and works miracles with it. The spirit is said to be

that of a slave, whose blood chanced to fall upon the blade while it

was being forged, and who died a voluntary death to expiate his

involuntary offence. By means of the two former talismans the Water

King can raise a flood that would drown the whole earth. If the Fire

King draws the magic sword a few inches from its sheath, the sun is

hidden and men and beasts fall into a profound sleep; were he to

draw it quite out of the scabbard, the world would come to an end.

To this wondrous brand sacrifices of buffaloes, pigs, fowls, and

ducks are offered for rain. It is kept swathed in cotton and silk;

and amongst the annual presents sent by the King of Cambodia were

rich stuffs to wrap the sacred sword.

Contrary to the common usage of the country, which is to bury the

dead, the bodies of both these mystic monarchs are burnt, but their

nails and some of their teeth and bones are religiously preserved as

amulets. It is while the corpse is being consumed on the pyre that

the kinsmen of the deceased magician flee to the forest and hide

themselves, for fear of being elevated to the invidious dignity

which he has just vacated. The people go and search for them, and

the first whose lurking place they discover is made King of Fire or

Water.

These, then, are examples of what I have called departmental kings

of nature. But it is a far cry to Italy from the forests of Cambodia

and the sources of the Nile. And though Kings of Rain, Water, and

Fire have been found, we have still to discover a King of the Wood

to match the Arician priest who bore that title. Perhaps we shall

find him nearer home.

IX. The Worship of Trees

1. Tree-spirits

IN THE RELIGIOUS history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship of

trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more natural.

For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primaeval

forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like

islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first century before our

era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a

distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar questioned

had travelled for two months through it without reaching the end.

Four centuries later it was visited by the Emperor Julian, and the

solitude, the gloom, the silence of the forest appear to have made a

deep impression on his sensitive nature. He declared that he knew

nothing like it in the Roman empire. In our own country the wealds

of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are remnants of the great forest of

Anderida, which once clothed the whole of the south-eastern portion

of the island. Westward it seems to have stretched till it joined

another forest that extended from Hampshire to Devon. In the reign

of Henry II. the citizens of London still hunted the wild bull and

the boar in the woods of Hampstead. Even under the later

Plantagenets the royal forests were sixty-eight in number. In the

forest of Arden it was said that down to modern times a squirrel

might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length of

Warwickshire. The excavation of ancient pile-villages in the valley

of the Po has shown that long before the rise and probably the

foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with dense woods

of elms, chestnuts, and especially of oaks. Archaeology is here

confirmed by history; for classical writers contain many references

to Italian forests which have now disappeared. As late as the fourth

century before our era Rome was divided from central Etruria by the

dreaded Ciminian forest, which Livy compares to the woods of

Germany. No merchant, if we may trust the Roman historian, had ever

penetrated its pathless solitudes; and it was deemed a most daring

feat when a Roman general, after sending two scouts to explore its

intricacies, led his army into the forest and, making his way to a

ridge of the wooded mountains, looked down on the rich Etrurian

fields spread out below. In Greece beautiful woods of pine, oak, and

other trees still linger on the slopes of the high Arcadian

mountains, still adorn with their verdure the deep gorge through

which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus, and were still,

down to a few years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the

lonely lake of Pheneus; but they are mere fragments of the forests

which clothed great tracts in antiquity, and which at a more remote

epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from sea to sea.

From an examination of the Teutonic words for "temple" Grimm has

made it probable that amongst the Germans the oldest sanctuaries

were natural woods. However that may be, tree-worship is well

attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock.

Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every

one, and their old word for sanctuary seems to be identical in

origin and meaning with the Latin _nemus,_ a grove or woodland

glade, which still survives in the name of Nemi. Sacred groves were

common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct

amongst their descendants at the present day. How serious that

worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious

penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel

the bark of a standing tree. The culprit's navel was to be cut out

and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was

to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound

about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to

replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit;

it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.

At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred

grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The heathen Slavs

worshipped trees and groves. The Lithuanians were not converted to

Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and

amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees

was prominent. Some of them revered remarkable oaks and other great

shady trees, from which they received oracular responses. Some

maintained holy groves about their villages or houses, where even to

break a twig would have been a sin. They thought that he who cut a

bough in such a grove either died suddenly or was crippled in one of

his limbs. Proofs of the prevalence of tree-worship in ancient

Greece and Italy are abundant. In the sanctuary of Aesculapius at

Cos, for example, it was forbidden to cut down the cypress-trees

under a penalty of a thousand drachms. But nowhere, perhaps, in the

ancient world was this antique form of religion better preserved

than in the heart of the great metropolis itself. In the Forum, the

busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was

worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its

trunk was enough to spread consternation through the city. Again, on

the slope of the Palatine Hill grew a cornel-tree which was esteemed

one of the most sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared

to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was

echoed by the people in the street, and soon a crowd might be seen

running helter-skelter from all sides with buckets of water, as if

(says Plutarch) they were hastening to put out a fire.