PRIMITIVE man creates his gods in his own image. Xenophanes remarked

long ago that the complexion of negro gods was black and their noses

flat; that Thracian gods were ruddy and blue-eyed; and that if

horses, oxen, and lions only believed in gods and had hands

wherewith to portray them, they would doubtless fashion their

deities in the form of horses, and oxen, and lions. Hence just as

the furtive savage conceals his real name because he fears that

sorcerers might make an evil use of it, so he fancies that his gods

must likewise keep their true name secret, lest other gods or even

men should learn the mystic sounds and thus be able to conjure with

them. Nowhere was this crude conception of the secrecy and magical

virtue of the divine name more firmly held or more fully developed

than in ancient Egypt, where the superstitions of a dateless past

were embalmed in the hearts of the people hardly less effectually

than the bodies of cats and crocodiles and the rest of the divine

menagerie in their rock-cut tombs. The conception is well

illustrated by a story which tells how the subtle Isis wormed his

secret name from Ra, the great Egyptian god of the sun. Isis, so

runs the tale, was a woman mighty in words, and she was weary of the

world of men, and yearned after the world of the gods. And she

meditated in her heart, saying, "Cannot I by virtue of the great

name of Ra make myself a goddess and reign like him in heaven and

earth?" For Ra had many names, but the great name which gave him all

power over gods and men was known to none but himself. Now the god

was by this time grown old; he slobbered at the mouth and his

spittle fell upon the ground. So Isis gathered up the spittle and

the earth with it, and kneaded thereof a serpent and laid it in the

path where the great god passed every day to his double kingdom

after his heart's desire. And when he came forth according to his

wont, attended by all his company of gods, the sacred serpent stung

him, and the god opened his mouth and cried, and his cry went up to

heaven. And the company of gods cried, "What aileth thee?" and the

gods shouted, "Lo and behold!" But he could not answer; his jaws

rattled, his limbs shook, the poison ran through his flesh as the

Nile floweth over the land. When the great god had stilled his

heart, he cried to his followers, "Come to me, O my children,

offspring of my body. I am a prince, the son of a prince, the divine

seed of a god. My father devised my name; my father and my mother

gave me my name, and it remained hidden in my body since my birth,

that no magician might have magic power over me. I went out to

behold that which I have made, I walked in the two lands which I

have created, and lo! something stung me. What it was, I know not.

Was it fire? was it water? My heart is on fire, my flesh trembleth,

all my limbs do quake. Bring me the children of the gods with

healing words and understanding lips, whose power reacheth to

heaven." Then came to him the children of the gods, and they were

very sorrowful. And Isis came with her craft, whose mouth is full of

the breath of life, whose spells chase pain away, whose word maketh

the dead to live. She said, "What is it, divine Father? what is it?"

The holy god opened his mouth, he spake and said, "I went upon my

way, I walked after my heart's desire in the two regions which I

have made to behold that which I have created, and lo! a serpent

that I saw not stung me. Is it fire? is it water? I am colder than

water, I am hotter than fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, mine

eye is not steadfast, I behold not the sky, the moisture bedeweth my

face as in summer-time." Then spake Isis, "Tell me thy name, divine

Father, for the man shall live who is called by his name." Then

answered Ra, "I created the heavens and the earth, I ordered the

mountains, I made the great and wide sea, I stretched out the two

horizons like a curtain. I am he who openeth his eyes and it is

light, and who shutteth them and it is dark. At his command the Nile

riseth, but the gods know not his name. I am Khepera in the morning,

I am Ra at noon, I am Tum at eve." But the poison was not taken away

from him; it pierced deeper, and the great god could no longer walk.

Then said Isis to him, "That was not thy name that thou spakest unto

me. Oh tell it me, that the poison may depart; for he shall live

whose name is named." Now the poison burned like fire, it was hotter

than the flame of fire. The god said, "I consent that Isis shall

search into me, and that my name shall pass from my breast into

hers." Then the god hid himself from the gods, and his place in the

ship of eternity was empty. Thus was the name of the great god taken

from him, and Isis, the witch, spake, "Flow away, poison, depart

from Ra. It is I, even I, who overcome the poison and cast it to the

earth; for the name of the great god hath been taken away from him.

Let Ra live and let the poison die." Thus spake great Isis, the

queen of the gods, she who knows Ra and his true name.

From this story it appears that the real name of the god, with which

his power was inextricably bound up, was supposed to be lodged, in

an almost physical sense, somewhere in his breast, from which Isis

extracted it by a sort of surgical operation and transferred it with

all its supernatural powers to herself. In Egypt attempts like that

of Isis to appropriate the power of a high god by possessing herself

of his name were not mere legends told of the mythical beings of a

remote past; every Egyptian magician aspired to wield like powers by

similar means. For it was believed that he who possessed the true

name possessed the very being of god or man, and could force even a

deity to obey him as a slave obeys his master. Thus the art of the

magician consisted in obtaining from the gods a revelation of their

sacred names, and he left no stone unturned to accomplish his end.

When once a god in a moment of weakness or forgetfulness had

imparted to the wizard the wondrous lore, the deity had no choice

but to submit humbly to the man or pay the penalty of his contumacy.

The belief in the magic virtue of divine names was shared by the

Romans. When they sat down before a city, the priests addressed the

guardian deity of the place in a set form of prayer or incantation,

inviting him to abandon the beleaguered city and come over to the

Romans, who would treat him as well as or better than he had ever

been treated in his old home. Hence the name of the guardian deity

of Rome was kept a profound secret, lest the enemies of the republic

might lure him away, even as the Romans themselves had induced many

gods to desert, like rats, the falling fortunes of cities that had

sheltered them in happier days. Nay, the real name, not merely of

its guardian deity, but of the city itself, was wrapt in mystery and

might never be uttered, not even in the sacred rites. A certain

Valerius Soranus, who dared to divulge the priceless secret, was put

to death or came to a bad end. In like manner, it seems, the ancient

Assyrians were forbidden to mention the mystic names of their

cities; and down to modern times the Cheremiss of the Caucasus keep

the names of their communal villages secret from motives of

superstition.

If the reader has had the patience to follow this examination of the

superstitions attaching to personal names, he will probably agree

that the mystery in which the names of royal personages are so often

shrouded is no isolated phenomenon, no arbitrary expression of

courtly servility and adulation, but merely the particular

application of a general law of primitive thought, which includes

within its scope common folk and gods as well as kings and priests.

XXIII. Our Debt to the Savage

IT would be easy to extend the list of royal and priestly taboos,

but the instances collected in the preceding pages may suffice as

specimens. To conclude this part of our subject it only remains to

state summarily the general conclusions to which our enquiries have

thus far conducted us. We have seen that in savage or barbarous

society there are often found men to whom the superstition of their

fellows ascribes a controlling influence over the general course of

nature. Such men are accordingly adored and treated as gods. Whether

these human divinities also hold temporal sway over the lives and

fortunes of their adorers, or whether their functions are purely

spiritual and supernatural, in other words, whether they are kings

as well as gods or only the latter, is a distinction which hardly

concerns us here. Their supposed divinity is the essential fact with

which we have to deal. In virtue of it they are a pledge and

guarantee to their worshippers of the continuance and orderly

succession of those physical phenomena upon which mankind depends

for subsistence. Naturally, therefore, the life and health of such a

god-man are matters of anxious concern to the people whose welfare

and even existence are bound up with his; naturally he is

constrained by them to conform to such rules as the wit of early man

has devised for averting the ills to which flesh is heir, including

the last ill, death. These rules, as an examination of them has

shown, are nothing but the maxims with which, on the primitive view,

every man of common prudence must comply if he would live long in

the land. But while in the case of ordinary men the observance of

the rules is left to the choice of the individual, in the case of

the god-man it is enforced under penalty of dismissal from his high

station, or even of death. For his worshippers have far too great a

stake in his life to allow him to play fast and loose with it.

Therefore all the quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the

venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated

long ago, and which old women at chimney corners still impart as

treasures of great price to their descendants gathered round the

cottage fire on winter evenings--all these antique fancies

clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path

of the old king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in

the toils of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of

custom, "light as air but strong as links of iron," that crossing

and recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a

network of observances from which death or deposition alone could

release him.

Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and priests

teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for

wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after

which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model

constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a

barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem to

us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency.

Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or

soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being,

it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules

which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and

harmonious whole. The flaw--and it is a fatal one--of the system

lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its conception of

the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the conclusions which

it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise these premises as

ridiculous because we can easily detect their falseness, would be

ungrateful as well as unphilosophical. We stand upon the foundation

reared by the generations that have gone before, and we can but

dimly realise the painful and prolonged efforts which it has cost

humanity to struggle up to the point, no very exalted one after all,

which we have reached. Our gratitude is due to the nameless and

forgotten toilers, whose patient thought and active exertions have

largely made us what we are. The amount of new knowledge which one

age, certainly which one man, can add to the common store is small,

and it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to

ignore the heap while vaunting the few grains which it may have been

our privilege to add to it. There is indeed little danger at present

of undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even

classical antiquity have made to the general advancement of our

race. But when we pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt

and ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the only

recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the

benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many,

perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our

resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our

differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and

deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage

forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us

by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to

regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune

which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those

who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being

regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of

their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and

enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted

for much of what we thought most our own, and that their errors were

not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply

hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were

propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be

inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and

rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all,

what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work

best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder

ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their

errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give

them the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day

stand in need of: _cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi sunt._

XXIV. The Killing of the Divine King

1. The Mortality of the Gods

MAN has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he

has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad

predicament. Thus the Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill

their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he

touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God, they kept

asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not, they

were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god

indeed. In answer to the enquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North

American Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit.

Being asked which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad

one, "Oh, neither of _them,_" replied he, "the Great Spirit that

made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have lived as

long as this." A tribe in the Philippine Islands told the Spanish

conquerors that the grave of the Creator was upon the top of Mount

Cabunian. Heitsi-eibib, a god or divine hero of the Hottentots, died

several times and came to life again. His graves are generally to be

met with in narrow defiles between mountains. When the Hottentots

pass one of them, they throw a stone on it for good luck, sometimes

muttering, "Give us plenty of cattle." The grave of Zeus, the great

god of Greece, was shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the

beginning of our era. The body of Dionysus was buried at Delphi

beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the

inscription, "Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele." According

to one account, Apollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras

is said to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how

the god had been killed by the python and buried under the tripod.

The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common

lot. They too grew old and died. But when at a later time the

discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to the

souls of the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite time

from corruption, the deities were permitted to share the benefit of

an invention which held out to gods as well as to men a reasonable

hope of immortality. Every province then had the tomb and mummy of

its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis

boasted of the mummy of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the

possession of that of Toumou. The high gods of Babylon also, though

they appeared to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were

conceived to be human in their bodily shape, human in their

passions, and human in their fate; for like men they were born into

the world, and like men they loved and fought and died.

2. Kings killed when their Strength fails

IF THE HIGH gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this

earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be

expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should

escape the same fate, though we hear of African kings who have

imagined themselves immortal by virtue of their sorceries. Now

primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their

safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one

of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally,

therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard

for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the

man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His

worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to

meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the

course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what

catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of

his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one

way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as

he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his

soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been

seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus

putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old

age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the

man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to

the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his

body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been

extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or

sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to

his worshippers, and with it their prosperity is gone and their very

existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul

of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer

it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying

of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last

stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue

to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body to which it might

be transferred. Whereas by slaying him his worshippers could, in the

first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and

transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place,

by putting him to death before his natural force was abated, they

would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the

decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and

all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his

soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.

The mystic kings of Fire and Water in Cambodia are not allowed to

die a natural death. Hence when one of them is seriously ill and the

elders think that he cannot recover, they stab him to death. The

people of Congo believed, as we have seen, that if their pontiff the

Chitomé were to die a natural death, the world would perish, and the

earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would

immediately be annihilated. Accordingly when he fell ill and seemed

likely to die, the man who was destined to be his successor entered

the pontiff's house with a rope or a club and strangled or clubbed

him to death. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods;

but whenever the priests chose, they sent a messenger to the king,

ordering him to die, and alleging an oracle of the gods as their

authority for the command. This command the kings always obeyed down

to the reign of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II., King of

Egypt. Having received a Greek education which emancipated him from

the superstitions of his countrymen, Ergamenes ventured to disregard

the command of the priests, and, entering the Golden Temple with a

body of soldiers, put the priests to the sword.

Customs of the same sort appear to have prevailed in this part of

Africa down to modern times. In some tribes of Fazoql the king had

to administer justice daily under a certain tree. If from sickness

or any other cause he was unable to discharge this duty for three

whole days, he was hanged on the tree in a noose, which contained

two razors so arranged that when the noose was drawn tight by the

weight of the king's body they cut his throat.

A custom of putting their divine kings to death at the first

symptoms of infirmity or old age prevailed until lately, if indeed

it is even now extinct and not merely dormant, among the Shilluk of

the White Nile, and in recent years it has been carefully

investigated by Dr. C. G. Seligman. The reverence which the Shilluk

pay to their king appears to arise chiefly from the conviction that

he is a reincarnation of the spirit of Nyakang, the semi-divine hero

who founded the dynasty and settled the tribe in their present

territory. It is a fundamental article of the Shilluk creed that the

spirit of the divine or semi-divine Nyakang is incarnate in the

reigning king, who is accordingly himself invested to some extent

with the character of a divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their

kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution

against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the

conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or

senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken

and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields,

and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever-increasing

numbers." To prevent these calamities it used to be the regular

custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death whenever he showed

signs of ill-health or failing strength. One of the fatal symptoms

of decay was taken to be an incapacity to satisfy the sexual

passions of his wives, of whom he has very many, distributed in a

large number of houses at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness

manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who are

popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a

white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat

of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of

death. A hut was specially built for the occasion: the king was led

into it and lay down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile

virgin: the door of the hut was then walled up; and the couple were

left without food, water, or fire to die of hunger and suffocation.

This was the old custom, but it was abolished some five generations

ago on account of the excessive sufferings of one of the kings who

perished in this way. It is said that the chiefs announce his fate

to the king, and that afterwards he is strangled in a hut which has

been specially built for the occasion.

From Dr. Seligman's enquiries it appears that not only was the

Shilluk king liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first

symptoms of incipient decay, but even while he was yet in the prime

of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival

and have to defend his crown in a combat to the death. According to

the common Shilluk tradition any son of a king had the right thus to

fight the king in possession and, if he succeeded in killing him, to

reign in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons,

the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may

well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must

have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only

take place with any prospect of success at night; for during the day

the king surrounded himself with his friends and bodyguards, and an

aspirant to the throne could hardly hope to cut his way through them

and strike home. It was otherwise at night. For then the guards were

dismissed and the king was alone in his enclosure with his favourite

wives, and there was no man near to defend him except a few

herdsmen, whose huts stood a little way off. The hours of darkness

were therefore the season of peril for the king. It is said that he

used to pass them in constant watchfulness, prowling round his huts

fully armed, peering into the blackest shadows, or himself standing

silent and alert, like a sentinel on duty, in some dark corner. When

at last his rival appeared, the fight would take place in grim

silence, broken only by the clash of spears and shields, for it was

a point of honour with the king not to call the herdsmen to his

assistance.

Like Nyakang himself, their founder, each of the Shilluk kings after

death is worshipped at a shrine, which is erected over his grave,

and the grave of a king is always in the village where he was born.

The tomb-shrine of a king resembles the shrine of Nyakang,

consisting of a few huts enclosed by a fence; one of the huts is

built over the king's grave, the others are occupied by the

guardians of the shrine. Indeed the shrines of Nyakang and the

shrines of the kings are scarcely to be distinguished from each

other, and the religious rituals observed at all of them are

identical in form and vary only in matters of detail, the variations

being due apparently to the far greater sanctity attributed to the

shrines of Nyakang. The grave-shrines of the kings are tended by

certain old men or women, who correspond to the guardians of the

shrines of Nyakang. They are usually widows or old men-servants of

the deceased king, and when they die they are succeeded in their

office by their descendants. Moreover, cattle are dedicated to the

grave-shrines of the kings and sacrifices are offered at them just

as at the shrines of Nyakang.

In general the principal element in the religion of the Shilluk

would seem to be the worship which they pay to their sacred or

divine kings, whether dead or alive. These are believed to be

animated by a single divine spirit, which has been transmitted from

the semi-mythical, but probably in substance historical, founder of

the dynasty through all his successors to the present day. Hence,

regarding their kings as incarnate divinities on whom the welfare of

men, of cattle, and of the corn implicitly depends, the Shilluk

naturally pay them the greatest respect and take every care of them;

and however strange it may seem to us, their custom of putting the

divine king to death as soon as he shows signs of ill-health or

failing strength springs directly from their profound veneration for

him and from their anxiety to preserve him, or rather the divine

spirit by which he is animated, in the most perfect state of

efficiency: nay, we may go further and say that their practice of

regicide is the best proof they can give of the high regard in which

they hold their kings. For they believe, as we have seen, that the

king's life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the

prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile

the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot

in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in

their opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put

the king to death while he is still hale and hearty, in order that

the divine spirit which he has inherited from his predecessors may

be transmitted in turn by him to his successor while it is still in

full vigour and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of disease

and old age. In this connexion the particular symptom which is

commonly said to seal the king's death-warrant is highly

significant; when he can no longer satisfy the passions of his

numerous wives, in other words, when he has ceased, whether

partially or wholly, to be able to reproduce his kind, it is time

for him to die and to make room for a more vigorous successor. Taken

along with the other reasons which are alleged for putting the king

to death, this one suggests that the fertility of men, of cattle,

and of the crops is believed to depend sympathetically on the

generative power of the king, so that the complete failure of that

power in him would involve a corresponding failure in men, animals,

and plants, and would thereby entail at no distant date the entire

extinction of all life, whether human, animal, or vegetable. No

wonder, that with such a danger before their eyes the Shilluk should

be most careful not to let the king die what we should call a

natural death of sickness or old age. It is characteristic of their

attitude towards the death of the kings that they refrain from

speaking of it as death: they do not say that a king has died but

simply that he has "gone away" like his divine ancestors Nyakang and

Dag, the two first kings of the dynasty, both of whom are reported

not to have died but to have disappeared. The similar legends of the

mysterious disappearance of early kings in other lands, for example

at Rome and in Uganda, may well point to a similar custom of putting

them to death for the purpose of preserving their life.

On the whole the theory and practice of the divine kings of the

Shilluk correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the

priests of Nemi, the Kings of the Wood, if my view of the latter is

correct. In both we see a series of divine kings on whose life the

fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to

depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or

otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to

their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and

decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the

part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a

corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops.

Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine

kings to death, particularly the method of transmitting their divine

souls to their successors, will be dealt with more fully in the

sequel. Meantime we pass to other examples of the general practice.

The Dinka are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of the

White Nile. They are essentially a pastoral people, passionately

devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen, though they

also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate small quantities

of millet and sesame. For their crops and above all for their

pastures they depend on the regularity of the rains: in seasons of

prolonged drought they are said to be reduced to great extremities.

Hence the rain-maker is a very important personage among them to

this day; indeed the men in authority whom travellers dub chiefs or

sheikhs are in fact the actual or potential rain-makers of the tribe

or community. Each of them is believed to be animated by the spirit

of a great rain-maker, which has come down to him through a

succession of rain-makers; and in virtue of this inspiration a

successful rain-maker enjoys very great power and is consulted on

all important matters. Yet in spite, or rather in virtue, of the

high honour in which he is held, no Dinka rain-maker is allowed to

die a natural death of sickness or old age; for the Dinka believe

that if such an untoward event were to happen, the tribe would

suffer from disease and famine, and the herds would not yield their

increase. So when a rain-maker feels that he is growing old and

infirm, he tells his children that he wishes to die. Among the Agar

Dinka a large grave is dug and the rain-maker lies down in it,

surrounded by his friends and relatives. From time to time he speaks

to the people, recalling the past history of the tribe, reminding

them how he has ruled and advised them, and instructing them how

they are to act in the future. Then, when he has concluded his

admonition, he bids them cover him up. So the earth is thrown down

on him as he lies in the grave, and he soon dies of suffocation.

Such, with minor variations, appears to be the regular end of the

honourable career of a rain-maker in all the Dinka tribes. The

Khor-Adar Dinka told Dr. Seligman that when they have dug the grave

for their rain-maker they strangle him in his house. The father and

paternal uncle of one of Dr. Seligman's informants had both been

rain-makers and both had been killed in the most regular and

orthodox fashion. Even if a rain-maker is quite young he will be put

to death should he seem likely to perish of disease. Further, every

precaution is taken to prevent a rain-maker from dying an accidental

death, for such an end, though not nearly so serious a matter as

death from illness or old age, would be sure to entail sickness on

the tribe. As soon as a rain-maker is killed, his valuable spirit is

supposed to pass to a suitable successor, whether a son or other

near blood relation.

In the Central African kingdom of Bunyoro down to recent years

custom required that as soon as the king fell seriously ill or began

to break up from age, he should die by his own hand; for, according

to an old prophecy, the throne would pass away from the dynasty if

ever the king were to die a natural death. He killed himself by

draining a poisoned cup. If he faltered or were too ill to ask for

the cup, it was his wife's duty to administer the poison. When the

king of Kibanga, on the Upper Congo, seems near his end, the

sorcerers put a rope round his neck, which they draw gradually

tighter till he dies. If the king of Gingiro happens to be wounded

in war, he is put to death by his comrades, or, if they fail to kill

him, by his kinsfolk, however hard he may beg for mercy. They say

they do it that he may not die by the hands of his enemies. The

Jukos are a heathen tribe of the Benue River, a great tributary of

the Niger. In their country "the town of Gatri is ruled by a king

who is elected by the big men of the town as follows. When in the

opinion of the big men the king has reigned long enough, they give

out that 'the king is sick'--a formula understood by all to mean

that they are going to kill him, though the intention is never put

more plainly. They then decide who is to be the next king. How long

he is to reign is settled by the influential men at a meeting; the

question is put and answered by each man throwing on the ground a

little piece of stick for each year he thinks the new king should

rule. The king is then told, and a great feast prepared, at which

the king gets drunk on guinea-corn beer. After that he is speared,

and the man who was chosen becomes king. Thus each Juko king knows

that he cannot have very many more years to live, and that he is

certain of his predecessor's fate. This, however, does not seem to

frighten candidates. The same custom of king-killing is said to

prevail at Quonde and Wukari as well as at Gatri." In the three

Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Katsina, and Daura, in Northern Nigeria, as

soon as a king showed signs of failing health or growing infirmity,

an official who bore the title of Killer of the Elephant appeared

and throttled him.

The Matiamvo is a great king or emperor in the interior of Angola.

One of the inferior kings of the country, by name Challa, gave to a

Portuguese expedition the following account of the manner in which

the Matiamvo comes by his end. "It has been customary," he said,

"for our Matiamvos to die either in war or by a violent death, and

the present Matiamvo must meet this last fate, as, in consequence of

his great exactions, he has lived long enough. When we come to this

understanding, and decide that he should be killed, we invite him to

make war with our enemies, on which occasion we all accompany him

and his family to the war, when we lose some of our people. If he

escapes unhurt, we return to the war again and fight for three or

four days. We then suddenly abandon him and his family to their

fate, leaving him in the enemy's hands. Seeing himself thus

deserted, he causes his throne to be erected, and, sitting down,

calls his family around him. He then orders his mother to approach;

she kneels at his feet; he first cuts off her head, then decapitates

his sons in succession, next his wives and relatives, and, last of

all, his most beloved wife, called Anacullo. This slaughter being

accomplished, the Matiamvo, dressed in all his pomp, awaits his own

death, which immediately follows, by an officer sent by the powerful

neighbouring chiefs, Caniquinha and Canica. This officer first cuts

off his legs and arms at the joints, and lastly he cuts off his

head; after which the head of the officer is struck off. All the

potentates retire from the encampment, in order not to witness his

death. It is my duty to remain and witness his death, and to mark

the place where the head and arms have been deposited by the two

great chiefs, the enemies of the Matiamvo. They also take possession

of all the property belonging to the deceased monarch and his

family, which they convey to their own residence. I then provide for

the funeral of the mutilated remains of the late Matiamvo, after

which I retire to his capital and proclaim the new government. I

then return to where the head, legs, and arms have been deposited,

and, for forty slaves, I ransom them, together with the merchandise

and other property belonging to the deceased, which I give up to the

new Matiamvo, who has been proclaimed. This is what has happened to

many Matiamvos, and what must happen to the present one."

It appears to have been a Zulu custom to put the king to death as

soon as he began to have wrinkles or grey hairs. At least this seems

implied in the following passage written by one who resided for some

time at the court of the notorious Zulu tyrant Chaka, in the early

part of the nineteenth century: "The extraordinary violence of the

king's rage with me was mainly occasioned by that absurd nostrum,

the hair oil, with the notion of which Mr. Farewell had impressed

him as being a specific for removing all indications of age. From

the first moment of his having heard that such a preparation was

attainable, he evinced a solicitude to procure it, and on every

occasion never forgot to remind us of his anxiety respecting it;

more especially on our departure on the mission his injunctions were

particularly directed to this object. It will be seen that it is one

of the barbarous customs of the Zoolas in their choice or election

of their kings that he must neither have wrinkles nor grey hairs, as

they are both distinguishing marks of disqualification for becoming

a monarch of a warlike people. It is also equally indispensable that

their king should never exhibit those proofs of having become unfit

and incompetent to reign; it is therefore important that they should

conceal these indications so long as they possibly can. Chaka had

become greatly apprehensive of the approach of grey hairs; which

would at once be the signal for him to prepare to make his exit from

this sublunary world, it being always followed by the death of the

monarch." The writer to whom we are indebted for this instructive

anecdote of the hair oil omits to specify the mode in which a

grey-haired and wrinkled Zulu chief used "to make his exit from this

sublunary world"; but on analogy we may conjecture that he was

killed.

The custom of putting kings to death as soon as they suffered from

any personal defect prevailed two centuries ago in the Caffre

kingdom of Sofala. We have seen that these kings of Sofala were

regarded as gods by their people, being entreated to give rain or

sunshine, according as each might be wanted. Nevertheless a slight

bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth, was considered a

sufficient cause for putting one of these god-men to death, as we

learn from the following passage of an old Portuguese historian: "It

was formerly the custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide

by taking poison when any disaster or natural physical defect fell

upon them, such as impotence, infectious disease, the loss of their

front teeth, by which they were disfigured, or any other deformity

or affliction. To put an end to such defects they killed themselves,

saying that the king should be free from any blemish, and if not, it

was better for his honour that he should die and seek another life

where he would be made whole, for there everything was perfect. But

the Quiteve (king) who reigned when I was in those parts would not

imitate his predecessors in this, being discreet and dreaded as he

was; for having lost a front tooth he caused it to be proclaimed

throughout the kingdom that all should be aware that he had lost a

tooth and should recognise him when they saw him without it, and if

his predecessors killed themselves for such things they were very

foolish, and he would not do so; on the contrary, he would be very

sorry when the time came for him to die a natural death, for his

life was very necessary to preserve his kingdom and defend it from

his enemies; and he recommended his successors to follow his

example."

The king of Sofala who dared to survive the loss of his front tooth

was thus a bold reformer like Ergamenes, king of Ethiopia. We may

conjecture that the ground for putting the Ethiopian kings to death

was, as in the case of the Zulu and Sofala kings, the appearance on

their person of any bodily defect or sign of decay; and that the

oracle which the priests alleged as the authority for the royal

execution was to the effect that great calamities would result from

the reign of a king who had any blemish on his body; just as an

oracle warned Sparta against a "lame reign," that is, the reign of a

lame king. It is some confirmation of this conjecture that the kings

of Ethiopia were chosen for their size, strength, and beauty long

before the custom of killing them was abolished. To this day the

Sultan of Wadai must have no obvious bodily defect, and the king of

Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a single blemish, such as a broken

or a filed tooth or the scar of an old wound. According to the Book

of Acaill and many other authorities no king who was afflicted with

a personal blemish might reign over Ireland at Tara. Hence, when the

great King Cormac Mac Art lost one eye by an accident, he at once

abdicated.

Many days' journey to the north-east of Abomey, the old capital of

Dahomey, lies the kingdom of Eyeo. "The Eyeos are governed by a

king, no less absolute than the king of Dahomey, yet subject to a

regulation of state, at once humiliating and extraordinary. When the

people have conceived an opinion of his ill-government, which is

sometimes insidiously infused into them by the artifice of his

discontented ministers, they send a deputation to him with a present

of parrots' eggs, as a mark of its authenticity, to represent to him

that the burden of government must have so far fatigued him that

they consider it full time for him to repose from his cares and

indulge himself with a little sleep. He thanks his subjects for

their attention to his ease, retires to his own apartment as if to

sleep, and there gives directions to his women to strangle him. This

is immediately executed, and his son quietly ascends the throne upon

the usual terms of holding the reins of government no longer than

whilst he merits the approbation of the people." About the year

1774, a king of Eyeo, whom his ministers attempted to remove in the

customary manner, positively refused to accept the proffered

parrots' eggs at their hands, telling them that he had no mind to

take a nap, but on the contrary was resolved to watch for the

benefit of his subjects. The ministers, surprised and indignant at

his recalcitrancy, raised a rebellion, but were defeated with great

slaughter, and thus by his spirited conduct the king freed himself

from the tyranny of his councillors and established a new precedent

for the guidance of his successors. However, the old custom seems to

have revived and persisted until late in the nineteenth century, for

a Catholic missionary, writing in 1884, speaks of the practice as if

it were still in vogue. Another missionary, writing in 1881, thus

describes the usage of the Egbas and the Yorubas of West Africa:

"Among the customs of the country one of the most curious is

unquestionably that of judging, and punishing the king. Should he

have earned the hatred of his people by exceeding his rights, one of

his councillors, on whom the heavy duty is laid, requires of the

prince that he shall 'go to sleep,' which means simply 'take poison

and die.' If his courage fails him at the supreme moment, a friend

renders him this last service, and quietly, without betraying the

secret, they prepare the people for the news of the king's death. In

Yoruba the thing is managed a little differently. When a son is born

to the king of Oyo, they make a model of the infant's right foot in

clay and keep it in the house of the elders (_ogboni_). If the king

fails to observe the customs of the country, a messenger, without

speaking a word, shows him his child's foot. The king knows what

that means. He takes poison and goes to sleep." The old Prussians

acknowledged as their supreme lord a ruler who governed them in the

name of the gods, and was known as "God's Mouth." When he felt

himself weak and ill, if he wished to leave a good name behind him,

he had a great heap made of thorn-bushes and straw, on which he

mounted and delivered a long sermon to the people, exhorting them to

serve the gods and promising to go to the gods and speak for the

people. Then he took some of the perpetual fire which burned in

front of the holy oak-tree, and lighting the pile with it burned

himself to death.

3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term

IN THE CASES hitherto described, the divine king or priest is

suffered by his people to retain office until some outward defect,

some visible symptom of failing health or advancing age, warns them

that he is no longer equal to the discharge of his divine duties;

but not until such symptoms have made their appearance is he put to

death. Some peoples, however, appear to have thought it unsafe to

wait for even the slightest symptom of decay and have preferred to

kill the king while he was still in the full vigour of life.

Accordingly, they have fixed a term beyond which he might not reign,

and at the close of which he must die, the term fixed upon being

short enough to exclude the probability of his degenerating

physically in the interval. In some parts of Southern India the

period fixed was twelve years. Thus, according to an old traveller,

in the province of Quilacare, "there is a Gentile house of prayer,

in which there is an idol which they hold in great account, and

every twelve years they celebrate a great feast to it, whither all

the Gentiles go as to a jubilee. This temple possesses many lands

and much revenue: it is a very great affair. This province has a

king over it, who has not more than twelve years to reign from

jubilee to jubilee. His manner of living is in this wise, that is to

say: when the twelve years are completed, on the day of this feast

there assemble together innumerable people, and much money is spent

in giving food to Bramans. The king has a wooden scaffolding made,

spread over with silken hangings: and on that day he goes to bathe

at a tank with great ceremonies and sound of music, after that he

comes to the idol and prays to it, and mounts on to the scaffolding,

and there before all the people he takes some very sharp knives, and

begins to cut off his nose, and then his ears, and his lips, and all

his members, and as much flesh off himself as he can; and he throws

it away very hurriedly until so much of his blood is spilled that he

begins to faint, and then he cuts his throat himself. And he

performs this sacrifice to the idol, and whoever desires to reign

another twelve years and undertake this martyrdom for love of the

idol, has to be present looking on at this: and from that place they

raise him up as king."

The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of

Samorin or Samory. He "pretends to be of a higher rank than the

Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a

pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held

as absurd and abominable by the Brahmans, by whom he is only treated

as a Sudra." Formerly the Samorin had to cut his throat in public at

the end of a twelve years' reign. But towards the end of the

seventeenth century the rule had been modified as follows: "Many

strange customs were observed in this country in former times, and

some very odd ones are still continued. It was an ancient custom for

the Samorin to reign but twelve years, and no longer. If he died

before his term was expired, it saved him a troublesome ceremony of

cutting his own throat, on a publick scaffold erected for the

purpose. He first made a feast for all his nobility and gentry, who

are very numerous. After the feast he saluted his guests, and went

on the scaffold, and very decently cut his own throat in the view of

the assembly, and his body was, a little while after, burned with

great pomp and ceremony, and the grandees elected a new Samorin.

Whether that custom was a religious or a civil ceremony, I know not,

but it is now laid aside. And a new custom is followed by the modern

Samorins, that jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions, at

the end of twelve years, and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious

plain, and a great feast is celebrated for ten or twelve days, with

mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so at the end of the

feast any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a crown by a

desperate action, in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his

guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him succeeds

him in his empire. In anno 1695, one of those jubilees happened, and

the tent pitched near Pennany, a seaport of his, about fifteen

leagues to the southward of Calicut. There were but three men that

would venture on that desperate action, who fell in, with sword and

target, among the guard, and, after they had killed and wounded

many, were themselves killed. One of the desperados had a nephew of

fifteen or sixteen years of age, that kept close by his uncle in the

attack on the guards, and, when he saw him fall, the youth got

through the guards into the tent, and made a stroke at his Majesty's

head, and had certainly despatched him if a large brass lamp which

was burning over his head had not marred the blow; but, before he

could make another, he was killed by the guards; and, I believe, the

same Samorin reigns yet. I chanced to come that time along the coast

and heard the guns for two or three days and nights successively."

The English traveller, whose account I have quoted, did not himself

witness the festival he describes, though he heard the sound of the

firing in the distance. Fortunately, exact records of these

festivals and of the number of men who perished at them have been

preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut. In the

latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by Mr. W.

Logan, with the personal assistance of the reigning king, and from

his work it is possible to gain an accurate conception both of the

tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically enacted down to

1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time.

The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his crown and his

life on the issue of battle was known as the "Great Sacrifice." It

fell every twelfth year, when the planet Jupiter was in retrograde

motion in the sign of the Crab, and it lasted twenty-eight days,

culminating at the time of the eighth lunar asterism in the month of

Makaram. As the date of the festival was determined by the position

of Jupiter in the sky, and the interval between two festivals was

twelve years, which is roughly Jupiter's period of revolution round

the sun, we may conjecture that the splendid planet was supposed to

be in a special sense the king's star and to rule his destiny, the

period of its revolution in heaven corresponding to the period of

his reign on earth. However that may be, the ceremony was observed

with great pomp at the Tirunavayi temple, on the north bank of the

Ponnani River. The spot is close to the present railway line. As the

train rushes by, you can just catch a glimpse of the temple, almost

hidden behind a clump of trees on the river bank. From the western

gateway of the temple a perfectly straight road, hardly raised above

the level of the surrounding rice-fields and shaded by a fine

avenue, runs for half a mile to a high ridge with a precipitous

bank, on which the outlines of three or four terraces can still be

traced. On the topmost of these terraces the king took his stand on

the eventful day. The view which it commands is a fine one. Across

the flat expanse of the rice-fields, with the broad placid river

winding through them, the eye ranges eastward to high tablelands,

their lower slopes embowered in woods, while afar off looms the

great chain of the western Ghauts, and in the furthest distance the

Neilgherries or Blue Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the

azure of the sky above.

But it was not to the distant prospect that the king's eyes

naturally turned at this crisis of his fate. His attention was

arrested by a spectacle nearer at hand. For all the plain below was

alive with troops, their banners waving gaily in the sun, the white

tents of their many camps standing sharply out against the green and

gold of the ricefields. Forty thousand fighting men or more were

gathered there to defend the king. But if the plain swarmed with

soldiers, the road that cuts across it from the temple to the king's

stand was clear of them. Not a soul was stirring on it. Each side of

the way was barred by palisades, and from the palisades on either

hand a long hedge of spears, held by strong arms, projected into the

empty road, their blades meeting in the middle and forming a

glittering arch of steel. All was now ready. The king waved his

sword. At the same moment a great chain of massy gold, enriched with

bosses, was placed on an elephant at his side. That was the signal.

On the instant a stir might be seen half a mile away at the gate of

the temple. A group of swordsmen, decked with flowers and smeared

with ashes, has stepped out from the crowd. They have just partaken

of their last meal on earth, and they now receive the last blessings

and farewells of their friends. A moment more and they are coming

down the lane of spears, hewing and stabbing right and left at the

spearmen, winding and turning and writhing among the blades as if

they had no bones in their bodies. It is all in vain. One after the

other they fall, some nearer the king, some farther off, content to

die, not for the shadow of a crown, but for the mere sake of

approving their dauntless valour and swordsmanship to the world. On

the last days of the festival the same magnificent display of

gallantry, the same useless sacrifice of life was repeated again and

again. Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves that

there are men who prefer honour to life.

"It is a singular custom in Bengal," says an old native historian of

India, "that there is little of hereditary descent in succession to

the sovereignty. . . . Whoever kills the king, and succeeds in

placing himself on that throne, is immediately acknowledged as king;

all the _amirs, wazirs,_ soldiers, and peasants instantly obey and

submit to him, and consider him as being as much their sovereign as

they did their former prince, and obey his orders implicitly. The

people of Bengal say, 'We are faithful to the throne; whoever fills

the throne we are obedient and true to it.'" A custom of the same

sort formerly prevailed in the little kingdom of Passier, on the

northern coast of Sumatra. The old Portuguese historian De Barros,

who informs us of it, remarks with surprise that no wise man would

wish to be king of Passier, since the monarch was not allowed by his

subjects to live long. From time to time a sort of fury seized the

people, and they marched through the streets of the city chanting

with loud voices the fatal words, "The king must die!" When the king

heard that song of death he knew that his hour had come. The man who

struck the fatal blow was of the royal lineage, and as soon as he

had done the deed of blood and seated himself on the throne he was

regarded as the legitimate king, provided that he contrived to

maintain his seat peaceably for a single day. This, however, the

regicide did not always succeed in doing. When Fernão Peres

d'Andrade, on a voyage to China, put in at Passier for a cargo of

spices, two kings were massacred, and that in the most peaceable and

orderly manner, without the smallest sign of tumult or sedition in

the city, where everything went on in its usual course, as if the

murder or execution of a king were a matter of everyday occurrence.

Indeed, on one occasion three kings were raised to the dangerous

elevation and followed each other in the dusty road of death in a

single day. The people defended the custom, which they esteemed very

laudable and even of divine institution, by saying that God would

never allow so high and mighty a being as a king, who reigned as his

vicegerent on earth, to perish by violence unless for his sins he

thoroughly deserved it. Far away from the tropical island of Sumatra

a rule of the same sort appears to have obtained among the old

Slavs. When the captives Gunn and Jarmerik contrived to slay the

king and queen of the Slavs and made their escape, they were pursued

by the barbarians, who shouted after them that if they would only

come back they would reign instead of the murdered monarch, since by

a public statute of the ancients the succession to the throne fell

to the king's assassin. But the flying regicides turned a deaf ear

to promises which they regarded as mere baits to lure them back to

destruction; they continued their flight, and the shouts and clamour

of the barbarians gradually died away in the distance.

When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at their own hands or

at the hands of others, on the expiration of a fixed term of years,

it was natural that they should seek to delegate the painful duty,

along with some of the privileges of sovereignty, to a substitute

who should suffer vicariously in their stead. This expedient appears

to have been resorted to by some of the princes of Malabar. Thus we

are informed by a native authority on that country that "in some

places all powers both executive and judicial were delegated for a

fixed period to natives by the sovereign. This institution was

styled _Thalavettiparothiam_ or authority obtained by decapitation.

. . . It was an office tenable for five years during which its bearer

was invested with supreme despotic powers within his jurisdiction.

On the expiry of the five years the man's head was cut off and

thrown up in the air amongst a large concourse of villagers, each of

whom vied with the other in trying to catch it in its course down.

He who succeeded was nominated to the post for the next five years."

When once kings, who had hitherto been bound to die a violent death

at the end of a term of years, conceived the happy thought of dying

by deputy in the persons of others, they would very naturally put it

in practice; and accordingly we need not wonder at finding so

popular an expedient, or traces of it, in many lands. Scandinavian

traditions contain some hints that of old the Swedish kings reigned

only for periods of nine years, after which they were put to death

or had to find a substitute to die in their stead. Thus Aun or On,

king of Sweden, is said to have sacrificed to Odin for length of

days and to have been answered by the god that he should live so

long as he sacrificed one of his sons every ninth year. He

sacrificed nine of them in this manner, and would have sacrificed

the tenth and last, but the Swedes would not allow him. So he died

and was buried in a mound at Upsala. Another indication of a similar

tenure of the crown occurs in a curious legend of the deposition and

banishment of Odin. Offended at his misdeeds, the other gods

outlawed and exiled him, but set up in his place a substitute, Oller

by name, a cunning wizard, to whom they accorded the symbols both of

royalty and of godhead. The deputy bore the name of Odin, and

reigned for nearly ten years, when he was driven from the throne,

while the real Odin came to his own again. His discomfited rival

retired to Sweden and was afterwards slain in an attempt to repair

his shattered fortunes. As gods are often merely men who loom large

through the mists of tradition, we may conjecture that this Norse

legend preserves a confused reminiscence of ancient Swedish kings

who reigned for nine or ten years together, then abdicated,

delegating to others the privilege of dying for their country. The

great festival which was held at Upsala every nine years may have

been the occasion on which the king or his deputy was put to death.

We know that human sacrifices formed part of the rites.

There are some grounds for believing that the reign of many ancient

Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at the end

of every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh

outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order

to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus

it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the

ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down

observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor

or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the

deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic

or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This custom, which

has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered to remain a

dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan monarchy; for in

the third century before our era a king, who had rendered himself

obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually deposed on various

trumped-up charges, among which the allegation that the ominous sign

had been seen in the sky took a prominent place.

If the tenure of the regal office was formerly limited among the

Spartans to eight years, we may naturally ask, why was that precise

period selected as the measure of a king's reign? The reason is

probably to be found in those astronomical considerations which

determined the early Greek calendar. The difficulty of reconciling

lunar with solar time is one of the standing puzzles which has taxed

the ingenuity of men who are emerging from barbarism. Now an

octennial cycle is the shortest period at the end of which sun and

moon really mark time together after overlapping, so to say,

throughout the whole of the interval. Thus, for example, it is only

once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the

longest or shortest day; and as this coincidence can be observed

with the aid of a simple dial, the observation is naturally one of

the first to furnish a base for a calendar which shall bring lunar

and solar times into tolerable, though not exact, harmony. But in

early days the proper adjustment of the calendar is a matter of

religious concern, since on it depends a knowledge of the right

seasons for propitiating the deities whose favour is indispensable

to the welfare of the community. No wonder, therefore, that the

king, as the chief priest of the state, or as himself a god, should

be liable to deposition or death at the end of an astronomical

period. When the great luminaries had run their course on high, and

were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be thought that

the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them unabated,

under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor. In Southern

India, as we have seen, the king's reign and life terminated with

the revolution of the planet Jupiter round the sun. In Greece, on

the other hand, the king's fate seems to have hung in the balance at

the end of every eight years, ready to fly up and kick the beam as

soon as the opposite scale was loaded with a falling star.

Whatever its origin may have been, the cycle of eight years appears

to have coincided with the normal length of the king's reign in

other parts of Greece besides Sparta. Thus Minos, king of Cnossus in

Crete, whose great palace has been unearthed in recent years, is

said to have held office for periods of eight years together. At the

end of each period he retired for a season to the oracular cave on

Mount Ida, and there communed with his divine father Zeus, giving

him an account of his kingship in the years that were past, and

receiving from him instructions for his guidance in those which were

to come. The tradition plainly implies that at the end of every

eight years the king's sacred powers needed to be renewed by

intercourse with the godhead, and that without such a renewal he

would have forfeited his right to the throne.

Without being unduly rash we may surmise that the tribute of seven

youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were bound to send to

Minos every eight years had some connexion with the renewal of the

king's power for another octennial cycle. Traditions varied as to

the fate which awaited the lads and damsels on their arrival in

Crete; but the common view appears to have been that they were shut

up in the labyrinth, there to be devoured by the Minotaur, or at

least to be imprisoned for life. Perhaps they were sacrificed by

being roasted alive in a bronze image of a bull, or of a bull-headed

man, in order to renew the strength of the king and of the sun, whom

he personated. This at all events is suggested by the legend of

Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his breast and leaped

with them into the fire, so that they were roasted alive. He is said

to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or by Hephaestus to Minos, to

guard the island of Crete, which he patrolled thrice daily.

According to one account he was a bull, according to another he was

the sun. Probably he was identical with the Minotaur, and stripped

of his mythical features was nothing but a bronze image of the sun

represented as a man with a bull's head. In order to renew the solar

fires, human victims may have been sacrificed to the idol by being

roasted in its hollow body or placed on its sloping hands and

allowed to roll into a pit of fire. It was in the latter fashion

that the Carthaginians sacrificed their offspring to Moloch. The

children were laid on the hands of a calf-headed image of bronze,

from which they slid into a fiery oven, while the people danced to

the music of flutes and timbrels to drown the shrieks of the burning

victims. The resemblance which the Cretan traditions bear to the

Carthaginian practice suggests that the worship associated with the

names of Minos and the Minotaur may have been powerfully influenced

by that of a Semitic Baal. In the tradition of Phalaris, tyrant of

Agrigentum, and his brazen bull we may have an echo of similar rites

in Sicily, where the Carthaginian power struck deep roots.

In the province of Lagos, the Ijebu tribe of the Yoruba race is

divided into two branches, which are known respectively as the Ijebu

Ode and the Ijebu Remon. The Ode branch of the tribe is ruled by a

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

deal of mystery. Down to recent times his face might not be seen

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

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

view. The other or Remon branch of the Ijebu tribe is governed by a

chief, who ranks below the Awujale. Mr. John Parkinson was informed

that in former times this subordinate chief used to be killed with

ceremony after a rule of three years. As the country is now under

British protection the custom of putting the chief to death at the

end of a three years' reign has long been abolished, and Mr.

Parkinson was unable to ascertain any particulars on the subject.

At Babylon, within historical times, the tenure of the kingly office

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

merely annual. For every year at the festival of Zagmuk the king had

to renew his power by seizing the hands of the image of Marduk in

his great temple of Esagil at Babylon. Even when Babylon passed

under the power of Assyria, the monarchs of that country were

expected to legalise their claim to the throne every year by coming

to Babylon and performing the ancient ceremony at the New Year

festival, and some of them found the obligation so burdensome that

rather than discharge it they renounced the title of king altogether

and contented themselves with the humbler one of Governor. Further,

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

historical period, the kings of Babylon or their barbarous

predecessors forfeited not merely their crown but their life at the

end of a year's tenure of office. At least this is the conclusion to

which the following evidence seems to point. According to the

historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample

knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival

called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous,

and lasted for five days, during which masters and servants changed

places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A

prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king's robes, seated

on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased,

to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king's

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

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

of office he bore the title of Zoganes. This custom might perhaps

have been explained as merely a grim jest perpetrated in a season of

jollity at the expense of an unhappy criminal. But one

circumstance--the leave given to the mock king to enjoy the king's

concubines--is decisive against this interpretation. Considering the

jealous seclusion of an oriental despot's harem we may be quite

certain that permission to invade it would never have been granted

by the despot, least of all to a condemned criminal, except for the

very gravest cause. This cause could hardly be other than that the

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

the substitution perfect it was necessary he should enjoy the full

rights of royalty during his brief reign. There is nothing

surprising in this substitution. The rule that the king must be put

to death either on the appearance of any symptom of bodily decay or

at the end of a fixed period is certainly one which, sooner or

later, the kings would seek to abolish or modify. We have seen that

in Ethiopia, Sofala, and Eyeo the rule was boldly set aside by

enlightened monarchs; and that in Calicut the old custom of killing

the king at the end of twelve years was changed into a permission

granted to any one at the end of the twelve years' period to attack

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

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

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

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

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

(in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year's

reign) he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king

reigned and suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may

have been an innocent person, possibly a member of the king's own

family; but with the growth of civilisation the sacrifice of an

innocent person would be revolting to the public sentiment, and

accordingly a condemned criminal would be invested with the brief

and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we shall find other examples of

a dying criminal representing a dying god. For we must not forget

that, as the case of the Shilluk kings clearly shows, the king is

slain in his character of a god or a demigod, his death and

resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life

unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people

and the world.

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

year's reign appears to have survived in the festival called

Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the last

month of the year. About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager

described the custom as follows: "The taboo Macahity is not unlike

to our festival of Christmas. It continues a whole month, during

which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and

sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival wherever

he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in his richest

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

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

must finish his excursion at sunrise. The strongest and most expert

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

warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king

lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from

a distance of about thirty paces, and the king must either catch the

spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there is no jesting in the

business. Having caught it, he carries it under his arm, with the

sharp end downwards, into the temple or _heavoo._ On his entrance,

the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and immediately the

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

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

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

year; but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to

catch a spear as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During

the Macahity, all punishments are remitted throughout the country;

and no person can leave the place in which he commences these

holidays, let the affair be ever so important."

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

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

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

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

the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that the chief who

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

his coronation. The right of succession lies with the chief of the

Musurongo; but we need not wonder that he does not exercise it, and

that the throne stands vacant. "No one likes to lose his life for a

few hours' glory on the Ngoio throne."

XXV. Temporary Kings

IN SOME places the modified form of the old custom of regicide which

appears to have prevailed at Babylon has been further softened down.

The king still abdicates annually for a short time and his place is

filled by a more or less nominal sovereign; but at the close of his

short reign the latter is no longer killed, though sometimes a mock

execution still survives as a memorial of the time when he was

actually put to death. To take examples. In the month of Méac

(February) the king of Cambodia annually abdicated for three days.

During this time he performed no act of authority, he did not touch

the seals, he did not even receive the revenues which fell due. In

his stead there reigned a temporary king called Sdach Méac, that is,

King February. The office of temporary king was hereditary in a

family distantly connected with the royal house, the sons succeeding

the fathers and the younger brothers the elder brothers just as in

the succession to the real sovereignty. On a favourable day fixed by

the astrologers the temporary king was conducted by the mandarins in

triumphal procession. He rode one of the royal elephants, seated in

the royal palanquin, and escorted by soldiers who, dressed in

appropriate costumes, represented the neighbouring peoples of Siam,

Annam, Laos, and so on. In place of the golden crown he wore a

peaked white cap, and his regalia, instead of being of gold

encrusted with diamonds, were of rough wood. After paying homage to

the real king, from whom he received the sovereignty for three days,

together with all the revenues accruing during that time (though

this last custom has been omitted for some time), he moved in

procession round the palace and through the streets of the capital.

On the third day, after the usual procession, the temporary king

gave orders that the elephants should trample under foot the

"mountain of rice," which was a scaffold of bamboo surrounded by

sheaves of rice. The people gathered up the rice, each man taking

home a little with him to secure a good harvest. Some of it was also

taken to the king, who had it cooked and presented to the monks.

In Siam on the sixth day of the moon in the sixth month (the end of

April) a temporary king is appointed, who for three days enjoys the

royal prerogatives, the real king remaining shut up in his palace.

This temporary king sends his numerous satellites in all directions

to seize and confiscate whatever they can find in the bazaar and

open shops; even the ships and junks which arrive in harbour during

the three days are forfeited to him and must be redeemed. He goes to

a field in the middle of the city, whither they bring a gilded

plough drawn by gaily-decked oxen. After the plough has been

anointed and the oxen rubbed with incense, the mock king traces nine

furrows with the plough, followed by aged dames of the palace

scattering the first seed of the season. As soon as the nine furrows

are drawn, the crowd of spectators rushes in and scrambles for the

seed which has just been sown, believing that, mixed with the

seed-rice, it will ensure a plentiful crop. Then the oxen are

unyoked, and rice, maize, sesame, sago, bananas, sugar-cane, melons,

and so on, are set before them; whatever they eat first will, it is

thought, be dear in the year following, though some people interpret

the omen in the opposite sense. During this time the temporary king

stands leaning against a tree with his right foot resting on his

left knee. From standing thus on one foot he is popularly known as

King Hop; but his official title is Phaya Phollathep "Lord of the

Heavenly Hosts." He is a sort of Minister of Agriculture; all

disputes about fields, rice, and so forth, are referred to him.

There is moreover another ceremony in which he personates the king.

It takes place in the second month (which falls in the cold season)

and lasts three days. He is conducted in procession to an open place

opposite the Temple of the Brahmans, where there are a number of

poles dressed like May-poles, upon which the Brahmans swing. All the

while that they swing and dance, the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has

to stand on one foot upon a seat which is made of bricks plastered

over, covered with a white cloth, and hung with tapestry. He is

supported by a wooden frame with a gilt canopy, and two Brahmans

stand one on each side of him. The dancing Brahmans carry buffalo

horns with which they draw water from a large copper caldron and

sprinkle it on the spectators; this is supposed to bring good luck,

causing the people to dwell in peace and quiet, health and

prosperity. The time during which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has

to stand on one foot is about three hours. This is thought "to prove

the dispositions of the Devattas and spirits." If he lets his foot

down "he is liable to forfeit his property and have his family

enslaved by the king, as it is believed to be a bad omen, portending

destruction to the state, and instability to the throne. But if he

stand firm he is believed to have gained a victory over evil

spirits, and he has moreover the privilege, ostensibly at least, of

seizing any ship which may enter the harbour during these three

days, and taking its contents, and also of entering any open shop in

the town and carrying away what he chooses."

Such were the duties and privileges of the Siamese King Hop down to

about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. Under the reign

of the late enlightened monarch this quaint personage was to some

extent both shorn of the glories and relieved of the burden of his

office. He still watches, as of old, the Brahmans rushing through

the air in a swing suspended between two tall masts, each some

ninety feet high; but he is allowed to sit instead of stand, and,

although public opinion still expects him to keep his right foot on

his left knee during the whole of the ceremony, he would incur no

legal penalty were he, to the great chagrin of the people, to put

his weary foot to the ground. Other signs, too, tell of the invasion

of the East by the ideas and civilisation of the West. The

thoroughfares that lead to the scene of the performance are blocked

with carriages: lamp-posts and telegraph posts, to which eager

spectators cling like monkeys, rise above the dense crowd; and,

while a tatterdemalion band of the old style, in gaudy garb of

vermilion and yellow, bangs and tootles away on drums and trumpets

of an antique pattern, the procession of barefooted soldiers in

brilliant uniforms steps briskly along to the lively strains of a

modern military band playing "Marching through Georgia."

On the first day of the sixth month, which was regarded as the

beginning of the year, the king and people of Samarcand used to put

on new clothes and cut their hair and beards. Then they repaired to

a forest near the capital where they shot arrows on horseback for

seven days. On the last day the target was a gold coin, and he who

hit it had the right to be king for one day. In Upper Egypt on the

first day of the solar year by Coptic reckoning, that is, on the

tenth of September, when the Nile has generally reached its highest

point, the regular government is suspended for three days and every

town chooses its own ruler. This temporary lord wears a sort of tall

fool's cap and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange

mantle. With a wand of office in his hand and attended by men

disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the

Governor's house. The latter allows himself to be deposed; and the

mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to the decisions

of which even the governor and his officials must bow. After three

days the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in

which he was encased is committed to the flames, and from its ashes

the Fellah creeps forth. The custom perhaps points to an old

practice of burning a real king in grim earnest. In Uganda the

brothers of the king used to be burned, because it was not lawful to

shed the royal blood.

The Mohammedan students of Fez, in Morocco, are allowed to appoint a

sultan of their own, who reigns for a few weeks, and is known as

_Sultan t-tulba,_ "the Sultan of the Scribes." This brief authority

is put up for auction and knocked down to the highest bidder. It

brings some substantial privileges with it, for the holder is freed

from taxes thenceforward, and he has the right of asking a favour

from the real sultan. That favour is seldom refused; it usually

consists in the release of a prisoner. Moreover, the agents of the

student-sultan levy fines on the shopkeepers and householders,

against whom they trump up various humorous charges. The temporary

sultan is surrounded with the pomp of a real court, and parades the

streets in state with music and shouting, while a royal umbrella is

held over his head. With the so-called fines and free-will

offerings, to which the real sultan adds a liberal supply of

provisions, the students have enough to furnish forth a magnificent

banquet; and altogether they enjoy themselves thoroughly, indulging

in all kinds of games and amusements. For the first seven days the

mock sultan remains in the college; then he goes about a mile out of

the town and encamps on the bank of the river, attended by the

students and not a few of the citizens. On the seventh day of his

stay outside the town he is visited by the real sultan, who grants

him his request and gives him seven more days to reign, so that the

reign of "the Sultan of the Scribes" nominally lasts three weeks.

But when six days of the last week have passed the mock sultan runs

back to the town by night. This temporary sultanship always falls in

spring, about the beginning of April. Its origin is said to have

been as follows. When Mulai Rasheed II. was fighting for the throne

in 1664 or 1665, a certain Jew usurped the royal authority at Taza.

But the rebellion was soon suppressed through the loyalty and

devotion of the students. To effect their purpose they resorted to

an ingenious stratagem. Forty of them caused themselves to be packed

in chests which were sent as a present to the usurper. In the dead

of night, while the unsuspecting Jew was slumbering peacefully among

the packing-cases, the lids were stealthily raised, the brave forty

crept forth, slew the usurper, and took possession of the city in

the name of the real sultan, who, to mark his gratitude for the help

thus rendered him in time of need, conferred on the students the

right of annually appointing a sultan of their own. The narrative

has all the air of a fiction devised to explain an old custom, of

which the real meaning and origin had been forgotten.

A custom of annually appointing a mock king for a single day was

observed at Lostwithiel in Cornwall down to the sixteenth century.

On "little Easter Sunday" the freeholders of the town and manor

assembled together, either in person or by their deputies, and one

among them, as it fell to his lot by turn, gaily attired and

gallantly mounted, with a crown on his head, a sceptre in his hand,

and a sword borne before him, rode through the principal street to

the church, dutifully attended by all the rest on horseback. The

clergyman in his best robes received him at the churchyard stile and

conducted him to hear divine service. On leaving the church he

repaired, with the same pomp, to a house provided for his reception.

Here a feast awaited him and his suite, and being set at the head of

the table he was served on bended knees, with all the rites due to

the estate of a prince. The ceremony ended with the dinner, and

every man returned home.

Sometimes the temporary king occupies the throne, not annually, but

once for all at the beginning of each reign. Thus in the kingdom of

Jambi in Sumatra it is the custom that at the beginning of a new

reign a man of the people should occupy the throne and exercise the

royal prerogatives for a single day. The origin of the custom is

explained by a tradition that there were once five royal brothers,

the four elder of whom all declined the throne on the ground of

various bodily defects, leaving it to their youngest brother. But

the eldest occupied the throne for one day, and reserved for his

descendants a similar privilege at the beginning of every reign.

Thus the office of temporary king is hereditary in a family akin to

the royal house. In Bilaspur it seems to be the custom, after the

death of a Rajah, for a Brahman to eat rice out of the dead Rajah's

hand, and then to occupy the throne for a year. At the end of the

year the Brahman receives presents and is dismissed from the

territory, being forbidden apparently to return. "The idea seems to

be that the spirit of the Rájá enters into the Bráhman who eats the

_khir_ (rice and milk) out of his hand when he is dead, as the

Brahman is apparently carefully watched during the whole year, and

not allowed to go away." The same or a similar custom is believed to

obtain among the hill states about Kangra. The custom of banishing

the Brahman who represents the king may be a substitute for putting

him to death. At the installation of a prince of Carinthia a

peasant, in whose family the office was hereditary, ascended a

marble stone which stood surrounded by meadows in a spacious valley;

on his right stood a black mother-cow, on his left a lean ugly mare.

A rustic crowd gathered about him. Then the future prince, dressed

as a peasant and carrying a shepherd's staff, drew near, attended by

courtiers and magistrates. On perceiving him the peasant called out,

"Who is this whom I see coming so proudly along?" The people

answered, "The prince of the land." The peasant was then prevailed

on to surrender the marble seat to the prince on condition of

receiving sixty pence, the cow and mare, and exemption from taxes.

But before yielding his place he gave the prince a light blow on the

cheek.

Some points about these temporary kings deserve to be specially

noticed before we pass to the next branch of the evidence. In the

first place, the Cambodian and Siamese examples show clearly that it

is especially the divine or magical functions of the king which are

transferred to his temporary substitute. This appears from the

belief that by keeping up his foot the temporary king of Siam gained

a victory over the evil spirits, whereas by letting it down he

imperilled the existence of the state. Again, the Cambodian ceremony

of trampling down the "mountain of rice," and the Siamese ceremony

of opening the ploughing and sowing, are charms to produce a

plentiful harvest, as appears from the belief that those who carry

home some of the trampled rice, or of the seed sown, will thereby

secure a good crop. Moreover, when the Siamese representative of the

king is guiding the plough, the people watch him anxiously, not to

see whether he drives a straight furrow, but to mark the exact point

on his leg to which the skirt of his silken robe reaches; for on

that is supposed to hang the state of the weather and the crops

during the ensuing season. If the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts hitches

up his garment above his knee, the weather will be wet and heavy

rains will spoil the harvest. If he lets it trail to his ankle, a

drought will be the consequence. But fine weather and heavy crops

will follow if the hem of his robe hangs exactly half-way down the

calf of his leg. So closely is the course of nature, and with it the

weal or woe of the people, dependent on the minutest act or gesture

of the king's representative. But the task of making the crops grow,

thus deputed to the temporary kings, is one of the magical functions

regularly supposed to be discharged by kings in primitive society.

The rule that the mock king must stand on one foot upon a raised

seat in the rice-field was perhaps originally meant as a charm to

make the crop grow high; at least this was the object of a similar

ceremony observed by the old Prussians. The tallest girl, standing

on one foot upon a seat, with her lap full of cakes, a cup of brandy

in her right hand and a piece of elm-bark or linden-bark in her

left, prayed to the god Waizganthos that the flax might grow as high

as she was standing. Then, after draining the cup, she had it

refilled, and poured the brandy on the ground as an offering to

Waizganthos, and threw down the cakes for his attendant sprites. If

she remained steady on one foot throughout the ceremony, it was an

omen that the flax crop would be good; but if she let her foot down,

it was feared that the crop might fail. The same significance

perhaps attaches to the swinging of the Brahmans, which the Lord of

the Heavenly Hosts had formerly to witness standing on one foot. On

the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic it might be

thought that the higher the priests swing the higher will grow the

rice. For the ceremony is described as a harvest festival, and

swinging is practised by the Letts of Russia with the avowed

intention of influencing the growth of the crops. In the spring and

early summer, between Easter and St. John's Day (the summer

solstice), every Lettish peasant is said to devote his leisure hours

to swinging diligently; for the higher he rises in the air the

higher will his flax grow that season.

In the foregoing cases the temporary king is appointed annually in

accordance with a regular custom. But in other cases the appointment

is made only to meet a special emergency, such as to relieve the

real king from some actual or threatened evil by diverting it to a

substitute, who takes his place on the throne for a short time. The

history of Persia furnishes instances of such occasional substitutes

for the Shah. Thus Shah Abbas the Great, being warned by his

astrologers in the year 1591 that a serious danger impended over

him, attempted to avert the omen by abdicating the throne and

appointing a certain unbeliever named Yusoofee, probably a

Christian, to reign in his stead. The substitute was accordingly

crowned, and for three days, if we may trust the Persian historians,

he enjoyed not only the name and the state but the power of the

king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to death: the decree

of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and Abbas, who

reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was promised by his

astrologers a long and glorious reign.

XXVI. Sacrifice of the King's Son

A POINT to notice about the temporary kings described in the

foregoing chapter is that in two places (Cambodia and Jambi) they

come of a stock which is believed to be akin to the royal family. If

the view here taken of the origin of these temporary kingships is

correct, we can easily understand why the king's substitute should

sometimes be of the same race as the king. When the king first

succeeded in getting the life of another accepted as a sacrifice

instead of his own, he would have to show that the death of that

other would serve the purpose quite as well as his own would have

done. Now it was as a god or demigod that the king had to die;

therefore the substitute who died for him had to be invested, at

least for the occasion, with the divine attributes of the king.

This, as we have just seen, was certainly the case with the

temporary kings of Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with the

supernatural functions, which in an earlier stage of society were

the special attributes of the king. But no one could so well

represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be

supposed to share the divine afflatus of his father. No one,

therefore, could so appropriately die for the king and, through him,

for the whole people, as the king's son.

We have seen that according to tradition, Aun or On, King of Sweden,

sacrificed nine of his sons to Odin at Upsala in order that his own

life might be spared. After he had sacrificed his second son he

received from the god an answer that he should live so long as he

gave him one of his sons every ninth year. When he had sacrificed

his seventh son, he still lived, but was so feeble that he could not

walk but had to be carried in a chair. Then he offered up his eighth

son, and lived nine years more, lying in his bed. After that he

sacrificed his ninth son, and lived another nine years, but so that

he drank out of a horn like a weaned child. He now wished to

sacrifice his only remaining son to Odin, but the Swedes would not

allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala.

In ancient Greece there seems to have been at least one kingly house

of great antiquity of which the eldest sons were always liable to be

sacrificed in room of their royal sires. When Xerxes was marching

through Thessaly at the head of his mighty host to attack the

Spartans at Thermopylae, he came to the town of Alus. Here he was

shown the sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, about which his guides told

him a strange tale. It ran somewhat as follows. Once upon a time the

king of the country, by name Athamas, married a wife Nephele, and

had by her a son called Phrixus and a daughter named Helle.

Afterwards he took to himself a second wife called Ino, by whom he

had two sons, Learchus and Melicertes. But his second wife was

jealous of her stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle, and plotted their

death. She went about very cunningly to compass her bad end. First

of all she persuaded the women of the country to roast the seed corn

secretly before it was committed to the ground. So next year no

crops came up and the people died of famine. Then the king sent

messengers to the oracle at Delphi to enquire the cause of the

dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the messenger to give out

as the answer of the god that the dearth would never cease till the

children of Athamas by his first wife had been sacrificed to Zeus.

When Athamas heard that, he sent for the children, who were with the

sheep. But a ram with a fleece of gold opened his lips, and speaking

with the voice of a man warned the children of their danger. So they

mounted the ram and fled with him over land and sea. As they flew

over the sea, the girl slipped from the animal's back, and falling

into water was drowned. But her brother Phrixus was brought safe to

the land of Colchis, where reigned a child of the sun. Phrixus

married the king's daughter, and she bore him a son Cytisorus. And

there he sacrificed the ram with the golden fleece to Zeus the God

of Flight; but some will have it that he sacrificed the animal to

Laphystian Zeus. The golden fleece itself he gave to his wife's

father, who nailed it to an oak tree, guarded by a sleepless dragon

in a sacred grove of Ares. Meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded

that King Athamas himself should be sacrificed as an expiatory

offering for the whole country. So the people decked him with

garlands like a victim and led him to the altar, where they were

just about to sacrifice him when he was rescued either by his

grandson Cytisorus, who arrived in the nick of time from Colchis, or

by Hercules, who brought tidings that the king's son Phrixus was yet

alive. Thus Athamas was saved, but afterward he went mad, and

mistaking his son Learchus for a wild beast, shot him dead. Next he

attempted the life of his remaining son Melicertes, but the child

was rescued by his mother Ino, who ran and threw herself and him

from a high rock into the sea. Mother and son were changed into

marine divinities, and the son received special homage in the isle

of Tenedos, where babes were sacrificed to him. Thus bereft of wife

and children the unhappy Athamas quitted his country, and on

enquiring of the oracle where he should dwell was told to take up

his abode wherever he should be entertained by wild beasts. He fell

in with a pack of wolves devouring sheep, and when they saw him they

fled and left him the bleeding remnants of their prey. In this way

the oracle was fulfilled. But because King Athamas had not been

sacrificed as a sin-offering for the whole country, it was divinely

decreed that the eldest male scion of his family in each generation

should be sacrificed without fail, if ever he set foot in the

town-hall, where the offerings were made to Laphystian Zeus by one

of the house of Athamas. Many of the family, Xerxes was informed,

had fled to foreign lands to escape this doom; but some of them had

returned long afterwards, and being caught by the sentinels in the

act of entering the town-hall were wreathed as victims, led forth in

procession, and sacrificed. These instances appear to have been

notorious, if not frequent; for the writer of a dialogue attributed

to Plato, after speaking of the immolation of human victims by the

Carthaginians, adds that such practices were not unknown among the

Greeks, and he refers with horror to the sacrifices offered on Mount

Lycaeus and by the descendants of Athamas.

The suspicion that this barbarous custom by no means fell into

disuse even in later days is strengthened by a case of human

sacrifice which occurred in Plutarch's time at Orchomenus, a very

ancient city of Boeotia, distant only a few miles across the plain

from the historian's birthplace. Here dwelt a family of which the

men went by the name of Psoloeis or "Sooty," and the women by the

name of Oleae or "Destructive." Every year at the festival of the

Agrionia the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn

sword, and if he overtook one of them he had the right to slay her.

In Plutarch's lifetime the right was actually exercised by a priest

Zoilus. The family thus liable to furnish at least one human victim

every year was of royal descent, for they traced their lineage to

Minyas, the famous old king of Orchomenus, the monarch of fabulous

wealth, whose stately treasury, as it is called, still stands in

ruins at the point where the long rocky hill of Orchomenus melts

into the vast level expanse of the Copaic plain. Tradition ran that

the king's three daughters long despised the other women of the

country for yielding to the Bacchic frenzy, and sat at home in the

king's house scornfully plying the distaff and the loom, while the

rest, wreathed with flowers, their dishevelled locks streaming to

the wind, roamed in ecstasy the barren mountains that rise above

Orchomenus, making the solitude of the hills to echo to the wild

music of cymbals and tambourines. But in time the divine fury

infected even the royal damsels in their quiet chamber; they were

seized with a fierce longing to partake of human flesh, and cast

lots among themselves which should give up her child to furnish a

cannibal feast. The lot fell on Leucippe, and she surrendered her

son Hippasus, who was torn limb from limb by the three. From these

misguided women sprang the Oleae and the Psoloeis, of whom the men

were said to be so called because they wore sad-coloured raiment in

token of their mourning and grief.

Now this practice of taking human victims from a family of royal

descent at Orchomenus is all the more significant because Athamas

himself is said to have reigned in the land of Orchomenus even

before the time of Minyas, and because over against the city there

rises Mount Laphystius, on which, as at Alus in Thessaly, there was

a sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, where, according to tradition,

Athamas purposed to sacrifice his two children Phrixus and Helle. On

the whole, comparing the traditions about Athamas with the custom

that obtained with regard to his descendants in historical times, we

may fairly infer that in Thessaly and probably in Boeotia there

reigned of old a dynasty of which the kings were liable to be

sacrificed for the good of the country to the god called Laphystian

Zeus, but that they contrived to shift the fatal responsibility to

their offspring, of whom the eldest son was regularly destined to

the altar. As time went on, the cruel custom was so far mitigated

that a ram was accepted as a vicarious sacrifice in room of the

royal victim, provided always that the prince abstained from setting

foot in the town-hall where the sacrifices were offered to

Laphystian Zeus by one of his kinsmen. But if he were rash enough to

enter the place of doom, to thrust himself wilfully, as it were, on

the notice of the god who had good-naturedly winked at the

substitution of a ram, the ancient obligation which had been

suffered to lie in abeyance recovered all its force, and there was

no help for it but he must die. The tradition which associated the

sacrifice of the king or his children with a great dearth points

clearly to the belief, so common among primitive folk, that the king

is responsible for the weather and the crops, and that he may justly

pay with his life for the inclemency of the one or the failure of

the other. Athamas and his line, in short, appear to have united

divine or magical with royal functions; and this view is strongly

supported by the claims to divinity which Salmoneus, the brother of

Athamas, is said to have set up. We have seen that this presumptuous

mortal professed to be no other than Zeus himself, and to wield the

thunder and lightning, of which he made a trumpery imitation by the

help of tinkling kettles and blazing torches. If we may judge from

analogy, his mock thunder and lightning were no mere scenic

exhibition designed to deceive and impress the beholders; they were

enchantments practised by the royal magician for the purpose of

bringing about the celestial phenomena which they feebly mimicked.

Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in a time of national

danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice for the

people. Thus Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews, says: "It was

an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a

city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole

people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children

thus offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the

Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land and having an

only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenician tongue Jeoud

signifies 'only begotten'), dressed him in royal robes and

sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when the country was

in great danger from the enemy." When the king of Moab was besieged

by the Israelites and hard beset, he took his eldest son, who should

have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering on

the wall.

XXVII. Succession to the Soul

TO THE VIEW that in early times, and among barbarous races, kings

have frequently been put to death at the end of a short reign, it

may be objected that such a custom would tend to the extinction of

the royal family. The objection may be met by observing, first, that

the kingship is often not confined to one family, but may be shared

in turn by several; second, that the office is frequently not

hereditary, but is open to men of any family, even to foreigners,

who may fulfil the requisite conditions, such as marrying a princess

or vanquishing the king in battle; and, third, that even if the

custom did tend to the extinction of a dynasty, that is not a

consideration which would prevent its observance among people less

provident of the future and less heedful of human life than

ourselves. Many races, like many individuals, have indulged in

practices which must in the end destroy them. The Polynesians seem

regularly to have killed two-thirds of their children. In some parts

of East Africa the proportion of infants massacred at birth is said

to be the same. Only children born in certain presentations are

allowed to live. The Jagas, a conquering tribe in Angola, are

reported to have put to death all their children, without exception,

in order that the women might not be cumbered with babies on the

march. They recruited their numbers by adopting boys and girls of

thirteen or fourteen years of age, whose parents they had killed and

eaten. Among the Mbaya Indians of South America the women used to

murder all their children except the last, or the one they believed

to be the last. If one of them had another child afterwards, she

killed it. We need not wonder that this practice entirely destroyed

a branch of the Mbaya nation, who had been for many years the most

formidable enemies of the Spaniards. Among the Lengua Indians of the

Gran Chaco, the missionaries discovered what they describe as "a

carefully planned system of racial suicide, by the practice of

infanticide by abortion, and other methods." Nor is infanticide the

only mode in which a savage tribe commits suicide. A lavish use of

the poison ordeal may be equally effective. Some time ago a small

tribe named Uwet came down from the hill country, and settled on the

left branch of the Calabar River in West Africa. When the

missionaries first visited the place, they found the population

considerable, distributed into three villages. Since then the

constant use of the poison ordeal has almost extinguished the tribe.

On one occasion the whole population took poison to prove their

innocence. About half perished on the spot, and the remnant, we are

told, still continuing their superstitious practice, must soon

become extinct. With such examples before us we need not hesitate to

believe that many tribes have felt no scruple or delicacy in

observing a custom which tends to wipe out a single family. To

attribute such scruples to them is to commit the common, the

perpetually repeated mistake of judging the savage by the standard

of European civilisation. If any of my readers set out with the

notion that all races of men think and act much in the same way as

educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom

collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so

erroneous a prepossession.

The explanation here given of the custom of killing divine persons

assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the

soul of the slain divinity is transmitted to his successor. Of this

transmission I have no direct proof except in the case of the

Shilluk, among whom the practice of killing the divine king prevails

in a typical form, and with whom it is a fundamental article of

faith that the soul of the divine founder of the dynasty is immanent

in every one of his slain successors. But if this is the only actual

example of such a belief which I can adduce, analogy seems to render

it probable that a similar succession to the soul of the slain god

has been supposed to take place in other instances, though direct

evidence of it is wanting. For it has been already shown that the

soul of the incarnate deity is often supposed to transmigrate at

death into another incarnation; and if this takes place when the

death is a natural one, there seems no reason why it should not take

place when the death has been brought about by violence. Certainly

the idea that the soul of a dying person may be transmitted to his

successor is perfectly familiar to primitive peoples. In Nias the

eldest son usually succeeds his father in the chieftainship. But if

from any bodily or mental defect the eldest son is disqualified for

ruling, the father determines in his lifetime which of his sons

shall succeed him. In order, however, to establish his right of

succession, it is necessary that the son upon whom his father's

choice falls shall catch in his mouth or in a bag the last breath,

and with it the soul, of the dying chief. For whoever catches his

last breath is chief equally with the appointed successor. Hence the

other brothers, and sometimes also strangers, crowd round the dying

man to catch his soul as it passes. The houses in Nias are raised

above the ground on posts, and it has happened that when the dying

man lay with his face on the floor, one of the candidates has bored

a hole in the floor and sucked in the chief's last breath through a

bamboo tube. When the chief has no son, his soul is caught in a bag,

which is fastened to an image made to represent the deceased; the

soul is then believed to pass into the image.

Sometimes it would appear that the spiritual link between a king and

the souls of his predecessors is formed by the possession of some

part of their persons. In southern Celebes the regalia often consist

of corporeal portions of deceased rajahs, which are treasured as

sacred relics and confer the right to the throne. Similarly among

the Sakalavas of southern Madagascar a vertebra of the neck, a nail,

and a lock of hair of a deceased king are placed in a crocodile's

tooth and carefully kept along with the similar relics of his

predecessors in a house set apart for the purpose. The possession of

these relics constitutes the right to the throne. A legitimate heir

who should be deprived of them would lose all his authority over the

people, and on the contrary a usurper who should make himself master

of the relics would be acknowledged king without dispute. When the

Alake or king of Abeokuta in West Africa dies, the principal men

decapitate his body, and placing the head in a large earthen vessel

deliver it to the new sovereign; it becomes his fetish and he is

bound to pay it honours. Sometimes, in order apparently that the new

sovereign may inherit more surely the magical and other virtues of

the royal line, he is required to eat a piece of his dead

predecessor. Thus at Abeokuta not only was the head of the late king

presented to his successor, but the tongue was cut out and given him

to eat. Hence, when the natives wish to signify that the sovereign

reigns, they say, "He has eaten the king." A custom of the same sort

is still practised at Ibadan, a large town in the interior of Lagos,

West Africa. When the king dies his head is cut off and sent to his

nominal suzerain, the Alafin of Oyo, the paramount king of Yoruba

land; but his heart is eaten by his successor. This ceremony was

performed not very many years ago at the accession of a new king of

Ibadan.

Taking the whole of the preceding evidence into account, we may

fairly suppose that when the divine king or priest is put to death

his spirit is believed to pass into his successor. In point of fact,

among the Shilluk of the White Nile, who regularly kill their divine

kings, every king on his accession has to perform a ceremony which

appears designed to convey to him the same sacred and worshipful

spirit which animated all his predecessors, one after the other, on

the throne.

XXVIII. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit

1. The Whitsuntide Mummers

IT remains to ask what light the custom of killing the divine king

or priest sheds upon the special subject to our enquiry. In an

earlier part of this work we saw reason to suppose that the King of

the Wood at Nemi was regarded as an incarnation of a tree-spirit or

of the spirit of vegetation, and that as such he would be endowed,

in the belief of his worshippers, with a magical power of making the

trees to bear fruit, the crops to grow, and so on. His life must

therefore have been held very precious by his worshippers, and was

probably hedged in by a system of elaborate precautions or taboos

like those by which, in so many places, the life of the man-god has

been guarded against the malignant influence of demons and

sorcerers. But we have seen that the very value attached to the life

of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only means of

preserving it from the inevitable decay of age. The same reasoning

would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be killed in

order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be transferred

in its integrity to his successor. The rule that he held office till

a stronger should slay him might be supposed to secure both the

preservation of his divine life in full vigour and its transference

to a suitable successor as soon as that vigour began to be impaired.

For so long as he could maintain his position by the strong hand, it

might be inferred that his natural force was not abated; whereas his

defeat and death at the hands of another proved that his strength

was beginning to fail and that it was time his divine life should be

lodged in a less dilapidated tabernacle. This explanation of the

rule that the King of the Wood had to be slain by his successor at

least renders that rule perfectly intelligible. It is strongly

supported by the theory and practice of the Shilluk, who put their

divine king to death at the first signs of failing health, lest his

decrepitude should entail a corresponding failure of vital energy on

the corn, the cattle, and men. Moreover, it is countenanced by the

analogy of the Chitomé, upon whose life the existence of the world

was supposed to hang, and who was therefore slain by his successor

as soon as he showed signs of breaking up. Again, the terms on which

in later times the King of Calicut held office are identical with

those attached to the office of King of the Wood, except that

whereas the former might be assailed by a candidate at any time, the

King of Calicut might only be attacked once every twelve years. But

as the leave granted to the King of Calicut to reign so long as he

could defend himself against all comers was a mitigation of the old

rule which set a fixed term to his life, so we may conjecture that

the similar permission granted to the King of the Wood was a

mitigation of an older custom of putting him to death at the end of

a definite period. In both cases the new rule gave to the god-man at

least a chance for his life, which under the old rule was denied

him; and people probably reconciled themselves to the change by

reflecting that so long as the god-man could maintain himself by the

sword against all assaults, there was no reason to apprehend that

the fatal decay had set in.

The conjecture that the King of the Wood was formerly put to death

at the expiry of a fixed term, without being allowed a chance for

his life, will be confirmed if evidence can be adduced of a custom

of periodically killing his counterparts, the human representatives

of the tree-spirit, in Northern Europe. Now in point of fact such a

custom has left unmistakable traces of itself in the rural festivals

of the peasantry. To take examples.

At Niederpöring, in Lower Bavaria, the Whitsuntide representative of

the tree-spirit--the _Pfingstl_ as he was called--was clad from top

to toe in leaves and flowers. On his head he wore a high pointed

cap, the ends of which rested on his shoulders, only two holes being

left in it for his eyes. The cap was covered with water-flowers and

surmounted with a nosegay of peonies. The sleeves of his coat were

also made of water-plants, and the rest of his body was enveloped in

alder and hazel leaves. On each side of him marched a boy holding up

one of the _Pfingstl's_ arms. These two boys carried drawn swords,

and so did most of the others who formed the procession. They

stopped at every house where they hoped to receive a present; and

the people, in hiding, soused the leaf-clad boy with water. All

rejoiced when he was well drenched. Finally he waded into the brook

up to his middle; whereupon one of the boys, standing on the bridge,

pretended to cut off his head. At Wurmlingen, in Swabia, a score of

young fellows dress themselves on Whit-Monday in white shirts and

white trousers, with red scarves round their waists and swords

hanging from the scarves. They ride on horseback into the wood, led

by two trumpeters blowing their trumpets. In the wood they cut down

leafy oak branches, in which they envelop from head to foot him who

was the last of their number to ride out of the village. His legs,

however, are encased separately, so that he may be able to mount his

horse again. Further, they give him a long artificial neck, with an

artificial head and a false face on the top of it. Then a May-tree

is cut, generally an aspen or beech about ten feet high; and being

decked with coloured handkerchiefs and ribbons it is entrusted to a

special "May-bearer." The cavalcade then returns with music and song

to the village. Amongst the personages who figure in the procession

are a Moorish king with a sooty face and a crown on his head, a Dr.

Iron-Beard, a corporal, and an executioner. They halt on the village

green, and each of the characters makes a speech in rhyme. The

executioner announces that the leaf-clad man has been condemned to

death, and cuts off his false head. Then the riders race to the

May-tree, which has been set up a little way off. The first man who

succeeds in wrenching it from the ground as he gallops past keeps it

with all its decorations. The ceremony is observed every second or

third year.

In Saxony and Thüringen there is a Whitsuntide ceremony called

"chasing the Wild Man out of the bush," or "fetching the Wild Man

out of the wood." A young fellow is enveloped in leaves or moss and

called the Wild Man. He hides in the wood and the other lads of the

village go out to seek him. They find him, lead him captive out of

the wood, and fire at him with blank muskets. He falls like dead to

the ground, but a lad dressed as a doctor bleeds him, and he comes

to life again. At this they rejoice, and, binding him fast on a

waggon, take him to the village, where they tell all the people how

they have caught the Wild Man. At every house they receive a gift.

In the Erzgebirge the following custom was annually observed at

Shrovetide about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Two men

disguised as Wild Men, the one in brushwood and moss, the other in

straw, were led about the streets, and at last taken to the

market-place, where they were chased up and down, shot and stabbed.

Before falling they reeled about with strange gestures and spirted

blood on the people from bladders which they carried. When they were

down, the huntsmen placed them on boards and carried them to the

ale-house, the miners marching beside them and winding blasts on

their mining tools as if they had taken a noble head of game. A very

similar Shrovetide custom is still observed near Schluckenau in

Bohemia. A man dressed up as a Wild Man is chased through several

streets till he comes to a narrow lane across which a cord is

stretched. He stumbles over the cord and, falling to the ground, is

overtaken and caught by his pursuers. The executioner runs up and

stabs with his sword a bladder filled with blood which the Wild Man

wears round his body; so the Wild Man dies, while a stream of blood

reddens the ground. Next day a straw-man, made up to look like the

Wild Man, is placed on a litter, and, accompanied by a great crowd,

is taken to a pool into which it is thrown by the executioner. The

ceremony is called "burying the Carnival."

In Semic (Bohemia) the custom of beheading the King is observed on

Whit-Monday. A troop of young people disguise themselves; each is

girt with a girdle of bark and carries a wooden sword and a trumpet

of willow-bark. The King wears a robe of tree-bark adorned with

flowers, on his head is a crown of bark decked with flowers and

branches, his feet are wound about with ferns, a mask hides his

face, and for a sceptre he has a hawthorn switch in his hand. A lad

leads him through the village by a rope fastened to his foot, while

the rest dance about, blow their trumpets, and whistle. In every

farmhouse the King is chased round the room, and one of the troop,

amid much noise and outcry, strikes with his sword a blow on the

King's robe of bark till it rings again. Then a gratuity is

demanded. The ceremony of decapitation, which is here somewhat

slurred over, is carried out with a greater semblance of reality in

other parts of Bohemia. Thus in some villages of the Königgrätz

district on Whit-Monday the girls assemble under one lime-tree and

the young men under another, all dressed in their best and tricked

out with ribbons. The young men twine a garland for the Queen, and

the girls another for the King. When they have chosen the King and

Queen they all go in procession two and two, to the ale-house, from

the balcony of which the crier proclaims the names of the King and

Queen. Both are then invested with the insignia of their office and

are crowned with the garlands, while the music plays up. Then some

one gets on a bench and accuses the King of various offences, such

as ill-treating the cattle. The King appeals to witnesses and a

trial ensues, at the close of which the judge, who carries a white

wand as his badge of office, pronounces a verdict of "Guilty," or

"Not guilty." If the verdict is "Guilty," the judge breaks his wand,

the King kneels on a white cloth, all heads are bared, and a soldier

sets three or four hats, one above the other, on his Majesty's head.

The judge then pronounces the word "Guilty" thrice in a loud voice,

and orders the crier to behead the King. The crier obeys by striking

off the King's hats with the wooden sword.