CHAPTER VIII. THE SATURNALIA AND KINDRED FESTIVALS.

§ 1. The Roman Saturnalia.

(M238) In an earlier part of this book we saw that many peoples have been

used to observe an annual period of license, when the customary restraints

of law and morality are thrown aside, when the whole population give

themselves up to extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker

passions find a vent which would never be allowed them in the more staid

and sober course of ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of

human nature, too often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime,

occur most commonly at the end of the year, and are frequently associated,

as I have had occasion to point out, with one or other of the agricultural

seasons, especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all

these periods of license the one which is best known and which in modern

languages has given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This famous

festival fell in December, the last month of the Roman year, and was

popularly supposed to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of

sowing and of husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and

beneficent king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on the

mountains together, taught them to till the ground, gave them laws, and

ruled in peace. His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought

forth abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no

baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious

and contented peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown:

all men had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king,

vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines

were reared in his honour, and many hills and high places in Italy bore

his name.(703) Yet the bright tradition of his reign was crossed by a dark

shadow: his altars are said to have been stained with the blood of human

victims, for whom a more merciful age afterwards substituted

effigies.(704) Of this gloomy side of the god’s religion there is little

or no trace in the descriptions which ancient writers have left us of the

Saturnalia. Feasting and revelry and all the mad pursuit of pleasure are

the features that seem to have especially marked this carnival of

antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets and public squares

and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth to the twenty-third of

December.(705)

(M239) But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it

seems to have struck the ancients themselves more than the license granted

to slaves at this time. The distinction between the free and the servile

classes was temporarily abolished. The slave might rail at his master,

intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not

even a word of reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at

any other season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or

death.(706) Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves

and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and

drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master.(707) So far

was this inversion of ranks carried, that each household became for a time

a mimic republic in which the high offices of state were discharged by the

slaves, who gave their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed

invested with all the dignity of the consulship, the praetorship, and the

bench.(708) Like the pale reflection of power thus accorded to bondsmen at

the Saturnalia was the mock kingship for which freemen cast lots at the

same season. The person on whom the lot fell enjoyed the title of king,

and issued commands of a playful and ludicrous nature to his temporary

subjects. One of them he might order to mix the wine, another to drink,

another to sing, another to dance, another to speak in his own dispraise,

another to carry a flute-girl on his back round the house.(709)

(M240) Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this

festive season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of society in

Saturn’s time, and that in general the Saturnalia passed for nothing more

or less than a temporary revival or restoration of the reign of that merry

monarch, we are tempted to surmise that the mock king who presided over

the revels may have originally represented Saturn himself. The conjecture

is strongly confirmed, if not established, by a very curious and

interesting account of the way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by

the Roman soldiers stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and

Diocletian. The account is preserved in a narrative of the martyrdom of

St. Dasius, which was unearthed from a Greek manuscript in the Paris

library, and published by Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer

descriptions of the event and of the custom are contained in manuscripts

at Milan and Berlin; one of them had already seen the light in an obscure

volume printed at Urbino in 1727, but its importance for the history of

the Roman religion, both ancient and modern, appears to have been

overlooked until Professor Cumont drew the attention of scholars to all

three narratives by publishing them together some years ago.(710)

According to these narratives, which have all the appearance of being

authentic, and of which the longest is probably based on official

documents, the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower Moesia celebrated the

Saturnalia year by year in the following manner. Thirty days before the

festival they chose by lot from amongst themselves a young and handsome

man, who was then clothed in royal attire to resemble Saturn. Thus arrayed

and attended by a multitude of soldiers he went about in public with full

license to indulge his passions and to taste of every pleasure, however

base and shameful. But if his reign was merry, it was short and ended

tragically; for when the thirty days were up and the festival of Saturn

had come, he cut his own throat on the altar of the god whom he

personated.(711) In the year 303 A.D. the lot fell upon the Christian

soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the heathen god and

soil his last days by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his

commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly

he was beheaded, as the Christian martyrologist records with minute

accuracy, at Durostorum by the soldier John on Friday the twentieth day of

November, being the twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the fourth hour.

Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its historical

character, which had been doubted or denied, has received strong

confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of the cathedral

which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is preserved, among other

remarkable antiquities, a white marble sarcophagus bearing a Greek

inscription, in characters of the age of Justinian, to the following

effect: “Here lies the holy martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum.” The

sarcophagus was transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the

church of San Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from

a Latin inscription let into the masonry, the martyr’s bones still repose

with those of two other saints. How long the sarcophagus was deposited in

the church of San Pellegrino, we do not know; but it is recorded to have

been there in the year 1650. We may suppose that the saint’s relics were

transferred for safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries

which followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged by

successive hordes of barbarian invaders.(712) At all events it appears

certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of the

martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a

real man, who suffered death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the

early centuries of the Christian era. Finding the narrative of the

nameless martyrologist thus established as to the principal fact recorded,

namely, the martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his

testimony as to the manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more

because his narrative is precise, circumstantial, and entirely free from

the miraculous element. Accordingly I conclude that the account which he

gives of the celebration of the Saturnalia among the Roman soldiers is

trustworthy.

(M241) This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King

of the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the

winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and of Tacitus. It seems to

prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or

merry-andrew whose only care was that the revelry should run high and the

fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the

hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the

clear frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte shewed his coronal of

snow. When we compare this comic monarch of the gay, the civilized

metropolis with his grim counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and

when we remember the long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic,

who in other ages and in other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in

sceptred palls, have played their little pranks for a few brief hours or

days, then passed before their time to a violent death, we can hardly

doubt that in the King of the Saturnalia at Rome, as he is depicted by

classical writers, we see only a feeble emasculated copy of that original,

whose strong features have been fortunately preserved for us by the

obscure author of the _Martyrdom of St. Dasius_. In other words, the

martyrologist’s account of the Saturnalia agrees so closely with the

accounts of similar rites elsewhere, which could not possibly have been

known to him, that the substantial accuracy of his description may be

regarded as established; and further, since the custom of putting a mock

king to death as a representative of a god cannot have grown out of a

practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel, whereas the

reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in assuming that in

an earlier and more barbarous age it was the universal practice in ancient

Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to choose a man who

played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary privileges of Saturn for

a season, and then died, whether by his own or another’s hand, whether by

the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in the character of the good

god who gave his life for the world. In Rome itself and other great towns

the growth of civilization had probably mitigated this cruel custom long

before the Augustan age, and transformed it into the innocent shape it

wears in the writings of the few classical writers who bestow a passing

notice on the holiday King of the Saturnalia. But in remoter districts the

older and sterner practice may long have survived; and even if after the

unification of Italy the barbarous usage was suppressed by the Roman

government, the memory of it would be handed down by the peasants and

would tend from time to time, as still happens with the lowest forms of

superstition among ourselves, to lead to a recrudescence of the practice,

especially among the rude soldiery on the outskirts of the empire over

whom the once iron hand of Rome was beginning to relax its grasp.(713)

(M242) The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the Carnival

of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts

that have come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not

amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that

is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most

lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure

personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and

dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the

feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace.(714) If the view here

suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other

than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of

the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were

over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean

on Twelfth Night and the mediaeval Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or

Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may perhaps have had a

similar origin. We will consider them in the following section.

§ 2. The King of the Bean and the Festival of Fools.

(M243) The custom of electing by lot a King and often also a Queen of the

Bean on Twelfth Night (Epiphany, the sixth of January) or on the eve of

that festival used to prevail in France, Belgium, Germany, and England,

and it is still kept up in some parts of France. It may be traced back to

the first half of the sixteenth century at least, and no doubt dates from

a very much more remote antiquity. At the French court the Kings

themselves did not disdain to countenance the mock royalty, and Louis XIV.

even supported with courtly grace the shadowy dignity in his own person.

Every family as a rule elected its own King. On the eve of the festival a

great cake was baked with a bean in it; the cake was divided in portions,

one for each member of the family, together with one for God, one for the

Virgin, and sometimes one also for the poor. The person who obtained the

portion containing the bean was proclaimed King of the Bean. Where a Queen

of the Bean was elected as well as a King, a second bean was sometimes

baked in the cake for the Queen. Thus at Blankenheim, near Neuerburg, in

the Eifel, a black and a white bean were baked in the cake; he who drew

the piece with the black bean was King, and she who drew the white bean

was Queen. In Franche-Comté, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,

they used to put as many white haricot beans in a hat as there were

persons present, and two coloured beans were added; the beans were drawn

at haphazard from the hat by a child, and they who got the coloured beans

were King and Queen. In England and perhaps elsewhere the practice was to

put a bean in the cake for the King and a pea for the Queen. But in some

places only the King was elected by lot, and after his election he chose

his Queen for himself. Sometimes a coin was substituted for the bean in

the cake; but though this usage was followed in southern Germany as early

as the first half of the sixteenth century, it is probably an innovation

on the older custom of employing a bean as the lot. In France the

distribution of the pieces of the cake among the persons present was made

in accordance with the directions of a child, the youngest boy present,

who was placed under or on the table and addressed by the name of “Phoebe”

or “Tébé”; he answered in Latin “_Domine_.” The master of the house,

holding a piece of the cake in his hand, asked the child to whom he should

give it, and the child named any person he pleased. Sometimes the first

slice of cake was regularly assigned to “the good God” and set aside for

the poor. In the name “Phoebe” or “Tébé,” by which the child was

addressed, learned antiquaries have detected a reference to the oracle of

Apollo; but more probably the name is a simple corruption of the Latin or

French word for bean (Latin _faba_, French _fève_). Immediately on his

election the King of the Bean was enthroned, saluted by all, and thrice

lifted up, while he made crosses with chalk on the beams and rafters of

the ceiling. Great virtue was attributed to these white crosses. They were

supposed to protect the house for the whole year against

“_all injuryes and harmes_

_Of cursed devils, sprites, and bugges, of conjurings and

charmes._”

Then feasting and revelry began and were kept up merrily without respect

of persons. Every time the King or Queen drank, the whole company was

expected to cry, “The King drinks!” or “The Queen drinks!” Any person who

failed to join in the cry was punished by having his face blackened with

soot or a burned cork or smeared with the lees of wine. In some parts of

the Ardennes the custom was to fasten great horns of paper in the hair of

the delinquent and to put a huge pair of spectacles on his nose; and he

had to wear these badges of infamy till the end of the festival.(715) The

custom of electing a King and Queen of the Bean on Twelfth Day is still

kept up all over the north of France. A miniature porcelain figure of a

child is sometimes substituted for the bean in the cake. If the lot,

whether bean or doll, falls to a boy he becomes King and chooses his

Queen; if it falls to a girl she becomes Queen and chooses her King.(716)

(M244) So far, apart from the crosses chalked up to ban hobgoblins,

witches, and bugs, the King and Queen of the Bean might seem to be merely

playful personages appointed at a season of festivity to lead the revels.

However, a more serious significance was sometimes attached to the office

and to the ceremonies of Twelfth Day in general. Thus in Lorraine the

height of the hemp crop in the coming year was prognosticated from the

height of the King and Queen; if the King was the taller of the two, it

was supposed that the male hemp would be higher than the female, but that

the contrary would happen if the Queen were taller than the King.(717)

Again, in the Vosges Mountains, on the borders of Franche-Comté, it is

customary on Twelfth Day for people to dance on the roofs in order to make

the hemp grow tall.(718) Further, in many places the beans used in the

cake were carried to the church to be blessed by the clergy, and people

drew omens from the cake as to the good or ill that would befall them

throughout the year. Moreover, certain forms of divination were resorted

to on Twelfth Night for the purpose of ascertaining in which month of the

year wheat would be dearest.(719)

(M245) In Franche-Comté, particularly in the Montagne du Doubs, it is

still the custom on the Eve of Twelfth Night (the fifth of January) to

light bonfires, which appear to have, in the popular mind, some reference

to the crops. The whole population takes part in the festivity. In the

afternoon the young folk draw a cart about the street collecting fuel.

Some people contribute faggots, others bundles of straw or of dry hemp

stalks. Towards evening the whole of the fuel thus collected is piled up a

little way from the houses and set on fire. While it blazes, the people

dance round it, crying, “Good year, come back! Bread and wine, come back!”

In the district of Pontarlier the young folk carry lighted torches about

the fields, shaking sparks over the sowed lands and shouting, “_Couaille,

couaille, blanconnie!_”—words of which the meaning has been

forgotten.(720) A similar custom is commonly observed on the same day (the

Eve of Twelfth Night, the fifth of January) in the Bocage of Normandy,

except that it is the fruit-trees rather than the sowed fields to which

the fire is applied. When the evening shadows have fallen on the

landscape, the darkness begins to be illuminated here and there by

twinkling points of fire, which multiply as the night grows late, till

they appear as numerous on earth as the stars in the sky. About every

village, in the fields and orchards, on the crests of the hills, wandering

lights may be discerned, vanishing and suddenly reappearing, gathering

together and then dispersing, pursuing each other capriciously, and

tracing broken lines, sparkling arabesques of fire in the gloom of night

The peasants are observing the ceremony of the “Moles and Field-mice”

(_Taupes et Mulots_); and that evening there is not a hamlet, not a farm,

hardly a solitary cottage that does not contribute its flame to the

general illumination, till the whole horizon seems in a blaze, and houses,

woods, and hills stand out in dark relief against the glow of the sky. The

villages vie with each other in the number and brilliancy of the fires

they can exhibit on this occasion. Woods and hedges are scoured to provide

the materials for the blaze. Torches of straw wound about poles are

provided in abundance; and armed with them men and women, lads and lasses,

boys and girls, pour forth from the houses at nightfall into the fields

and orchards. There they run about among the trees, waving the lighted

torches under the branches and striking the trunks with them so that the

sparks fly out in showers. And as they do so they sing or scream at the

top of their voices certain traditional curses against the animals and

insects that injure the fruit-trees. They bid the moles and field-mice to

depart from their orchards, threatening to break their bones and burn

their beards if they tarry. The more they do this, the larger, they

believe, will be the crop of fruit in the following autumn. When everybody

has rushed about his own orchard, meadow or pasture in this fashion, they

all assemble on a height or crest of a hill, where they picnic, each

bringing his share of provisions, cider, or brandy to the feast. There,

too, they kindle a huge bonfire, and dance round it, capering and

brandishing their torches in wild enthusiasm.(721) Customs of the same

sort used to be observed on the same day (the Eve of Epiphany, the fifth

of January) in the Ardennes. People ran about with burning torches,

commanding the moles and field-mice to go forth. Then they threw the

torches on the ground, and believed that by this proceeding they purified

the earth and made it fruitful.(722)

(M246) This ceremony appears to be intended to ensure a good crop of fruit

by burning out the animals and insects that harm the fruit-trees. In some

parts of England it used to be customary to light fires at the same season

for the purpose, apparently, of procuring a plentiful crop of wheat in the

ensuing autumn. Thus, “in the parish of Pauntley, a village on the borders

of the county of Gloucester, next Worcestershire, and in the

neighbourhood, a custom prevails, which is intended to prevent the smut in

wheat. On the Eve of Twelfth-day, all the servants of every farmer

assemble together in one of the fields that has been sown with wheat. At

the end of twelve lands, they make twelve fires in a row with straw,

around one of which, much larger than the rest, they drink a cheerful

glass of cider to their master’s health, and success to the future

harvest; then, returning home, they feast on cakes soaked in cider, which

they claim as a reward for their past labours in sowing the grain.”(723)

Similarly in Herefordshire, “on the Eve of Twelfth Day, at the approach of

evening, the farmers, their friends, servants, etc., all assemble, and,

near six o’clock, all walk together to a field where wheat is growing. The

highest part of the ground is always chosen, where twelve small fires, and

one large one are lighted up. The attendants, headed by the master of the

family, pledge the company in old cyder, which circulates freely on these

occasions. A circle is formed round the large fire, when a general shout

and hallooing takes place, which you hear answered from all the villages

and fields near; as I have myself counted fifty or sixty fires burning at

the same time, which are generally placed on some eminence. This being

finished, the company all return to the house, where the good housewife

and her maids are preparing a good supper, which on this occasion is very

plentiful. A large cake is always provided, with a hole in the middle.

After supper, the company all attend the bailiff (or head of the oxen) to

the wain-house, where the following particulars are observed. The master,

at the head of his friends, fills the cup (generally of strong ale), and

stands opposite the first or finest of the oxen (twenty-four of which I

have often seen tied up in their stalls together); he then pledges him in

a curious toast; the company then follow his example with all the other

oxen, addressing each by their name. This being over, the large cake is

produced, and is, with much ceremony, put on the horn of the first ox,

through the hole in the cake; he is then tickled to make him toss his

head: if he throws the cake behind, it is the mistress’s perquisite; if

before (in what is termed the _boosy_), the bailiff claims this prize.

This ended, the company all return to the house, the doors of which are in

the meantime locked, and not opened till some joyous songs are sung. On

entering, a scene of mirth and jollity commences, and reigns thro’ the

house till a late, or rather an early, hour, the next morning.”(724)

(M247) The custom was known as Wassailing and it was believed to have a

beneficial effect on the crops.(725) According to one Herefordshire

informant, “on Twelfth Day they make twelve fires of straw and one large

one to burn the old witch; they sing, drink, and dance round it; without

this festival they think they should have no crop.”(726) This explanation

of the large fire on Twelfth Day is remarkable and may supply the key to

the whole custom of kindling fires on the fields or in the orchards on

that day. We have seen that witches and fiends of various sorts are

believed to be let loose during the Twelve Days and that in some places

they are formally driven away on Twelfth Night.(727) It may well be that

the fires lighted on that day were everywhere primarily intended to burn

the witches and other maleficent beings swarming invisible in the

mischief-laden air, and that the benefit supposed to be conferred by the

fires on the crops was not so much the positive one of quickening the

growth of vegetation by genial warmth as the negative one of destroying

the baleful influences which would otherwise blast the fruits of the earth

and of the trees. This interpretation of the English and French custom of

lighting fires in fields and orchards on Twelfth Night is confirmed by a

parallel custom observed by Macedonian peasants for the express purpose of

burning up certain malicious fiends, who are believed to be abroad at this

season. These noxious beings are known as _Karkantzari_ or _Skatsantzari_.

They are thought to be living people, whether men or women, who during the

Twelve Days are transformed into horrible monsters, with long nails, red

faces, bloodshot eyes, snottering noses, and slobbering mouths. In this

hideous guise they roam about by night haunting houses and making the

peasant’s life well-nigh unbearable; they knock at the doors and should

they be refused admittance they will scramble down the chimney and pinch,

worry, and defile the sleepers in their beds. The only way to escape from

these tormenters is to seize and bind them fast with a straw rope. If you

have no such rope or your heart fails you, there is nothing for it but to

shut yourself up in the house before dark, fasten the door tight, block up

the chimney, and wait for daylight; for it is only at night that the

monsters are on the prowl, during the day they resume their ordinary human

shape. However, in some places strenuous efforts are made during the

Twelve Days to destroy these hateful nocturnal goblins by fire. For

example, on Christmas Eve some people burn the _Karkantzari_ by lighting

faggots of holm-oak and throwing them out into the streets at early dawn.

In other places, notably at Melenik, they scald the fiends to death on New

Year’s Eve by means of pancakes frizzling and hissing in a pan. While the

goodwife is baking the cakes, the goodman disguises himself as one of the

fiends in a fur coat turned inside out, and in his assumed character

dances and sings outside the door, while he invites his wife to join him

in the dance. In other districts people collect faggots during the whole

of the Twelve Days and lay them up on the hearth. Then on the Eve of

Twelfth Night they set fire to the pile in order that the goblins, who are

supposed to be lurking under the ashes, may utterly perish.(728) Thus the

view that the large fire in Herefordshire on Twelfth Night is intended “to

burn the old witch” is far more probable than the opinion that it

represents the Virgin Mary, and that the other twelve fires stand for the

twelve apostles.(729) This latter interpretation is in all probability

nothing more than a Christian gloss put upon an old heathen custom of

which the meaning was forgotten.

(M248) The Gloucestershire custom was described by the English traveller

Thomas Pennant in the latter part of the eighteenth century. He says: “A

custom savouring of the Scotch Bel-tien prevales in Gloucestershire,

particularly about Newent and the neighbouring parishes, on the twelfth

day, or on the Epiphany, in the evening. All the servants of every

particular farmer assemble together in one of the fields that has been

sown with wheat; on the border of which, in the most conspicuous or most

elevated place, they make twelve fires of straw, in a row; around one of

which, made larger than the rest, they drink a cheerful glass of cyder to

their master’s health, success to the future harvest, and then returning

home, they feast on cakes made of carraways, etc., soaked in cyder, which

they claim as a reward for their past labours in sowing the grain.”(730)

In Shropshire also it used to be customary to kindle festal fires on the

tops of hills and other high places on Twelfth Night.(731) Again, in

Ireland “on Twelfth-Eve in Christmas, they use to set up as high as they

can a sieve of oats, and in it a dozen of candles set round, and in the

centre one larger, all lighted. This in memory of our Saviour and his

Apostles, lights of the world.”(732) Down to the present time, apparently,

in the county of Roscommon, “Twelfth Night, which is Old Christmas Day, is

a greater day than Christmas Day itself. Thirteen rushlights are made in

remembrance of the numbers at the Last Supper, and each is named after

some member of the family. If there are not enough in the household other

relations’ names are added. The candles are stuck in a cake of cow-dung

and lighted, and as each burns out, so will be the length of each person’s

life. Rushlights are only used for this occasion.”(733)

(M249) In these English and Irish customs observed on Twelfth Night the

twelve fires or candles probably refer either to the twelve days from

Christmas to Epiphany or to the twelve months of the year. In favour of

this view it may be said that according to a popular opinion, which has

been reported in England(734) and is widely diffused in Germany and the

German provinces of Austria, the weather of the twelve days in question

determines the weather of the twelve following months, so that from the

weather on each of these days it is possible to predict the weather of the

corresponding month in the ensuing year.(735) Hence in Swabia the days are

called “the Twelve Lot Days”; and many people seek to pry into the future

with scientific precision by means of twelve circles, each subdivided into

four quadrants, which they chalk up over the parlour door or inscribe on

paper. Each circle represents a month, and each quadrant represents a

quarter of a month; and according as the sky is overcast or clear during

each quarter of a day from Christmas to Epiphany, you shade the

corresponding quadrant of a circle or leave it a blank. By this

contrivance, as simple as it is ingenious, you may forecast the weather

for the whole year with more or less of accuracy.(736) At Hosskirch in

Swabia they say that you can predict the weather for the twelve months

from the weather of the twelve hours of Twelfth Day alone.(737) A somewhat

different system of meteorology is adopted in various parts of

Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. On Christmas, New Year’s Day, or

another of the twelve days you take an onion, slice it in two, peel off

twelve coats, and sprinkle a pinch of salt in each of them. The twelve

coats of the onion stand for the twelve months of the year, and from the

amount of moisture which has gathered in each of them next morning you may

foretell the amount of rain that will fall in the corresponding

month.(738)

(M250) But the belief that the weather of the twelve months can be

predicted from the weather of the twelve days is not confined to the

Germanic peoples. It occurs also in France and among the Celts of Brittany

and Scotland. Thus in the Bocage of Normandy “the village old wives have a

very simple means of divining the general temperature of the coming

season. According to them, the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany,

including Epiphany, represent the twelve months of the year. So the thing

to do is to mark the temperature of each of these days, for the

temperature of the corresponding month will be relatively the same. Some

people say that this experience is rarely at fault, and more trust is put

in it than in the predictions of the _Double-Liégois_.”(739) In

Cornouaille, Brittany, it is popularly believed that the weather of the

last six days of December and the first six of January prognosticates the

weather of the twelve months; but in other parts of Brittany it is the

first twelve days of January that are supposed to be ominous of the

weather for the year. These days are called _gour-deziou_, which is

commonly interpreted “male days,” but is said to mean properly “additional

or supplementary days.”(740) Again, in the Highlands of Scotland the

twelve days of Christmas (_Da latha dheug na Nollaig_) “were the twelve

days commencing from the Nativity or Big _Nollaig_, and were deemed to

represent, in respect of weather, the twelve months of the year. Some say

the days should be calculated from New Year’s Day.”(741) Others again

reckon the Twelve Days from the thirty-first of December. Thus Pennant

tells us that “the Highlanders form a sort of almanack or presage of the

weather of the ensuing year in the following manner: they make observation

on twelve days, beginning at the last of December, and hold as an

infallible rule, that whatsoever weather happens on each of those days,

the same will prove to agree in the correspondent months. Thus, January is

to answer to the weather of December 31st; February to that of January

1st; and so with the rest. Old people still pay great attention to this

augury.”(742) It is interesting to observe that in the Celtic regions of

Scotland and France popular opinion hesitates as to the exact date of the

twelve days, some people dating them from Christmas, others from the New

Year, and others again from the thirty-first of December. This hesitation

has an important bearing on the question of the origin of the twelve days’

period, as I shall point out immediately.

(M251) Thus in the popular mind the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany

are conceived as a miniature of the whole year, the character of each

particular day answering to the character of a particular month. The

conception appears to be very ancient, for it meets us again among the

Aryans of the Vedic age in India. They, too, appear to have invested

twelve days in midwinter with a sacred character as a time when the three

Ribhus or genii of the seasons rested from their labours in the home of

the sun-god; and these twelve rest-days they called “an image or copy of

the year.”(743)

(M252) This curious coincidence, if such it is, between the winter

festivals of the ancient Aryans of India and their modern kinsfolk in

Europe seems to be best explained on the theory that the twelve days in

question derive their sanctity from the position which they occupied in

the calendar of the primitive Aryans. The coincidence of the name for

month with the name for moon in the various Aryan languages(744) points to

the conclusion that the year of our remote ancestors was primarily based

on observation of the moon rather than of the sun; but as a year of twelve

lunar months or three hundred and fifty-four days (reckoning the months at

twenty-nine and thirty days alternately) falls short of the solar year of

three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days by roundly twelve days,

the discrepancy could not fail to attract the attention of an intelligent

people, such as the primitive Aryans must be supposed to have been, who

had made some progress in the arts of life; and the most obvious way of

removing the discrepancy and equating the lunar with the solar year is to

add twelve days at the end of each period of twelve lunar months so as to

bring the total days of the year up to three hundred and sixty-six. The

equation is not indeed perfectly exact, but it may well have been

sufficiently so for the rudimentary science of the primitive Aryans.(745)

As many savage races in modern times have observed the discrepancy between

solar and lunar time and have essayed to correct it by observations of the

sun or the constellations, especially the Pleiades,(746) there seems no

reason to doubt that the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples in

prehistoric times were able to make similar observations, and that they

were not, as has been suggested, reduced to the necessity of borrowing the

knowledge of such simple and obvious facts from the star-gazers of ancient

Babylonia. Learned men who make little use of their eyes except to read

books are too apt to underrate the observational powers of the savage, who

lives under totally different conditions from us, spending most of his

time in the open air and depending for his very existence on the accuracy

with which he notes the varied and changing aspects of nature.

(M253) It has been proposed to explain the manifold superstitions which

cluster round the Twelve Days, or rather the Twelve Nights, as they are

more popularly called,(747) by reference to the place which they occupy in

the Christian calendar, beginning as they do immediately after Christmas

and ending with Epiphany.(748) But, in the first place, it is difficult to

see why the interval between these two particular festivals should have

attracted to itself a greater mass of superstitious belief and custom than

the interval between any other two Christian festivals in the calendar; if

it really did so, the ground of its special attraction is still to seek,

and on this essential point the advocates of the Christian origin of the

Twelve Nights throw no light. In the second place, the superstitious

beliefs and customs themselves appear to have no relation to Christianity

but to be purely pagan in character. Lastly, a fatal objection to the

theory in question is that the place of the Twelve Days in the calendar is

not uniformly fixed to the interval between Christmas and Epiphany; it

varies considerably in popular opinion in different places, but it is

significant that the variations never exceed certain comparatively narrow

limits. The twelve-days’ festival, so to speak, oscillates to and fro

about a fixed point, which is either the end of the year or the winter

solstice. Thus in Silesia the Twelve Days are usually reckoned to fall

before Christmas instead of after it; though in the Polish districts and

the mountainous region of the country the ordinary German opinion prevails

that the days immediately follow Christmas.(749) In some parts of Bavaria

the Twelve Days are counted from St. Thomas’s Day (the twenty-first of

December) to New Year’s Day; while in parts of Mecklenburg they begin with

New Year’s Day and so coincide with the first twelve days of January,(750)

and this last mode of reckoning finds favour, as we saw, with some Celts

of Brittany and Scotland.(751) These variations in the dating of the

Twelve Days seem irreconcilable with the theory that they derive their

superstitious character purely from the accident that they fall between

Christmas and Epiphany; accordingly we may safely dismiss the theory of

their Christian origin and recognize, with many good authorities,(752) in

the Twelve Days the relics of a purely pagan festival, which was probably

celebrated long before the foundation of Christianity. In truth the

hypothesis of the Christian derivation of the Twelve Days in all

probability exactly inverts the historical order of the facts. On the

whole the evidence goes to shew that the great Christian festivals were

arbitrarily timed by the church so as to coincide with previously existing

pagan festivals for the sake of weaning the heathen from their old faith

and bringing them over to the new religion. To make the transition as easy

as possible the ecclesiastical authorities, in abolishing the ancient

rites, appointed ceremonies of somewhat similar character on the same

days, or nearly so, thus filling up the spiritual void by a new creation

which the worshipper might accept as an adequate substitute for what he

had lost. Christmas and Easter, the two pivots on which the Christian

calendar revolves, appear both to have been instituted with this

intention: the one superseded a midwinter festival of the birth of the

sun-god, the other superseded a vernal festival of the death and

resurrection of the vegetation-god.(753)

(M254) If the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany were indeed an

ancient intercalary period inserted for the purpose of equating the lunar

to the solar year, we can better understand the curious superstitions that

have clustered round them and the quaint customs that have been annually

observed during their continuance. To the primitive mind it might well

seem that an intercalary period stands outside of the regular order of

things, forming part neither of the lunar nor of the solar system; it is

an excrescence, inevitable but unaccountable, which breaks the smooth

surface of ordinary existence, an eddy which interrupts the even flow of

months and years. Hence it may be inferred that the ordinary rules of

conduct do not apply to such extraordinary periods, and that accordingly

men may do in them what they would never dream of doing at other times.

Thus intercalary days tend to degenerate into seasons of unbridled

license; they form an interregnum during which the customary restraints of

law and morality are suspended and the ordinary rulers abdicate their

authority in favour of a temporary regent, a sort of puppet king, who

bears a more or less indefinite, capricious, and precarious sway over a

community given up for a time to riot, turbulence, and disorder. If that

is so—though it must be confessed that the view here suggested is to a

great extent conjectural—we may perhaps detect the last surviving

representatives of such puppet kings in the King of the Bean and other

grotesque figures of the same sort who used to parade with the mimic pomp

of sovereignty on one or other of the twelve days between Christmas and

Epiphany. For the King of the Bean was by no means the only such ruler of

the festive season, nor was Twelfth Night the only day on which he and his

colleagues played their pranks. We will conclude this part of our subject

with a brief notice of some of these mummers.

(M255) In the first place it deserves to be noticed that in many parts of

the continent, such as France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Austria,

Twelfth Day is regularly associated with three mythical kings named

Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, and derives its popular appellation from

them, being known in Germany and Austria as the Day of the Three Kings

(_Dreikönigstag_) and in France as the Festival of the Kings (_Fête des

Rois_). Further, it has been customary in many places to represent the

three kings by mummers, who go about arrayed in royal costume from door to

door, singing songs and collecting contributions from the households which

they visit.(754) The custom may very well be older than Christianity,

though it has received a Christian colouring; for the mythical kings are

commonly identified with the wise men of the East, who are said to have

been attracted to the infant Christ at Bethlehem by the sight of his star

in the sky.(755) Yet there is no Biblical authority for regarding these

wise men as kings or for fixing their number at three. In Franche-Comté

the old custom is still observed, or at all events it was so down to

recent years. The Three Kings are personated by three boys dressed in long

white shirts with coloured sashes round their waists; on their heads they

wear pointed mitres of pasteboard decorated with a gilt star and floating

ribbons. Each carries a long wand topped by a star, which he keeps

constantly turning. The one who personates Melchior has his face blackened

with soot, because Melchior is supposed to have been a negro king. When

they enter a house, they sing a song, setting forth that they are three

kings who have come from three different countries, led by a star, to

adore the infant Jesus at Bethlehem. After the song the negro king

solicits contributions by shaking his money-box or holding out a basket,

in which the inmates of the house deposit eggs, nuts, apples and so forth.

By way of thanks for this liberality the three kings chant a stave in

which they call down the blessing of God on the household.(756) The custom

is similar in the Vosges Mountains, where the Three Kings are held in

great veneration and invoked by hedge doctors to effect various cures. For

example, if a man drops to the ground with the falling sickness, you need

only whisper in his right ear, “_Gaspard fert myrrham, thus Melchior,

Balthasar aurum_,” and he will get up at once. But to make the cure

complete you must knock three nails into the earth on the precise spot

where he fell; each nail must be exactly of the length of the patient’s

little finger, and as you knock it in you must take care to utter the

sufferer’s name.(757) In many Czech villages of Bohemia the children who

play the part of the Three Kings assimilate themselves to the wise men of

the East in the gospel by carrying gilt paper, incense, and myrrh with

them on their rounds, which they distribute as gifts in the houses they

visit, receiving in return money or presents in kind. Moreover they

fumigate and sprinkle the houses and describe crosses and letters on the

doors. Amongst the Germans of West Bohemia it is the schoolmaster who,

accompanied by some boys, goes the round of the village on Twelfth Day. He

chalks up the letters C. M. B. (the initials of Caspar, Melchior, and

Balthasar), together with three crosses, on every door, and fumigates the

house with a burning censer in order to guard it from evil influences and

infectious diseases.(758) Some people used to wear as an amulet a picture

representing the adoration of the Three Kings with a Latin inscription to

the following effect: “Holy three kings, Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar, pray

for us, now and in the hour of our death.” The picture was thought to

protect the wearer not only from epilepsy, headache, and fever, but also

from the perils of the roads, from the bite of mad dogs, from sudden

death, from sorcery and witchcraft.(759) Whatever its origin, the festival

of the Three Kings goes back to the middle ages, for it is known to have

been celebrated with great pomp at Milan in 1336. On that occasion the

Three Kings appeared wearing crowns, riding richly caparisoned horses, and

surrounded by pages, bodyguards, and a great retinue of followers. Before

them was carried a golden star, and they offered gifts of gold,

frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Christ cradled in a manger beside

the high altar of the church of St. Eustorgius.(760)

(M256) In our own country a popular figure during the Christmas holidays

used to be the Lord of Misrule, or, as he was called in Scotland, the

Abbot of Unreason, who led the revels at that merry season in the halls of

colleges, the Inns of Court, the palace of the king, and the mansions of

nobles.(761) Writing at the end of the sixteenth century, the antiquary

John Stow tells us that, “in the feast of Christmas, there was in the

King’s house, wheresoever he was lodged, a Lord of Misrule, or Master of

Merry Disports; and the like had ye in the house of every nobleman of

honour or good worship, were he spiritual or temporal. Amongst the which

the Mayor of London, and either of the Sheriffs, had their several Lords

of Misrule, ever contending, without quarrel or offence, who should make

the rarest pastimes to delight the beholders. These Lords beginning their

rule on Alhollon eve, continued the same til the morrow after the Feast of

the Purification, commonly called Candlemas day. In all which space there

were fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at

cards for counters, nails, and points, in every house, more for pastime

than for gain.”(762) Again, in the seventeenth century the ardent royalist

Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote that “they may be likewise said to use their

king ... as about Christmas we do the King of Misrule; whom we invest with

that title to no other end, but to countenance the Bacchanalian riots and

preposterous disorders of the family, where he is installed.”(763) From

the former passage it appears that the Lords of Misrule often or even

generally reigned for more than three months in winter, namely from

Allhallow Even (the thirty-first of October, the Eve of All Saints’ Day)

till Candlemas (the second of February). Sometimes, however, their reign

seems to have been restricted to the Twelve Nights. Thus we are told that

George Ferrers of Lincoln’s Inn was Lord of Misrule for twelve days one

year when King Edward VI. kept his Christmas with open house at

Greenwich.(764) At Trinity College, Cambridge, a Master of Arts used to be

appointed to this honourable office, which he held for the twelve days

from Christmas to Twelfth Day, and he resumed office on Candlemas Day. His

duty was to regulate the games and diversions of the students,

particularly the plays which were acted in the college hall. Similar

masters of the revels were commonly instituted in the colleges at Oxford;

for example, at Merton College the fellows annually elected about St.

Edmund’s Day, in November a Lord of Misrule or, as he was called in the

registers, a King of the Bean (_Rex Fabarum_), who held office till

Candlemas and sometimes assumed a number of ridiculous titles. In the

Inner Temple a Lord of Misrule used to be appointed on St. Stephen’s Day

(the twenty-sixth of December); surrounded by his courtiers, who were

dubbed by various derogatory or ribald names, he presided at the dancing,

feasting, and minstrelsy in the hall. Of the mock monarch who in the

Christmas holidays of 1635 held office in the Middle Temple the

jurisdiction, privileges, and parade have been minutely described. He was

attended by his lord keeper, lord treasurer, with eight white staves, a

band of gentleman pensioners with poleaxes, and two chaplains. He dined

under a canopy of state both in the hall and in his own chambers. He

received many petitions, which he passed on in regal style to his Master

of Requests; and he attended service in the Temple church, where his

chaplains preached before him and did him reverence. His expenses,

defrayed from his own purse, amounted to no less than two thousand

pounds.(765) “I remember to have heard a Bencher of the Temple tell a

story of a tradition in their house, where they had formerly a custom of

choosing kings for such a season, and allowing him his expences at the

charge of the society: One of our kings, said my friend, carried his royal

inclination a little too far, and there was a committee ordered to look

into the management of his treasury. Among other things it appeared, that

his Majesty walking _incog._ in the cloister, had overheard a poor man say

to another, Such a small sum would make me the happiest man in the world.

The king out of his royal compassion privately inquired into his

character, and finding him a proper object of charity, sent him the money.

When the committee read the report, the house passed his accounts with a

plaudite without further examination, upon the recital of this article in

them, ‘For making a man happy, £10:0:0.’ ”(766)

(M257) At the English court the annual Lord of Misrule is not to be

confounded with the Master of the Revels, who was a permanent official and

probably despised the temporary Lord as an upstart rival and intruder.

Certainly there seems to have been at times bad blood between them. Some

correspondence which passed between the two merry monarchs in the reign of

Edward VI. has been preserved, and from it we learn that on one occasion

the Lord of Misrule had much difficulty in extracting from the Master of

the Revels the fool’s coat, hobby-horses, and other trumpery paraphernalia

which he required for the proper support of his dignity. Indeed the

costumes furnished by his rival were so shabby that his lordship returned

them with a note, in which he informed the Master of the Revels that the

gentlemen of rank and position who were to wear these liveries stood too

much on their dignity to be seen prancing about the streets of London

rigged out in such old slops. The Lords of Council had actually to

interpose in the petty squabble between the two potentates.(767)

(M258) In France the counterparts of these English Lords of Misrule

masqueraded in clerical attire as mock Bishops, Archbishops, Popes, or

Abbots. The festival at which they disported themselves was known as the

Festival of Fools (_Fête des Fous_), which fell in different places at

different dates, sometimes on Christmas Day, sometimes on St. Stephen’s

Day (the twenty-sixth of December), sometimes on New Year’s Day, and

sometimes on Twelfth Day. According to one account “on the first day,

which was the festival of Christmas, the lower orders of clergy and monks

cried in unison _Noël_ (Christmas) and gave themselves up to jollity. On

the morrow, St. Stephen’s Day, the deacons held a council to elect a Pope

or Patriarch of Fools, a Bishop or Archbishop of Innocents, an Abbot of

Ninnies; next day, the festival of St. John, the subdeacons began the

dance in his honour; afterwards, on the fourth day, the festival of the

Holy Innocents, the choristers and minor clergy claimed the Pope or Bishop

or Abbot elect, who made his triumphal entry into the church on

Circumcision Day (the first of January) and sat enthroned pontifically

till the evening of Epiphany. It was then the joyous reign of this Pope or

this Bishop or this Abbot of Folly which constituted the Festival of Fools

and dominated its whimsical phases, the grotesque and sometimes impious

masquerades, the merry and often disgusting scenes, the furious orgies,

the dances, the games, the profane songs, the impudent parodies of the

catholic liturgy.”(768) At these parodies of the most solemn rites of the

church the priests, wearing grotesque masks and sometimes dressed as

women, danced in the choir and sang obscene chants: laymen disguised as

monks and nuns mingled with the clergy: the altar was transformed into a

tavern, where the deacons and subdeacons ate sausages and black-puddings

or played at dice and cards under the nose of the celebrant; and the

censers smoked with bits of old shoes instead of incense, filling the

church with a foul stench. After playing these pranks and running,

leaping, and cutting capers through the whole church, they rode about the

town in mean carts, exchanging scurrilities with the crowds of laughing

and jeering spectators.(769)

(M259) Amongst the buffooneries of the Festival of Fools one of the most

remarkable was the introduction of an ass into the church, where various

pranks were played with the animal. At Autun the ass was led with great

ceremony to the church under a cloth of gold, the corners of which were

held by four canons; and on entering the sacred edifice the animal was

wrapt in a rich cope, while a parody of the mass was performed. A regular

Latin liturgy in glorification of the ass was chanted on these occasions,

and the celebrant priest imitated the braying of an ass. At Beauvais the

ceremony was performed every year on the fourteenth of January. A young

girl with a child in her arms rode on the back of the ass in imitation of

the Flight into Egypt. Escorted by the clergy and the people she was led

in triumph from the cathedral to the parish church of St. Stephen. There

she and her ass were introduced into the chancel and stationed on the left

side of the altar; and a long mass was performed which consisted of scraps

borrowed indiscriminately from the services of many church festivals

throughout the year. In the intervals the singers quenched their thirst:

the congregation imitated their example; and the ass was fed and watered.

The services over, the animal was brought from the chancel into the nave,

where the whole congregation, clergy and laity mixed up together, danced

round the animal and brayed like asses. Finally, after vespers and

compline, the merry procession, led by the precentor and preceded by a

huge lantern, defiled through the streets to wind up the day with indecent

farces in a great theatre erected opposite the church.(770)

(M260) A pale reflection or diminutive copy of the Festival of Fools was

the Festival of the Innocents, which was celebrated on Childermas or Holy

Innocents’ Day, the twenty-eighth of December. The custom was widely

observed both in France and England. In France on Childermas or the eve of

the festival the choristers assembled in the church and chose one of their

number to be a Boy Bishop, who officiated in that character with mock

solemnity. Such burlesques of ecclesiastical ritual appear to have been

common on that day in monasteries and convents, where the offices

performed by the clergy and laity were inverted for the occasion. At the

Franciscan monastery of Antibes, for example, the lay brothers, who

usually worked in the kitchen and the garden, took the place of the

priests on Childermas and celebrated mass in church, clad in tattered

sacerdotal vestments turned inside out, holding the books upside down,

wearing spectacles made of orange peel, mumbling an unintelligible jargon,

and uttering frightful cries. These buffooneries were kept up certainly as

late as the eighteenth century,(771) and probably later. In the great

convent of the Congrégation de Notre Dame at Paris down to the latter part

of the nineteenth century the nuns and their girl pupils regularly

exchanged parts on Holy Innocents’ Day. The pupils pretended to be nuns

and a select few of them were attired as such, while the nuns made believe

to be pupils, without however changing their dress.(772)

(M261) In England the Boy Bishop was widely popular during the later

Middle Ages and only succumbed to the austerity of the Reformation. He is

known, for example, to have officiated in St. Paul’s, London, in the

cathedrals of Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, Gloucester, Lichfield, Norwich,

Lincoln, and York, in great collegiate churches such as Beverley minster,

St. Peter’s, Canterbury, and Ottery St. Mary’s, in college chapels such as

Magdalen and All Souls’ at Oxford, in the private chapels of the king, and

in many parish churches throughout the country. The election was usually

made on St. Nicholas’s Day (the sixth of December), but the office and

authority lasted till Holy Innocents’ Day (the twenty-eighth of December).

Both days were appropriate, for St. Nicholas was the patron saint of

school children, and Holy Innocents’ Day commemorates the slaughter of the

young children by Herod. In cathedrals the Bishop was chosen from among

the choir boys. After his election he was completely apparelled in the

episcopal vestments, with a mitre and crosier, bore the title and

displayed the state of a Bishop, and exacted ceremonial obedience from his

fellows, who were dressed like priests. They took possession of the church

and, with the exception of mass, performed all the ceremonies and offices.

The Boy Bishop preached from the pulpit. At Salisbury the ceremonies at

which he presided are elaborately regulated by the statutes of Roger de

Mortival, enacted in 1319; and two of the great service-books of the Sarum

use, the Breviary and the Processional, furnish full details of the

ministrations of the Boy Bishop and his fellows. He is even said to have

enjoyed the right of disposing of such prebends as happened to fall vacant

during the days of his episcopacy. But the pranks of the mock bishop were

not confined to the church. Arrayed in full canonicals he was led about

with songs and dances from house to house, blessing the grinning people

and collecting money in return for his benedictions. At York in the year

1396 the Boy Bishop is known to have gone on his rounds to places so far

distant as Bridlington, Leeds, Beverley, Fountains Abbey, and Allerton;

and the profits which he made were considerable. William of Wykeham

ordained in 1400 that a Boy Bishop should be chosen at Winchester College

and another at New College, Oxford, and that he should recite the office

at the Feast of the Innocents. His example was followed some forty years

afterwards in the statutes of the royal foundations of Eton College and of

King’s College, Cambridge. From being elected on St. Nicholas’s Day the

Boy Bishop was sometimes called a Nicholas Bishop (_Episcopus

Nicholatensis_).(773) In Spanish cathedrals, also, it appears to have been

customary on St. Nicholas’s Day to elect a chorister to the office of

Bishop. He exercised a certain jurisdiction till Holy Innocents’ Day, and

his prebendaries took secular offices, acting in the capacity of

alguazils, catchpoles, dog-whippers, and sweepers.(774)

(M262) On the whole it seems difficult to suppose that the a curious

superstitions and quaint ceremonies, the outbursts of profanity and the

inversions of ranks, which characterize the popular celebration of the

twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany, have any connexion with the

episodes of Christian history believed to be commemorated by these two

festivals. More probably they are relics of an old heathen festival

celebrated during the twelve intercalary days which our forefathers

annually inserted in their calendar at midwinter in order to equalize the

short lunar year of twelve months with the longer solar year of three

hundred and sixty-five or sixty-six days. We need not assume that the

license and buffooneries of the festive season were borrowed from the

Roman Saturnalia; both celebrations may well have been parallel and

independent deductions from a like primitive philosophy of nature. There

is not indeed, so far as I am aware, any direct evidence that the

Saturnalia at Rome was an intercalary festival; but the license which

characterized it, and the temporary reign of a mock king, who personated

Saturn, suggest that it may have been so. If we were better acquainted

with the intercalary periods of peoples at a comparatively low level of

culture, we might find that they are commonly marked by similar outbreaks

of lawlessness and similar reigns of more or less nominal and farcical

rulers. But unfortunately we know too little about the observance of such

periods among primitive peoples to be warranted in making any positive

affirmation on the subject.

(M263) However, there are grounds for thinking that intercalary periods

have commonly been esteemed unlucky. The Aztecs certainly regarded as very

unlucky the five supplementary days which they added at the end of every

year in order to make up a total of three hundred and sixty-five

days.(775) These five supplementary days, corresponding to the last four

of January and the first of February, were called _nemontemi_, which means

“vacant,” “superfluous,” or “useless.” Being dedicated to no god, they

were deemed inauspicious, equally unfit for the services of religion and

the transaction of civil business. During their continuance no sacrifices

were offered by the priests and no worshippers frequented the temples. No

cases were tried in the courts of justice. The houses were not swept.

People abstained from all actions of importance and confined themselves to

performing such as could not be avoided, or spent the time in paying

visits to each other. In particular they were careful during these fatal

days not to fall asleep in the daytime, not to quarrel, and not to

stumble; because they thought that if they did such things at that time

they would continue to do so for ever. Persons born on any of these days

were deemed unfortunate, destined to fail in their undertakings and to

live in wretchedness and poverty all their time on earth.(776) The Mayas

of Yucatan employed a calendar like that of the Aztecs, and they too

looked upon the five supplementary days at the end of the year as unlucky

and of evil omen; hence they gave no names to these days, and while they

lasted the people stayed for the most part at home; they neither washed

themselves, nor combed their hair, nor loused each other; and they did no

servile or fatiguing work lest some evil should befall them.(777)

(M264) The ancient Egyptians like the Aztecs considered a year to consist

of three hundred and sixty ordinary days divided into months and eked out

with five supplementary days so as to bring the total number of days in

the year up to three hundred and sixty-five; but whereas the Aztecs

divided the three hundred and sixty ordinary days into eighteen arbitrary

divisions or months of twenty days each, the Egyptians, keeping much

closer to the natural periods marked by the phases of the moon, divided

these days into twelve months of thirty days each.(778) This mode of

regulating the calendar appears to be exceedingly ancient in Egypt and may

even date from the prehistoric period; for the five days over and above

the year (_haru duaït hiru ronpit_) are expressly mentioned in the texts

of the pyramids.(779) The myth told to explain their origin was as

follows. Once on a time the earth-god Keb lay secretly with the

sky-goddess Nut, and the sun-god Ra in his anger cursed the goddess,

saying that she should give birth to her offspring neither in any month

nor in any year. He thought, no doubt, by this imprecation to prevent her

from bringing forth the fruit of her womb. But he was outwitted by the

wily Thoth, who engaged the goddess of the moon in a game of draughts and

having won the game took as a forfeit from her the seventieth part of

every day in the year, and out of the fractions thus abstracted he made up

five new days, which he added to the old year of three hundred and sixty

days. As these days formed no part either of a month or of a year, the

goddess Nut might be delivered in them without rendering the sun-god’s

curse void and of no effect. Accordingly she bore Osiris on the first of

the days, Horus on the second, Set or Typhon on the third, Isis on the

fourth, and Nephthys on the fifth. Of these five supplementary or

intercalary days the third, as the birthday of the evil deity Set or

Typhon, was deemed unlucky, and the Egyptian kings neither transacted

business on it nor attended to their persons till nightfall.(780) Thus it

appears that the ancient Egyptians regarded the five supplementary or

intercalary days as belonging neither to a month nor to a year, but as

standing outside of both and forming an extraordinary period quite apart

and distinct from the ordinary course of time. It is probable, though we

cannot prove it, that in all countries intercalary days or months have

been so considered by the primitive astronomers who first observed the

discrepancy between solar and lunar time and attempted to reconcile it by

the expedient of intercalation.

(M265) Thus we infer with some probability that the sacred Twelve Days or

Nights at midwinter derive their peculiar character in popular custom and

superstition from the circumstance that they were originally an

intercalary period inserted annually at the end of a lunar year of three

hundred and fifty-four days for the purpose of equating it to a solar year

reckoned at three hundred and sixty-six days. However, there are grounds

for thinking that at a very early time the Aryan peoples sought to correct

their lunar year, not by inserting twelve supplementary days every year,

but by allowing the annual deficiency to accumulate for several years and

then supplying it by a whole intercalary month. In India the Aryans of the

Vedic age appear to have adopted a year of three hundred and sixty days,

divided into twelve months of thirty days each, and to have remedied the

annual deficiency of five days by intercalating a whole month of thirty

days every fifth year, thus regulating their calendar according to a five

years’ cycle.(781) The Celts of Gaul, as we learn from the Coligny

calendar, also adopted a five years’ cycle, but they managed it

differently. They retained the old lunar year of three hundred and

fifty-four days divided into twelve months, six of thirty days and six of

twenty-nine days; but instead of intercalating twelve days every year to

restore the balance between lunar and solar time they intercalated a month

of thirty days every two and a half years, so that in each cycle of five

years the total number of intercalary days was sixty, which was equivalent

to intercalating twelve days annually. Thus the result at the end of each

cycle of five years was precisely the same as it would have been if they

had followed the old system of annual intercalation.(782) Why they

abandoned the simple and obvious expedient of annually intercalating

twelve days, and adopted instead the more recondite system of

intercalating a month of thirty days every two and a half years, is not

plain. It may be that religious or political motives unknown to us

concurred with practical considerations to recommend the change. One

result of the reform would be the abolition of the temporary king who, if

I am right, used to bear a somewhat tumultuary sway over the community

during the saturnalia of the Twelve Days. Perhaps the annually recurring

disorders which attended that period of license were not the least urgent

of the reasons which moved the rulers to strike the twelve intercalary

days out of the year and to replace them by an intercalary month at longer

intervals.

(M266) However that may be, the equivalence of the new intercalary month

to the old intercalary Twelve Days multiplied by two and a half is

strongly suggested by a remarkable feature of the Coligny calendar; for in

it the thirty days of the intercalary month, which bore the name of

Ciallos, are named after the ordinary twelve months of the year. Thus the

first day of the intercalary month is called Samon, which is the name of

the first month of the year; the second day of the month is called

Dumannos, which is the name of the second month of the year; the third day

of the month is called Rivros, which is the name of the third month of the

year; the fourth day of the month is called Anacan, which is the name of

the fourth month of the year; and so on with all the rest, so that the

thirty days of the intercalary month bear the names of the twelve months

of the year repeated two and a half times.(783) This seems to shew that,

just as our modern peasants regard the Twelve Days as representing each a

month of the year in their chronological order, so the old Celts of Gaul

who drew up the Coligny calendar regarded the thirty days of the

intercalary month as representing the thirty ordinary months which were to

follow it till the next intercalation took place. And we may conjecture

that just as our modern peasants still draw omens from the Twelve Days for

the twelve succeeding months, so the old Celts drew omens from the thirty

days of the intercalary month for the thirty months of the two and a half

succeeding years. Indeed we may suppose that the reformers of the calendar

transferred, or attempted to transfer, to the new intercalary month the

whole of the quaint customs and superstitions which from time immemorial

had clustered round the twelve intercalary days of the old year. Thus,

like the old Twelve Days of midwinter, the thirty days of the new

intercalary month may have formed an interregnum or break in the ordinary

course of government, a tumultuary period of general license, during which

the ordinary rules of law and morality were suspended and the direction of

affairs committed to a temporary and more or less farcical ruler or King

of the Bean, who may possibly have had to pay with his life for his brief

reign of thirty days. The floating traditions of such merry monarchs and

of the careless happy-go-lucky life under them may have crystallized in

after ages into the legend of Saturn and the Golden Age. If that was

so—and I put forward the hypothesis for no more than a web of conjectures

woven from the gossamer threads of popular superstition—we can understand

why the Twelve Days, intercalated every year in the old calendar, should

have survived to the present day in the memory of the people, whereas the

thirty days, intercalated every two and a half years in the new calendar,

have long been forgotten. It is the simplest ideas that live longest in

the simple minds of the peasantry; and since the intercalation of twelve

days in every year to allow the lagging moon to keep pace with the longer

stride of the sun is certainly an easier and more obvious expedient than

to wait for two and a half years till he has outrun her by thirty days, we

need not wonder that this ancient mode of harmonizing lunar and solar time

should have lingered in the recollection and in the usages of the people

ages after the more roundabout method, which reflective minds had devised

for accomplishing the same end, had faded alike from the memory of the

peasant and the page of the historian.

§ 3. The Saturnalia and Lent.

(M267) As the Carnival is always held on the last three days before the

beginning of Lent, its date shifts somewhat from year to year, but it

invariably falls either in February or March. Hence it does not coincide

with the date of the Saturnalia, which within historical times seems to

have been always celebrated in December even in the old days, before

Caesar’s reform of the calendar, when the Roman year ended with February

instead of December.(784) Yet if the Saturnalia, like many other seasons

of license, was originally celebrated as a sort of public purification at

the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one, it may at a still

more remote period, when the Roman year began with March, have been

regularly held either in February or March and therefore at approximately

the same date as the modern Carnival. So strong and persistent are the

conservative instincts of the peasantry in respect to old custom, that it

would be no matter for surprise if, in rural districts of Italy, the

ancient festival continued to be celebrated at the ancient time long after

the official celebration of the Saturnalia in the towns had been shifted

from February to December. Latin Christianity, which struck at the root of

official or civic paganism, has always been tolerant of its rustic

cousins, the popular festivals and ceremonies which, unaffected by

political and religious revolutions, by the passing of empires and of

gods, have been carried on by the people with but little change from time

immemorial, and represent in fact the original stock from which the state

religions of classical antiquity were comparatively late offshoots. Thus

it may very well have come about that while the new faith stamped out the

Saturnalia in the towns, it suffered the original festival, disguised by a

difference of date, to linger unmolested in the country; and so the old

feast of Saturn, under the modern name of the Carnival, has reconquered

the cities, and goes on merrily under the eye and with the sanction of the

Catholic Church.

(M268) The opinion that the Saturnalia originally fell in February or the

beginning of March receives some support from the circumstance that the

festival of the Matronalia, at which mistresses feasted their slaves just

as masters did theirs at the Saturnalia, always continued to be held on

the first of March, even when the Roman year began with January.(785) It

is further not a little recommended by the consideration that this date

would be eminently appropriate for the festival of Saturn, the old Italian

god of sowing and planting. It has always been a puzzle to explain why

such a festival should have been held at midwinter; but on the present

hypothesis the mystery vanishes. With the Italian farmer February and

March were the great season of the spring sowing and planting;(786)

nothing could be more natural than that the husbandman should inaugurate

the season with the worship of the deity to whom he ascribed the function

of quickening the seed. It is no small confirmation of this theory that

the last day of the Carnival, namely Shrove Tuesday, is still, or was down

to recent times, the customary season in Central Europe for promoting the

growth of the crops by means of leaps and dances.(787) The custom fits in

very well with the view which derives the Carnival from an old festival of

sowing such as the Saturnalia probably was in its origin. Further, the

orgiastic character of the festival is readily explained by the help of

facts which met us in a former part of our investigation. We have seen

that between the sower and the seed there is commonly supposed to exist a

sympathetic connexion of such a nature that his conduct directly affects

and can promote or retard the growth of the crops.(788) What wonder then

if the simple husbandman imagined that by cramming his belly, by swilling

and guzzling just before he proceeded to sow his fields, he thereby

imparted additional vigour to the seed?(789)

(M269) But while his crude philosophy may thus have painted gluttony and

intoxication in the agreeable colours of duties which he owed to himself,

to his family, and to the commonwealth, it is possible that the zest with

which he acquitted himself of his obligations may have been whetted by a

less comfortable reflection. In modern times the indulgence of the

Carnival is immediately followed by the abstinence of Lent; and if the

Carnival is the direct descendant of the Saturnalia, may not Lent in like

manner be merely the continuation, under a thin disguise, of a period of

temperance which was annually observed, from superstitious motives, by

Italian farmers long before the Christian era? Direct evidence of this, so

far as I am aware, is not forthcoming; but we have seen that a practice of

abstinence from fleshly lusts has been observed by various peoples as a

sympathetic charm to foster the growth of the seed;(790) and such an

observance would be an appropriate sequel to the Saturnalia, if that

festival was indeed, as I conjecture it to have been, originally held in

spring as a religious or magical preparation for sowing and planting. When

we consider how widely diffused is the belief in the sympathetic influence

which human conduct, and especially the intercourse of the sexes, exerts

on the fruits of the earth, we may be allowed to conjecture that the

Lenten fast, with the rule of continence which is recommended, if not

strictly enjoined, by the Catholic and Coptic churches during that

season,(791) was in its origin intended, not so much to commemorate the

sufferings of a dying god, as to foster the growth of the seed, which in

the bleak days of early spring the husbandman commits with anxious care

and misgiving to the bosom of the naked earth. Ecclesiastical historians

have been puzzled to say why after much hesitation and great diversity of

usage in different places the Christian church finally adopted forty days

as the proper period for the mournful celebration of Lent.(792) Perhaps in

coming to this decision the authorities were guided, as so often, by a

regard for an existing pagan celebration of similar character and duration

which they hoped by a change of name to convert into a Christian

solemnity. Such a heathen Lent they may have found to hand in the rites of

Persephone, the Greek goddess of the corn, whose image, carved out of a

tree, was annually brought into the cities and mourned for forty nights,

after which it was burned.(793) The time of year when these lamentations

took place is not mentioned by the old Christian writer who records them;

but they would fall most appropriately at the season when the seed was

sown or, in mythical language, when the corn-goddess was buried, which in

ancient Italy, as we saw, was done above all in the months of February and

March. We know that at the time of the autumnal sowing Greek women held a

sad and serious festival because the Corn-goddess Persephone or the

Maiden, as they called her, then went down into the earth with the sown

grain, and Demeter fondly mourned her daughter’s absence; hence in

sympathy with the sorrowful mother the women likewise mourned and observed

a solemn fast and abstained from the marriage bed.(794) It is reasonable,

therefore, to suppose that they practised similar rules of mourning and

abstinence for a like reason at the time of the spring sowing, and that

the ancient ritual survives in the modern Lent, which preserves the memory

of the _Mater Dolorosa_, though it has substituted a dead Son for a dead

Daughter.

(M270) Be that as it may, it is worthy of note that in Burma a similar

fast, which English writers call the Buddhist Lent, is observed for three

months every year while the ploughing and sowing of the fields go forward;

and the custom is believed to be far older than Buddhism, which has merely

given it a superficial tinge like the veneer of Christianity which, if I

am right, has overlaid an old heathen observance in Lent. This Burmese

Lent, we are told, covers the rainy season from the full moon of July to

the full moon of October. “This is the time to plough, this is the time to

sow; on the villagers’ exertions in these months depends all their

maintenance for the rest of the year. Every man, every woman, every child,

has hard work of some kind or another. And so, what with the difficulties

of travelling, what with the work there is to do, and what with the custom

of Lent, every one stays at home. It is the time for prayer, for fasting,

for improving the soul. Many men during these months will live even as the

monks live, will eat but before midday, will abstain from tobacco. There

are no plays during Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time for

preparing the land for the crop; it is the time for preparing the soul for

eternity. The congregations on the Sundays will be far greater at this

time than at any other; there will be more thought of the serious things

of life.”(795)

§ 4. Saturnalia in Ancient Greece.

(M271) Beyond the limits of Italy festivals of the same general character

as the Saturnalia appear to have been held over a considerable area of the

ancient world. A characteristic feature of the Saturnalia, as we saw, was

an inversion of social ranks, masters changing places with their slaves

and waiting upon them, while slaves were indulged with a semblance not

merely of freedom but even of power and office. In various parts of Greece

the same hollow show of granting liberty to slaves was made at certain

festivals. Thus at a Cretan festival of Hermes the servants feasted and

their masters waited upon them. In the month of Geraestius the Troezenians

observed a certain solemnity lasting many days, on one of which the slaves

played at dice with the citizens and were treated to a banquet by their

lords. The Thessalians held a great festival called Peloria, which Baton

of Sinope identified with the Saturnalia, and of which the antiquity is

vouched for by a tradition that it originated with the Pelasgians. At this

festival sacrifices were offered to Pelorian Zeus, tables splendidly

adorned were set out, all strangers were invited to the feast, all

prisoners released, and the slaves sat down to the banquet, enjoyed full

freedom of speech, and were served by their masters.(796)

(M272) But the Greek festival which appears to have corresponded most

closely to the Italian Saturnalia was the Cronia or festival of Cronus, a

god whose barbarous myth and cruel ritual clearly belong to a very early

stratum of Greek religion, and who was by the unanimous voice of antiquity

identified with Saturn. We are told that his festival was celebrated in

most parts of Greece, but especially at Athens, where the old god and his

wife Rhea had a shrine near the stately, but far more modern, temple of

Olympian Zeus. A joyous feast, at which masters and slaves sat down

together, formed a leading feature of the solemnity. At Athens the

festival fell in the height of summer, on the twelfth day of the month

Hecatombaeon, formerly called the month of Cronus, which answered nearly

to July; and tradition ran that Cecrops, the first king of Attica, had

founded an altar in honour of Cronus and Rhea, and had ordained that

master and man should share a common meal when the harvest was got

in.(797) Yet there are indications that at Athens the Cronia may once have

been a spring festival. For a cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps

referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronus by the

Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which

corresponded roughly to March,(798) and there are traces of a license

accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the

wine-jars, which fell on the eleventh day of the preceding month

Anthesterion.(799) At Olympia the festival of Cronus undoubtedly occurred

in spring; for here a low but steep hill, now covered with a tangled

growth of dark holly-oaks and firs, was sacred to him, and on its top

certain magistrates, who bore the title of kings, offered sacrifice to the

old god at the vernal equinox in the Elean month Elaphius.(800)

(M273) In this last ceremony, which probably went on year by year long

before the upstart Zeus had a temple built for himself at the foot of the

hill, there are two points of special interest, first the date of the

ceremony, and second the title of the celebrants. First, as to the date,

the spring equinox, or the twenty-first of March, must have fallen so near

the fifteenth day of the Athenian month Elaphebolion, that we may fairly

ask whether the Athenian custom of offering a cake to Cronus on that day

may not also have been an equinoctial ceremony. In the second place, the

title of kings borne by the magistrates who sacrificed to Cronus renders

it probable that, like magistrates with similar high-sounding titles

elsewhere in republican Greece, they were the lineal descendants of sacred

kings whom the superstition of their subjects invested with the attributes

of divinity.(801) If that was so, it would be natural enough that one of

these nominal kings should pose as the god Cronus in person. For, like his

Italian counterpart Saturn, the Greek Cronus was believed to have been a

king who reigned in heaven or on earth during the blissful Golden Age,

when men passed their days like gods without toil or sorrow, when life was

a long round of festivity, and death came like sleep, sudden but gentle,

announced by none of his sad forerunners, the ailments and infirmities of

age.(802) Thus the analogy of the Olympian Cronia, probably one of the

oldest of Greek festivals, to the Italian Saturnalia would be very close

if originally, as I conjecture, the Saturnalia fell in spring and Saturn

was personated at it, as we have good reason to believe, by a man dressed

as a king. May we go a step further and suppose that, just as the man who

acted King Saturn at the Saturnalia was formerly slain in that character,

so one of the kings who celebrated the Cronia at Olympia not only played

the part of Cronus, but was sacrificed, as god and victim in one, on the

top of the hill? Cronus certainly bore a sinister reputation in antiquity.

He passed for an unnatural parent who had devoured his own offspring, and

he was regularly identified by the Greeks with the cruel Semitic Baals who

delighted in the sacrifice of human victims, especially of children.(803)

A legend which savours strongly of infant sacrifice is reported of a

shrine that stood at the very foot of the god’s own hill at Olympia;(804)

and a quite unambiguous story was told of the sacrifice of a babe to

Lycaean Zeus on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia, where the worship of Zeus was

probably nothing but a continuation, under a new name, of the old worship

of Cronus, and where human victims appear to have been regularly offered

down to the Christian era.(805) The Rhodians annually sacrificed a man to

Cronus in the month Metageitnion; at a later time they kept a condemned

criminal in prison till the festival of the Cronia was come, then led him

forth outside the gates, made him drunk with wine, and cut his

throat.(806) With the parallel of the Saturnalia before our eyes, we may

surmise that the victim who thus ended his life in a state of intoxication

at the Cronia perhaps personated King Cronus himself, the god who reigned

in the happy days of old when men had nothing to do but to eat and drink

and make merry. At least the Rhodian custom lends some countenance to the

conjecture that formerly a human victim may have figured at the sacrifice

which the so-called kings offered to Cronus on his hill at Olympia. In

this connexion it is to be remembered that we have already found

well-attested examples of a custom of sacrificing the scions of royal

houses in ancient Greece.(807) If the god to whom, or perhaps rather in

whose character, the princes were sacrificed, was Cronus, it would be

natural that the Greeks of a later age should identify him with Baal or

Moloch, to whom in like manner Semitic kings offered up their children.

The Laphystian Zeus of Thessaly and Boeotia, whom tradition associated

with these human sacrifices, was probably, like the Lycaean Zeus of

Arcadia, nothing but the aboriginal deity, commonly known as Cronus, whose

gloomy rites the Greek invaders suffered the priests of the vanquished

race to continue after the ancient manner, while they quieted their

scruples of conscience or satisfied their pride as conquerors by investing

the bloodthirsty old savage with the name, if not with the character, of

their own milder deity, the humane and gracious Zeus.

§ 5. Saturnalia in Western Asia.

(M274) When we pass from Europe to western Asia, from ancient Greece to

ancient Babylon and the regions where Babylonian influence penetrated, we

are still met with festivals which bear the closest resemblance to the

oldest form of the Italian Saturnalia. The reader may remember the

festival of the Sacaea, on which I had occasion to touch in an earlier

part of this work.(808) It was held at Babylon during five days of the

month Lous, beginning with the sixteenth day of the month. During its

continuance, just as at the Saturnalia, masters and servants changed

places, the servants issuing orders and the masters obeying them; and in

each house one of the servants, dressed as a king and bearing the title of

Zoganes, bore rule over the household. Further, just as at the Saturnalia

in its original form a man was dressed as King Saturn in royal robes,

allowed to indulge his passions and caprices to the full, and then put to

death, so at the Sacaea a condemned prisoner, who probably also bore for

the time being the title of Zoganes, was arrayed in the king’s attire and

suffered to play the despot, to use the king’s concubines, and to give

himself up to feasting and debauchery without restraint, only however in

the end to be stript of his borrowed finery, scourged, and hanged or

crucified.(809) From Strabo we learn that this Asiatic counterpart of the

Saturnalia was celebrated in Asia Minor wherever the worship of the

Persian goddess Anaitis had established itself. He describes it as a

Bacchic orgy, at which the revellers were disguised as Scythians, and men

and women drank and dallied together by day and night.(810)

(M275) As the worship of Anaitis, though of Persian origin, appears to

have been deeply leavened with coarse elements which it derived from the

religion of Babylon,(811) we may perhaps regard Mesopotamia as the

original home from which the Sacaean festival spread westward into other

parts of Asia Minor. Now the Sacaean festival, described by the Babylonian

priest Berosus in the first book of his history of Babylon, has been

plausibly identified(812) with the great Babylonian festival of the New

year called Zakmuk, Zagmuk, Zakmuku, or Zagmuku, which has become known to

us in recent times through inscriptions. The Babylonian year began with

the spring month of Nisan, which seems to have covered the second half of

March and the first half of April. Thus the New Year festival, which

occupied at least the first eleven days of Nisan, probably included the

spring equinox. It was held in honour of Marduk or Merodach, the chief god

of Babylon, whose great temple of Esagila in the city formed the religious

centre of the solemnity. For here, in a splendid chamber of the vast

edifice, all the gods were believed to assemble at this season under the

presidency of Marduk for the purpose of determining the fates for the new

year, especially the fate of the king’s life. On this occasion the king of

Babylon was bound annually to renew his regal power by grasping the hands

of the image of Marduk in his temple, as if to signify that he received

the kingdom directly from the deity and was unable without the divine

assistance and authority to retain it for more than a year. Unless he thus

formally reinstated himself on the throne once a year, the king ceased to

reign legitimately. When Babylonia was conquered by Assyria, the Assyrian

monarchs themselves used to come to Babylon and perform the ceremony of

grasping the god’s hands in order to establish by this solemn act their

title to the kingdom which they had won for themselves by the sword; until

they had done so, they were not recognized as kings by their Babylonian

subjects. Some of them indeed found the ceremony either so burdensome or

so humiliating to their pride as conquerors, that rather than perform it

they renounced the title of king of Babylon altogether and contented

themselves with the more modest title of regent. Another notable feature

of the Babylonian festival of the New Year appears to have been a

ceremonial marriage of the god Marduk; for in a hymn relating to the

solemnity it is said of the deity that “he hastened to his bridal.” The

festival was of hoar antiquity, for it was known to Gudea, an old king of

Southern Babylonia who flourished between two and three thousand years

before the beginning of our era, and it is mentioned in an early account

of the Great Flood. At a much later period it is repeatedly referred to by

King Nebuchadnezzar and his successors. Nebuchadnezzar records how he

built of bricks and bitumen a chapel or altar, “a thing of joy and

rejoicing,” for the great festival of Marduk, the lord of the gods; and we

read of the rich and abundant offerings which were made by the high priest

at this time.(813)

(M276) Unfortunately the notices of this Babylonian festival of the New

Year which have come down to us deal chiefly with its mythical aspect and

throw little light on the mode of its celebration. Hence its identity with

the Sacaea must remain for the present a more or less probable hypothesis.

In favour of the hypothesis may be alleged in the first place the

resemblance of the names Sacaea and Zoganes to Zakmuk or Zagmuku, if that

was the real pronunciation of the name,(814) and in the second place the

very significant statement that the fate of the king’s life was supposed

to be determined by the gods, under the presidency of Marduk, at the

Zakmuk or New Year’s festival.(815) When we remember that the central

feature of the Sacaea appears to have been the saving of the king’s life

for another year by the vicarious sacrifice of a criminal on the cross or

the gallows, we can understand that the season was a critical one for the

king, and that it may well have been regarded as determining his fate for

the ensuing twelve months. The annual ceremony of renewing the king’s

power by contact with the god’s image, which formed a leading feature of

the Zakmuk festival, would be very appropriately performed immediately

after the execution or sacrifice of the temporary king who died in the

room of the real monarch.

(M277) A difficulty, however, in the way of identifying the Sacaea with

the Zakmuk arises from the statement of Berosus that the Sacaea fell on

the sixteenth day of Lous, which was the tenth month of the

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

Thus if the Sacaea occurred in July and the Zakmuk in March, the theory of

their identity could not be maintained. But the dating of the months of

the Syro-Macedonian calendar is a matter of some uncertainty; the month of

Lous in particular appears to have fallen at different times of the year

in different places,(816) and until we have ascertained beyond the reach

of doubt when Lous fell at Babylon in the time of Berosus, it would be

premature to allow much weight to the seeming discrepancy in the dates of

the two festivals. At all events, whether the festivals were the same or

different, we are confronted with difficulties which in the present state

of our knowledge may be pronounced insoluble. If the festivals were the

same, we cannot explain their apparent difference of date: if they were

different, we cannot explain their apparent similarity of character. In

what follows I shall, with some eminent Oriental scholars,(817)

provisionally assume the identity of Zakmuk and Sacaea, but I would ask

the reader to bear clearly in mind that the hypothesis leaves the apparent

discrepancy of their dates unexplained. Towards a solution of the problem

I can only suggest conjecturally either that the date of the festival had

been for some reason shifted in the time of Berosus, or that two different

festivals of the same type may have been held at different seasons of the

year, one in spring and one in summer, perhaps by two distinct but kindred

tribes, who retained their separate religious rites after they had

coalesced in the Babylonian empire. Both conjectures might be supported by

analogies. On the one hand, for example, in the Jewish calendar New Year’s

Day was shifted under Babylonian influence from autumn to spring,(818) and

in a later part of this work we shall see that the Chinese festival of new

fire, at first celebrated in spring, was afterwards shifted to the summer

solstice, only however to be brought back at a later time to its original

date. On the other hand, the popular festivals of our European peasantry

afford many examples of rites which appear to be similar in character,

though they fall at different times of the year; such, for instance, are

the ceremonies concerned with vegetation on May Day, Whitsuntide, and

Midsummer Day,(819) and the fire festivals which are distributed at still

wider intervals throughout the months.(820) Similarly in ancient Italy the

agricultural festival of the Ambarvalia was celebrated by Italian farmers

at different dates in different places.(821) These cases may warn us

against the danger of hastily inferring an essential difference between

Zakmuk and Sacaea on the ground of a real or apparent difference in their

dates.

(M278) A fresh and powerful argument in favour of the identity of the two

festivals is furnished by the connexion which has been traced between both

of them and the Jewish feast of Purim.(822) There are good grounds for

believing that Purim was unknown to the Jews until after the exile, and

that they learned to observe it during their captivity in the East. The

festival is first mentioned in the book of Esther, which by the majority

of critics is assigned to the fourth or third century B.C.,(823) and which

certainly cannot be older than the Persian period, since the scene of the

narrative is laid in Susa at the court of a Persian king Ahasuerus, whose

name appears to be the Hebrew equivalent of Xerxes. The next reference to

Purim occurs in the second book of Maccabees, a work written probably

about the beginning of our era.(824) Thus from the absence of all notice

of Purim in the older books of the Bible, we may fairly conclude that the

festival was instituted or imported at a comparatively late date among the

Jews. The same conclusion is supported by the book of Esther itself, which

was manifestly written to explain the origin of the feast and to suggest

motives for its observance. For, according to the author of the book, the

festival was established to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews from a

great danger which threatened them in Persia under the reign of King

Xerxes. Thus the opinion of modern scholars that the feast of Purim, as

celebrated by the Jews, was of late date and oriental origin, is borne out

by the tradition of the Jews themselves. An examination of that tradition

and the mode of celebrating the feast renders it probable that Purim is

nothing but a more or less disguised form of the Babylonian festival of

the Sacaea or Zakmuk.

(M279) In the first place, the feast of Purim was and is held on the

fourteenth and fifteenth days of Adar, the last month of the Jewish year,

which corresponds roughly to March.(825) Thus the date agrees nearly,

though not exactly, with the date of the Babylonian Zakmuk, which fell a

fortnight later in the early days of the following month Nisan. A trace of

the original celebration of Purim in Nisan may perhaps be found in the

statement that “they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman” in Nisan,

the first month of the year.(826) It has been suggested with some

plausibility that the Jews may have shifted the date of Purim in order

that the new and foreign festival might not clash with their own old

festival of the Passover, which began on the fourteenth day of Nisan.

Another circumstance which speaks at once for the alien origin of Purim

and for its identity with Zakmuk is its name. The author of the book of

Esther derives the name Purim from _pur_, “a lot,”(827) but no such word

with this signification exists in Hebrew, and hence we are driven to look

for the meaning and etymology of Purim in some other language. A specious

theory is that the name was derived from an Assyrian word _puvru_, “an

assembly,” and referred primarily to the great assembly of the gods which,

as we have seen, formed a chief feature of the festival of Zakmuk, and was

held annually in the temple of Marduk at Babylon for the purpose of

determining the fates or lots of the new year;(828) the august assembly

appears to have been occasionally, if not regularly, designated by the

very name _puvru_.(829) On this hypothesis the traditional Jewish

explanation of the name Purim preserved a genuine kernel of historical

truth, or at least of mythical fancy, under the husk of a verbal error;

for the name, if this derivation of it is correct, really signified, not

“the lots,” but the assembly for drawing or otherwise determining the

lots. Another explanation which has been offered is “that _pūr_ or _būr_

seems to be an old Assyrian word for ‘stone,’ and that therefore it is

possible that the word was also used to signify ‘lot,’ like the Hebrew

גורל ‘lot,’ which originally, no doubt, meant ‘little stone.’ ”(830)

Either of these explanations of the name Purim, by tracing it back to the

New Year assembly of the gods at Babylon for settling the lots, furnishes

an adequate explanation of the traditional association of Purim with the

casting of lots—an association all the more remarkable and all the more

likely to be ancient because there is nothing to justify it either in the

Hebrew language or in the Jewish mode of celebrating the festival. When to

this we add the joyous, nay, extravagant festivity which has always been

characteristic of Purim, and is entirely in keeping with a New Year

celebration, we may perhaps be thought to have made out a fairly probable

case for holding that the Jewish feast is derived from the Babylonian New

Year festival of Zakmuk. Whether the Jews borrowed the feast directly from

the Babylonians or indirectly through the Persian conquerors of Babylon is

a question which deserves to be considered; but the Persian colouring of

the book of Esther speaks strongly for the view that Purim came to Israel

by way of Persia, or at all events from Babylon under Persian rule, and

this view is confirmed by other evidence, to which I shall have to ask the

reader’s attention a little later on.

(M280) If the links which bind Purim to Zakmuk are reasonably strong, the

chain of evidence which connects the Jewish festival with the Sacaea is

much stronger. Nor is this surprising when we remember that, while the

popular mode of celebrating Zakmuk is unknown, we possess important and

trustworthy details as to the manner of holding the Sacaea. We have seen

that the Sacaea was a wild Bacchanalian revel at which men and women

disguised themselves and drank and played together in a fashion that was

more gay than modest. Now this is, or used to be, precisely the nature of

Purim. The two days of the festival, according to the author of the book

of Esther, were to be kept for ever as “days of feasting and gladness, and

of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor.”(831) And this

joyous character the festival seems always to have retained. The author of

a tract in the Talmud lays it down as a rule that at the feast of Purim

every Jew is bound to drink until he cannot distinguish between the words

“Cursed be Haman” and “Blessed be Mordecai”; and he tells how on one

occasion a certain Rabba drank so deep at Purim that he murdered a rabbi

without knowing what he was about. Indeed Purim has been described as the

Jewish Bacchanalia, and we are told that at this season everything is

lawful which can contribute to the mirth and gaiety of the festival.(832)

Writers of the seventeenth century assert that during the two days, and

especially on the evening of the second day, the Jews did nothing but

feast and drink to repletion, play, dance, sing, and make merry; in

particular they disguised themselves, men and women exchanging clothes,

and thus attired ran about like mad, in open defiance of the Mosaic law,

which expressly forbids men to dress as women and women as men.(833) Among

the Jews of Frankfort, who inhabited the squalid but quaint and

picturesque old street known as the Judengasse, which many of us still

remember, the revelry at Purim ran as high as ever in the eighteenth

century. The gluttony and intoxication began punctually at three o’clock

in the afternoon of the first day and went on until the whole community

seemed to have taken leave of their senses. They ate and drank, they

frolicked and cut capers, they reeled and staggered about, they shrieked,

yelled, stamped, clattered, and broke each other’s heads with wooden

hammers till the blood flowed. On the evening of the first day the women

were allowed, as a special favour, to open their latticed window and look

into the men’s synagogue, because the great deliverance of the Jews from

their enemies in the time of King Ahasuerus was said to have been effected

by a woman. A feature of the festival which should not be overlooked was

the acting of the story of Esther as a comedy, in which Esther, Ahasuerus,

Haman, Mordecai, and others played their parts after a fashion that

sometimes degenerated from farce into ribaldry.(834) Thus on the whole we

may take it that Purim has always been a Saturnalia, and therefore

corresponds in character to the Sacaea as that festival has been described

for us by Strabo.

(M281) But further, when we examine the narrative which professes to

account for the institution of Purim, we discover in it not only the

strongest traces of Babylonian origin, but also certain singular analogies

to those very features of the Sacaean festival with which we are here more

immediately concerned. The book of Esther turns upon the fortunes of two

men, the vizier Haman and the despised Jew Mordecai, at the court of a

Persian king. Mordecai, we are told, had given mortal offence to the

vizier, who accordingly prepares a tall gallows on which he hopes to see

his enemy hanged, while he himself expects to receive the highest mark of

the king’s favour by being allowed to wear the royal crown and the royal

robes, and thus attired to parade the streets mounted on the king’s own

horse and attended by one of the noblest princes, who should proclaim to

the multitude his temporary exaltation and glory. But the artful intrigues

of the wicked vizier miscarried and resulted in precisely the opposite of

what he had hoped and expected; for the royal honours which he had looked

for fell to his rival Mordecai, and he himself was hanged on the gallows

which he had made ready for his foe. In this story we seem to detect a

reminiscence, more or less confused, of the Zoganes of the Sacaea, in

other words, of the custom of investing a private man with the insignia of

royalty for a few days and then putting him to death on the gallows or the

cross. It is true that in the narrative the part of the Zoganes is divided

between two actors, one of whom hopes to play the king but is hanged

instead, while the other acts the royal part and escapes the gallows to

which he was destined by his enemy. But this bisection, so to say, of the

Zoganes may have been deliberately invented by the Jewish author of the

book of Esther for the sake of setting the origin of Purim, which it was

his purpose to explain, in a light that should reflect glory on his own

nation. Or, perhaps more probably, it points back to a custom of

appointing two mock kings at the Sacaea, one of whom was put to death at

the end of the festival, while the other was allowed to go free, at least

for a time. We shall be the more inclined to adopt the latter hypothesis

when we observe that corresponding to the two rival aspirants to the

temporary kingship there appear in the Jewish narrative two rival queens,

Vashti and Esther, one of whom succeeds to the high estate from which the

other has fallen. Further, it is to be noted that Mordecai, the successful

candidate for the mock kingship, and Esther, the successful candidate for

the queenship, are linked together by close ties both of interest and

blood, the two being said to be cousins. This suggests that in the

original story or the original custom there may have figured two pairs of

kings and queens, of whom one pair is represented in the Jewish narrative

by Mordecai and Esther and the other by Haman and Vashti.

(M282) Some confirmation of this view is furnished by the names of two at

least out of the four personages. It seems to be now generally recognized

by Biblical scholars that the name Mordecai, which has no meaning in

Hebrew, is nothing but a slightly altered form of Marduk or Merodach, the

name of the chief god of Babylon, whose great festival was the Zakmuk; and

further, it is generally admitted that Esther in like manner is equivalent

to Ishtar, the great Babylonian goddess whom the Greeks called Astarte,

and who is more familiar to English readers as Ashtaroth. The derivation

of the names of Haman and Vashti is less certain, but some high

authorities are disposed to accept the view of Jensen that Haman is

identical with Humman or Homman, the national god of the Elamites, and

that Vashti is in like manner an Elamite goddess whose name Jensen read as

Mashti in inscriptions. Now, when we consider that the Elamites were from

time immemorial the hereditary foes of the Babylonians and had their

capital at Susa, the very place in which the scene of the book of Esther

is laid, we can hardly deny the plausibility of the theory that Haman and

Vashti on the one side and Mordecai and Esther on the other represent the

antagonism between the gods of Elam and the gods of Babylon, and the final

victory of the Babylonian deities in the very capital of their

rivals.(835) “It is therefore possible,” says Professor Nöldeke, “that we

here have to do with a feast whereby the Babylonians commemorated a

victory gained by their gods over the gods of their neighbours the

Elamites, against whom they had so often waged war. The Jewish feast of

Purim is an annual merrymaking of a wholly secular kind, and it is known

that there were similar feasts among the Babylonians. That the Jews in

Babylonia should have adopted a festival of this sort cannot be deemed

improbable, since in modern Germany, to cite an analogous case, many Jews

celebrate Christmas after the manner of their Christian fellow-countrymen,

in so far at least as it is a secular institution. It is true that

hitherto no Babylonian feast coinciding, like Purim, with the full moon of

the twelfth month has been discovered; but our knowledge of the Babylonian

feasts is derived from documents of an earlier period. Possibly the

calendar may have undergone some change by the time when the Jewish feast

of Purim was established. Or it may be that the Jews intentionally shifted

the date of the festival which they borrowed from the heathen.”(836)

(M283) However, the theory of an opposition between the gods of Babylon

and the gods of Elam at the festival appears to break down at a crucial

point; for the latest and most accurate reading of the Elamite

inscriptions proves, I am informed, that the name of the goddess which

Jensen read as Mashti, and which on that assumption he legitimately

compared to the Hebrew Vashti,(837) must really be read as Parti, between

which and Vashti there is no connexion. Accordingly, in a discussion of

the origin of Purim it is safer at present to lay no weight on the

supposed religious antagonism between the deities of Babylon and

Elam.(838)

(M284) If we are right in tracing the origin of Purim to the Babylonian

Sacaea and in finding the counterpart of the Zoganes in Haman and

Mordecai, it would appear that the Zoganes during his five days of office

personated not merely a king but a god, whether that god was the

Babylonian Marduk or some other deity not yet identified. The union of the

divine and royal characters in a single person is so common that we need

not be surprised at meeting with it in ancient Babylon. And the view that

the mock king of the Sacaea died as a god on the cross or the gallows is

no novelty. The acute and learned Movers long ago observed that “we should

be overlooking the religious significance of oriental festivals and the

connexion of the Sacaea with the worship of Anaitis, if we were to treat

as a mere jest the custom of disguising a slave as a king. We may take it

for certain that with the royal dignity the king of the Sacaea assumed

also the character of an oriental ruler as representative of the divinity,

and that when he took his pleasure among the women of the king’s harem, he

played the part of Sandan or Sardanapalus himself. For according to

ancient oriental ideas the use of the king’s concubines constituted a

claim to the throne, and we know from Dio that the five-days’ king

received full power over the harem. Perhaps he began his reign by publicly

cohabiting with the king’s concubines, just as Absalom went in to his

father’s concubines in a tent spread on the roof of the palace before all

Israel, for the purpose of thereby making known and strengthening his

claim to the throne.”(839)

(M285) Whatever may be thought of this latter conjecture, there can be no

doubt that Movers is right in laying great stress both on the permission

given to the mock king to invade the real king’s harem, and on the

intimate connexion of the Sacaea with the worship of Anaitis. That

connexion is vouched for by Strabo, and when we consider that in Strabo’s

time the cult of the old Persian goddess Anaitis was thoroughly saturated

with Babylonian elements and had practically merged in the sensual worship

of the Babylonian Ishtar or Astarte,(840) we shall incline to view with

favour Movers’s further conjecture, that a female slave may have been

appointed to play the divine queen to the part of the divine king

supported by the Zoganes, and that reminiscences of such a queen have

survived in the myth or legend of Semiramis. According to tradition,

Semiramis was a fair courtesan beloved by the king of Assyria, who took

her to wife. She won the king’s heart so far that she persuaded him to

yield up to her the kingdom for five days, and having assumed the sceptre

and the royal robes she made a great banquet on the first day, but on the

second day she shut up her husband in prison or put him to death and

thenceforward reigned alone.(841) Taken with Strabo’s evidence as to the

association of the Sacaea with the worship of Anaitis, this tradition

seems clearly to point to a custom of giving the Zoganes, during his five

days’ reign, a queen who represented the goddess Anaitis or Semiramis or

Astarte, in short the great Asiatic goddess of love and fertility, by

whatever name she was called. For that in Eastern legend Semiramis was a

real queen of Assyria, who had absorbed many of the attributes of the

goddess Astarte, appears to be established by the researches of modern

scholars; in particular it has been shewn by Robertson Smith that the

worship of Anaitis is not only modelled on Astarte worship in general, but

corresponds to that particular type of it which was specially associated

with the name of Semiramis.(842) The identity of Anaitis and the mythical

Semiramis is clearly proved by the circumstance that the great sanctuary

of Anaitis at Zela in Pontus was actually built upon a mound of

Semiramis;(843) probably the old worship of the Semitic goddess always

continued there even after her Semitic name of Semiramis or Astarte had

been exchanged for the Persian name of Anaitis, perhaps in obedience to a

decree of the Persian king Artaxerxes II., who first spread the worship of

Anaitis in the west of Asia.(844) It is highly significant, not only that

the Sacaean festival was annually held at this ancient seat of the worship

of Semiramis or Astarte; but further, that the whole city of Zela was

formerly inhabited by sacred slaves and harlots, ruled over by a supreme

pontiff, who administered it as a sanctuary rather than as a city.(845)

Formerly, we may suppose, this priestly king himself died a violent death

at the Sacaea in the character of the divine lover of Semiramis, while the

part of the goddess was played by one of the sacred prostitutes. The

probability of this is greatly strengthened by the existence of the

so-called mound of Semiramis under the sanctuary. For the mounds of

Semiramis, which were pointed out all over Western Asia,(846) were said to

have been the graves of her lovers whom she buried alive.(847) The

tradition ran that the great and lustful queen Semiramis, fearing to

contract a lawful marriage lest her husband should deprive her of power,

admitted to her bed the handsomest of her soldiers, only, however, to

destroy them all afterwards.(848) Now this tradition is one of the surest

indications of the identity of the mythical Semiramis with the Babylonian

goddess Ishtar or Astarte. For the famous Babylonian epic which recounts

the deeds of the hero Gilgamesh tells how, when he clothed himself in

royal robes and put his crown on his head, the goddess Ishtar was smitten

with love of him and wooed him to be her mate. But Gilgamesh rejected her

insidious advances, for he knew the sad fate that had overtaken all her

lovers, and he reproached the cruel goddess, saying:—

“_Tammuz, the lover of thy youth,_

_Thou causest to weep every year._

_The bright-coloured_ allallu _bird thou didst love_.

_Thou didst crush him and break his pinions._

_In the woods he stands and laments, __‘__O my pinions!__’_

_Thou didst love the lion of perfect strength,_

_Seven and seven times thou didst dig pit-falls for him._

_Thou didst love the horse that joyed in the fray,_

_With whip and spur and lash thou didst urge him on._

_Thou didst force him on for seven double hours,_

_Thou didst force him on when wearied and thirsty;_

_His mother the goddess Silili thou madest weep._

_Thou didst also love a shepherd of the flock,_

_Who continually poured out for thee the libation,_

_And daily slaughtered kids for thee;_

_But thou didst smite him, and didst change him into a wolf,_

_So that his own sheep-boys hunted him,_

_And his own hounds tore him to pieces._”

(M286) The hero also tells the miserable end of a gardener in the service

of the goddess’s father. The hapless swain had once been honoured with the

love of the goddess, but when she tired of him she changed him into a

cripple so that he could not rise from his bed. Therefore Gilgamesh fears

to share the fate of all her former lovers and spurns her proffered

favours.(849) But it is not merely that the myth of Ishtar thus tallies

with the legend of Semiramis; the worship of the goddess was marked by a

profligacy which has found its echo in the loose character ascribed by

tradition to the queen. Inscriptions, which confirm and supplement the

evidence of Herodotus, inform us that Ishtar was served by harlots of

three different classes all dedicated to her worship. Indeed, there is

reason to think that these women personated the goddess herself, since one

of the names given to them is applied also to her.(850)

(M287) Thus we can hardly doubt that the mythical Semiramis is

substantially a form of Ishtar or Astarte, the great Semitic goddess of

love and fertility; and if this is so, we may assume with at least a fair

degree of probability that the high pontiff of Zela or his deputy, who

played the king of the Sacaea at the sanctuary of Semiramis, perished as

one of the unhappy lovers of the goddess, perhaps as Tammuz, whom she

caused “to weep every year.” When he had run his brief meteoric career of

pleasure and glory, his bones would be laid in the great mound which

covered the mouldering remains of many mortal gods, his predecessors, whom

the goddess had honoured with her fatal love.(851)

(M288) Here then at the great sanctuary of the goddess in Zela it appears

that her myth was regularly translated into action; the story of her love

and the death of her divine lover was performed year by year as a sort of

mystery-play by men and women who lived for a season and sometimes died in

the character of the visionary beings whom they personated. The intention

of these sacred dramas, we may be sure, was neither to amuse nor to

instruct an idle audience, and as little were they designed to gratify the

actors, to whose baser passions they gave the reins for a time. They were

solemn rites which mimicked the doings of divine beings, because man

fancied that by such mimicry he was able to arrogate to himself the divine

functions and to exercise them for the good of his fellows. The operations

of nature, to his thinking, were carried on by mythical personages very

like himself; and if he could only assimilate himself to them completely

he would be able to wield all their powers. This is probably the original

motive of most religious dramas or mysteries among rude peoples. The

dramas are played, the mysteries are performed, not to teach the

spectators the doctrines of their creed, still less to entertain them, but

for the purpose of bringing about those natural effects which they

represent in mythical disguise; in a word, they are magical ceremonies and

their mode of operation is mimicry or sympathy. We shall probably not err

in assuming that many myths, which we now know only as myths, had once

their counterpart in magic; in other words, that they used to be acted as

a means of producing in fact the events which they describe in figurative

language. Ceremonies often die out while myths survive, and thus we are

left to infer the dead ceremony from the living myth. If myths are, in a

sense, the reflections or shadows of men cast upon the clouds, we may say

that these reflections continue to be visible in the sky and to inform us

of the doings of the men who cast them, long after the men themselves are

not only beyond our range of vision but sunk beneath the horizon.

(M289) The principle of mimicry is implanted so deep in human nature and

has exerted so far-reaching an influence on the development of religion as

well as of the arts that it may be well, even at the cost of a short

digression, to illustrate by example some of the modes in which primitive

man has attempted to apply it to the satisfaction of his wants by means of

religious or magical dramas. For it seems probable that the masked dances

and ceremonies, which have played a great part in the social life of

savages in many quarters of the world, were primarily designed to subserve

practical purposes rather than simply to stir the emotions of the

spectators and to while away the languor and tedium of idle hours. The

actors sought to draw down blessings on the community by mimicking certain

powerful superhuman beings and in their assumed character working those

beneficent miracles which in the capacity of mere men they would have

confessed themselves powerless to effect. In fact the aim of these

elementary dramas, which contain in germ the tragedy and comedy of

civilized nations, was the acquisition of superhuman power for the public

good. That this is the real intention of at least many of these dramatic

performances will appear from the following accounts, which for the sake

of accuracy I will quote for the most part in the words of the original

observers.

(M290) A conspicuous feature in the social life of the Indian tribes of

North-Western America are the elaborate masked dances or pantomimes in

which the actors personate spirits or legendary animals. Most of them

appear designed to bring before the eyes of the people the guardian

spirits of the clans. “Owing to the fact that these spirits are

hereditary, their gifts are always contained in the legend detailing their

acquisition by the ancestor of a clan. The principal gifts in these tales

are the magic harpoon which insures success in sea-otter hunting; the

death bringer which, when pointed against enemies, kills them; the water

of life which resuscitates the dead; the burning fire which, when pointed

against an object, burns it; and a dance, a song, and cries which are

peculiar to the spirit. The gift of this dance means that the protégé of

the spirit is to perform the same dances which have been shown to him. In

these dances he personates the spirit. He wears his mask and his

ornaments. Thus the dance must be considered a dramatic performance of the

myth relating to the acquisition of the spirit, and shows to the people

that the performer by his visit to the spirit has obtained his powers and

desires. When nowadays a spirit appears to a young Indian, he gives him

the same dance, and the youth also returns from the initiation filled with

the powers and desires of the spirit. He authenticates his initiation by

his dance in the same way as his mythical ancestor did. The obtaining of

the magical gifts from these spirits is called _lokoala_, while the person

who has obtained them becomes _naualaku_, supernatural, which is also the

quality of the spirit himself. The ornaments of all these spirits are

described as made of cedar bark, which is dyed red in the juice of alder

bark. They appear to their devotees only in winter, and therefore the

dances are also performed only in winter.”(852) In some of the dances the

performers imitate animals, and the explanation which the Indians give of

these dances is that “the ceremonial was instituted at the time when men

had still the form of animals; before the transformer had put everything

into its present shape. The present ceremonial is a repetition of the

ceremonial performed by the man animals or, as we may say, a dramatization

of the myth. Therefore the people who do not represent spirits, represent

these animals.”(853)

(M291) Another observer of these Indians writes on the same subject as

follows: “The _dukwally_ (_i.e._, _lokoala_) and other _tamanawas_(854)

performances are exhibitions intended to represent incidents connected

with their mythological legends. There are a great variety, and they seem

to take the place, in a measure, of theatrical performances or games

during the season of the religious festivals. There are no persons

especially set apart as priests for the performance of these ceremonies,

although some, who seem more expert than others, are usually hired to give

life to the scenes, but these performers are quite as often found among

the slaves or common people as among the chiefs, and excepting during the

continuance of the festivities are not looked on as of any particular

importance. On inquiring the origin of these ceremonies, I was informed

that they did not originate with the Indians, but were revelations of the

guardian spirits, who made known what they wished to be performed. An

Indian, for instance, who has been consulting with his guardian spirit,

which is done by going through the washing and fasting process before

described, will imagine or think he is called upon to represent the owl.

He arranges in his mind the style of dress, the number of performers, the

songs and dances or other movements, and, having the plan perfected,

announces at a _tamanawas_ meeting that he has had a revelation which he

will impart to a select few. These are then taught and drilled in strict

secrecy, and when they have perfected themselves, will suddenly make their

appearance and perform before the astonished tribe. Another Indian gets up

the representation of the whale, others do the same of birds, and in fact

of everything that they can think of. If any performance is a success, it

is repeated, and gradually comes to be looked upon as one of the regular

order in the ceremonies; if it does not satisfy the audience, it is laid

aside. Thus they have performances that have been handed down from remote

ages, while others are of a more recent date.”(855)

(M292) Another writer, who travelled among the Indians of North-Western

America, has expressed himself on this subject as follows: “The task of

representing the gods is undertaken in every tribe by some intelligent

and, according to their own account, inspired men; they form the Secret

Societies, in order that their secret arts and doctrines, their mummeries

and masquerades may not be revealed to the uninitiated and to the public.

The intention of these exhibitions is to confirm the faith of the young

people and the women in the ancient traditions as to the intercourse of

the gods with men and as to their own intimate relations to the gods. In

order to convince possible doubters, the members of the Secret Societies

have had recourse to all kinds of mysterious means, which to a civilized

man must appear the height of savagery; for example, they mutilate their

bodies, rend corpses in pieces and devour them, tear pieces out of the

bodies of living men, and so on. Further, the almost morbid vanity of the

North-Western Indians and their desire to win fame, respect, and

distinction may have served as a motive for joining the Secret Societies;

since every member of them enjoys great respect.

“There were and still are hundreds of masks in use, every one of which

represents a spirit who occurs in their legends. In the exhibitions they

appear singly or in groups, according as the legend to be represented

requires, and the masked men are then looked upon by the astonished crowd,

not only as actors representing the gods, but as the very gods themselves

who have come down from heaven to earth. Hence every such representative

must do exactly what legend says the spirit did. If the representative

wears no mask, as often happens with the _Hametzes_ (the Cannibals or

Biters) or the _Pakwalla_ (Medicine-men), then the spirit whom he

represents has passed into his body, and accordingly the man possessed by

the spirit is not responsible for what he does amiss in this condition. As

the use of masks throws a sort of mysterious glamour over the performance

and at the same time allows the actor to remain unknown, the peculiarly

sacred festivals are much oftener celebrated with masks than without them.

In every Secret Society there are definite rules as to how often and how

long a mask may be used. Amongst the Kwakiutl the masks may not, under the

heaviest penalties, be disposed of for four winters, the season when such

festivals are usually celebrated. After that time they may be destroyed or

hidden in the forest, that no uninitiated person may find them, or they

may be finally sold. The masks are made only in secret, generally in the

deep solitude of the woods, in order that no uninitiated person may detect

the maker at work....

(M293) “The dance is accompanied by a song which celebrates in boastful

words the power of the gods and the mighty deeds represented in the

performance. At the main part of the performance all present join in the

song, for it is generally known to everybody and is repeated in recitative

again and again. It seems that new songs and new performances are

constantly springing up in one or other of the villages through the agency

of some intelligent young man, hitherto without a song of his own, who

treats in a poetical fashion some legend which has been handed down orally

from their forefathers. For every man who takes part in the performances

and festivals must make his _début_ with a song composed by himself. In

this way new songs and dances are constantly originating, the material for

them being, of course, always taken from the tribal deities of the

particular singer and poet.”(856)

(M294) Similar masquerades are in vogue among the neighbours of these

Indians, the Esquimaux of Bering Strait, and from the following account it

will appear that the performances are based on similar ideas and beliefs.

“Shamans make masks representing grotesque faces of supernatural beings

which they claim to have seen. These may be _yu-ă_, which are the spirits

of the elements, of places, and of inanimate things in general; the

_tunghät_, or wandering genii, or the shades of people and animals. The

first-named are seen in lonely places, on the plains and mountains or at

sea, and more rarely about the villages, by the clairvoyant vision of the

shamans. They are usually invisible to common eyes, but sometimes render

themselves visible to the people for various purposes.

“Many of them, especially among the _tunghät_, are of evil character,

bringing sickness and misfortune upon people from mere wantonness or for

some fancied injury. The Eskimo believe that everything, animate or

inanimate, is possessed of a shade, having semihuman form and features,

enjoying more or less freedom of motion; the shamans give form to their

ideas of them in masks, as well as of others which they claim inhabit the

moon and the sky-land. In their daily life, if the people witness some

strange occurrence, are curiously affected, or have a remarkable

adventure, during which they seem to be influenced or aided in a

supernatural manner, the shamans interpret the meaning and describe the

appearance of the being that exerted its power.

(M295) “Curious mythological beasts are also said to inhabit both land and

sea, but to become visible only on special occasions. These ideas furnish

material upon which their fancy works, conjuring up strange forms that are

usually modifications of known creatures. It is also believed that in

early days all animate beings had a dual existence, becoming at will

either like man or the animal forms they now wear. In those early days

there were but few people; if an animal wished to assume its human form,

the forearm, wing, or other limb was raised and pushed up the muzzle or

beak as if it were a mask, and the creature became manlike in form and

features. This idea is still held, and it is believed that many animals

now possess this power. The manlike form thus appearing is called the

_inua_, and is supposed to represent the thinking part of the creature,

and at death becomes its shade. Shamans are believed to have the power of

seeing through the animal mask to the manlike features behind. The ideas

held on this subject are well illustrated in the Raven legends, where the

changes are made repeatedly from one form to another.

(M296) “Masks may also represent totemic animals, and the wearers during

the festivals are believed actually to become the creature represented or

at least to be endowed with its spiritual essence. Some of the masks of

the lower Yukon and the adjacent territory to the Kuskokwim are made with

double faces. This is done by having the muzzle of the animal fitted over

and concealing the face of the _inua_ below, the outer mask being held in

place by pegs so arranged that it can be removed quickly at a certain time

in the ceremony, thus symbolizing the transformation. Another style of

mask from the lower Kuskokwim has the under face concealed by a small

hinged door on each side, which opens out at the proper time in a

ceremony, indicating the metamorphosis. When the mask represents a totemic

animal, the wearer needs no double face, since he represents in person the

shade of the totemic animal.

“When worn in any ceremonial, either as a totem mask or as representing

the shade, _yu-ă_ or _tunghâk_, the wearer is believed to become

mysteriously and unconsciously imbued with the spirit of the being which

his mask represents, just as the namesakes are entered into and possessed

by the shades at certain parts of the Festival to the Dead....(857)

“Mask festivals are usually held as a species of thanksgiving to the

shades and powers of earth, air, and water for giving the hunter success.

The _inuas_ or shades of the powers and creatures of the earth are

represented that they may be propitiated, thus insuring further

success.”(858)

(M297) The religious ritual of the Cora Indians of Mexico comprises

elaborate dramatic ceremonies or dances, in which the actors or dancers

identify themselves with the gods, such as the god of the Morning Star,

the goddess of the Moon, and the divinities of the Rain. These dances form

the principal part of the Cora festivals and are accompanied by liturgical

songs, the words of which the Indians believe to have been revealed to

their forefathers by the gods and to exercise a direct magical influence

upon the deities themselves and through them upon nature.(859) The Kobeua

and Kaua Indians of North-Western Brazil perform masked dances at their

festivals in honour of the dead. The maskers imitate the actions and the

habits of birds, beasts, and insects. For example, there is a large

azure-blue butterfly which delights the eye with the splendour of its

colour, like a fallen fragment of the sky; and in the butterfly dance two

men represent the play of these brilliant insects in the sunshine,

fluttering on the wing and settling on sandbanks and rocks. Again, the

sloth is acted by a masker who holds on to a cross-beam of the house by

means of a hooked stick, in imitation of the sluggish creature which will

hang by its claws from the bough of a tree for hours together without

stirring. Again, the darting of swallows, as they flit to and fro across a

river, is mimicked by masked men dancing side by side: the swarming of

sandflies in the air is acted by a swarm of maskers; and so with the

movements of the black vulture, the owl, the jaguar, the _aracu_ fish, the

house-spider, and the dung-beetle. Yet these representations are not

simple dramas designed to amuse and divert the mourners in their hour of

sorrow; the Indian attributes to them a much deeper significance, for

under the outer husk of beasts and birds and insects he believes that

there lurk foul fiends and powerful spirits. “All these mimicries are

based on an idea of magical efficiency. They are intended to bring

blessing and fertility to the village and its inhabitants, to the

plantations, and to the whole of surrounding nature, thereby compensating,

as it were, for the loss of the dead man in whose honour the festival is

held. By copying as faithfully as possible the movements and actions of

the being whom he personates, the actor identifies himself with him. The

mysterious force which resides in the mask passes into the dancer, turns

the man himself into a mighty demon, and endows him with the power of

banning demons or earning their favour. Especially is it the intention by

means of mimicry to obtain for man control over the demons of growth and

the spirits of game and fish.” When the festival is over, the masks are

burned, and the demons, which are thought to have animated them, take

flight to their own place, it may be to the other world or to a mountain

top, or to the side of a thundering cascade.(860)

(M298) The Monumbo of German New Guinea perform masked dances in which the

dancers personate supernatural beings or animals, such as kangaroos, dogs,

and cassowaries. They consecrate the masks by fumigating them with the

smoke of a certain creeper, and believe that by doing so they put life

into them. Accordingly they afterwards treat the masks with respect, talk

to them as if they were alive, and refuse to part with them to Europeans.

Certain of the masks they even regard as guardian spirits and appeal to

them for fine weather, help in the chase or in war, and so forth. Every

clan owns some masks and the head man of the clan makes all the

arrangements for a masquerade. The dances are accompanied by songs of

which the words are unintelligible even to the natives themselves.(861)

Again, the Kayans of Central Borneo perform masked dances for the purpose

of ensuring abundant crops of rice. The actors personate demons, wearing

grotesque masks on their faces, their bodies swathed in cumbrous masses of

green leaves. “In accordance with their belief that the spirits are more

powerful than men, the Kayans assume that when they imitate the form of

spirits and play their part, they acquire superhuman power. Hence just as

their spirits can fetch back the souls of men, so they imagine that they

can lure to themselves the souls of the rice.”(862)

(M299) When the Sea Dyaks of Borneo have taken a human head, they hold a

Head-feast (_Gawè Pala_) in honour of the war-god or bird-chief Singalang

Burong, who lives far away above the sky. At this festival a long liturgy

called _mengap_ is chanted, the god is invoked, and is believed to be

present in the person of an actor, who poses as the deity and blesses the

people in his name. “But the invocation is not made by the human performer

in the manner of a prayer direct to this great being; it takes the form of

a story, setting forth how the mythical hero Kling or Klieng made a

head-feast and fetched Singalang Burong to it. This Kling, about whom

there are many fables, is a spirit, and is supposed to live somewhere or

other not far from mankind, and to be able to confer benefits upon them.

The Dyak performer or performers then, as they walk up and down the long

verandah of the house singing the _mengap_, in reality describe Kling’s

_Gawè Pala_ [head-feast], and how Singalang Burong was invited and came.

In thought the Dyaks identify themselves with Kling, and the resultant

signification is that the recitation of this story is an invocation to

Singalang Burong, who is supposed to come not to Kling’s house only, but

to the actual Dyak house where the feast is celebrated; and he is received

by a particular ceremony, and is offered food or sacrifice.” At the close

of the ceremony “the performer goes along the house, beginning with the

head man, touches each person in it, and pronounces an invocation upon

him. In this he is supposed to personate Singalang Burong and his

sons-in-law, who are believed to be the real actors. Singalang Burong

himself _nenjangs_ the headmen, and his sons-in-law, the birds, bless the

rest. The touch of the human performer, and the accompanying invocation

are thought to effect a communication between these bird-spirits from the

skies and each individual being. The great bird-chief and his dependants

come from above to give men their charms and their blessings. Upon the men

the performer invokes physical strength and bravery in war; and upon the

women luck with paddy, cleverness in Dyak feminine accomplishments, and

beauty in form and complexion.”(863)

(M300) Thus the dramatic performances of these primitive peoples are in

fact religious or oftener perhaps magical ceremonies, and the songs or

recitations which accompany them are spells or incantations, though the

real character of both is apt to be overlooked by civilized man,

accustomed as he is to see in the drama nothing more than an agreeable

pastime or at best a vehicle of moral instruction. Yet if we could trace

the drama of the civilized nations back to its origin, we might find that

it had its roots in magical or religious ideas like those which still

mould and direct the masked dances of many savages. Certainly the

Athenians in the heyday of their brilliant civilization retained a lively

sense of the religious import of dramatic performances; for they

associated them directly with the worship of Dionysus and allowed them to

be enacted only during the festivals of the god.(864) In India, also, the

drama appears to have been developed out of religious dances or

pantomimes, in which the actors recited the deeds and played the parts of

national gods and heroes.(865) Hence it is at least a legitimate

hypothesis that the criminal, who masqueraded as a king and perished in

that character at the Bacchanalian festival of the Sacaea, was only one of

a company of actors, who figured on that occasion in a sacred drama of

which the substance has been preserved to us in the book of Esther.

(M301) When once we perceive that the gods and goddesses, the heroes and

heroines of mythology have been represented officially, so to say, by a

long succession of living men and women who bore the names and were

supposed to exercise the functions of these fabulous creatures, we have

attained a point of vantage from which it seems possible to propose terms

of peace between two rival schools of mythologists who have been waging

fierce war on each other for ages. On the one hand it has been argued that

mythical beings are nothing but personifications of natural objects and

natural processes; on the other hand, it has been maintained that they are

nothing but notable men and women who in their lifetime, for one reason or

another, made a great impression on their fellows, but whose doings have

been distorted and exaggerated by a false and credulous tradition. These

two views, it is now easy to see, are not so mutually exclusive as their

supporters have imagined. The personages about whom all the marvels of

mythology have been told may have been real human beings, as the

Euhemerists allege; and yet they may have been at the same time

personifications of natural objects or processes, as the adversaries of

Euhemerism assert. The doctrine of incarnation supplies the missing link

that was needed to unite the two seemingly inconsistent theories. If the

powers of nature or a certain department of nature be conceived as

personified in a deity, and that deity can become incarnate in a man or

woman, it is obvious that the incarnate deity is at the same time a real

human being and a personification of nature. To take the instance with

which we are here concerned, Semiramis may have been the great Semitic

goddess of love, Ishtar or Astarte, and yet she may be supposed to have

been incarnate in a woman or even in a series of real women, whether

queens or harlots, whose memory survives in ancient history. Saturn,

again, may have been the god of sowing and planting, and yet may have been

represented on earth by a succession or dynasty of sacred kings, whose gay

but short lives may have contributed to build up the legend of the Golden

Age. The longer the series of such human divinities, the greater,

obviously, the chance of their myth or legend surviving; and when moreover

a deity of a uniform type was represented, whether under the same name or

not, over a great extent of country by many local dynasties of divine men

or women, it is clear that the stories about him would tend still further

to persist and be stereotyped.

(M302) The conclusions which we have reached in regard to the legend of

Semiramis and her lovers probably holds good of all the similar tales that

were current in antiquity throughout the East; in particular, it may be

assumed to apply to the myths of Aphrodite and Adonis in Syria, of Cybele

and Attis in Phrygia, and of Isis and Osiris in Egypt. If we could trace

these stories back to their origin, we might find that in every case a

human couple acted year by year the parts of the loving goddess and the

dying god. We know that down to Roman times Attis was personated by

priests who bore his name;(866) and if within the period of which we have

knowledge the dead Attis and the dead Adonis were represented only by

effigies, we may surmise that it had not always been so, and that in both

cases the dead god was once represented by a dead man. Further, the

license accorded to the man who played the dying god at the Sacaea speaks

strongly in favour of the hypothesis that before the incarnate deity was

put to a public death he was in all cases allowed, or rather required, to

enjoy the embraces of a woman who played the goddess of love. The reason

for such an enforced union of the human god and goddess is not hard to

divine. If primitive man believes that the growth of the crops can be

stimulated by the intercourse of common men and women,(867) what showers

of blessings will he not anticipate from the commerce of a pair whom his

fancy invests with all the dignity and powers of deities of fertility?

(M303) Thus the theory of Movers, that at the Sacaea the Zoganes

represented a god and paired with a woman who personated a goddess, turns

out to rest on deeper and wider foundations than that able scholar was

aware of. He thought that the divine couple who figured by deputy at the

ceremony were Semiramis and Sandan or Sardanapalus. It now appears that he

was substantially right as to the goddess; but we have still to enquire

into the god. There seems to be no doubt that the name Sardanapalus is

only the Greek way of representing Ashurbanapal, the name of the greatest

and nearly the last king of Assyria. But the records of the real monarch

which have come to light within recent years give little support to the

fables that attached to his name in classical tradition. For they prove

that, far from being the effeminate weakling he seemed to the Greeks of a

later age, he was a warlike and enlightened monarch, who carried the arms

of Assyria to distant lands and fostered at home the growth of science and

letters.(868) Still, though the historical reality of King Ashurbanapal is

as well attested as that of Alexander or Charlemagne, it would be no

wonder if myths gathered, like clouds, round the great figure that loomed

large in the stormy sunset of Assyrian glory. Now the two features that

stand out most prominently in the legends of Sardanapalus are his

extravagant debauchery and his violent death in the flames of a great

pyre, on which he burned himself and his concubines to save them from

falling into the hands of his victorious enemies. It is said that the

womanish king, with painted face and arrayed in female attire, passed his

days in the seclusion of the harem, spinning purple wool among his

concubines and wallowing in sensual delights; and that in the epitaph

which he caused to be carved on his tomb he recorded that all the days of

his life he ate and drank and toyed, remembering that life is short and

full of trouble, that fortune is uncertain, and that others would soon

enjoy the good things which he must leave behind.(869) These traits bear

little resemblance to the portrait of Ashurbanapal either in life or in

death; for after a brilliant career of conquest the Assyrian king died in

old age, at the height of human ambition, with peace at home and triumph

abroad, the admiration of his subjects and the terror of his foes. But if

the traditional characteristics of Sardanapalus harmonize but ill with

what we know of the real monarch of that name, they fit well enough with

all that we know or can conjecture of the mock kings who led a short life

and a merry during the revelry of the Sacaea, the Asiatic equivalent of

the Saturnalia. We can hardly doubt that for the most part such men, with

death staring them in the face at the end of a few days, sought to drown

care and deaden fear by plunging madly into all the fleeting joys that

still offered themselves under the sun. When their brief pleasures and

sharp sufferings were over, and their bones or ashes mingled with the

dust, what more natural that on their tomb—those mounds in which the

people saw, not untruly, the graves of the lovers of Semiramis—there

should be carved some such lines as those which tradition placed in the

mouth of the great Assyrian king, to remind the heedless passer-by of the

shortness and vanity of life?

(M304) When we turn to Sandan, the other legendary or mythical being whom

Movers thought that the Zoganes may have personated, we find the arguments

in support of his theory still stronger. The city of Tarsus in Cilicia is

said to have been founded by a certain Sandan whom the Greeks identified

with Hercules; and at the festival of this god or hero an effigy of him

was burned on a great pyre.(870) This Sandan is doubtless the same with

the Sandes whom Agathias calls the old Persian Hercules. Professing to

give a list of the gods whom the Persians worshipped before the days of

Zoroaster, the Byzantine historian mentions Bel, Sandes, and Anaitis, whom

he identifies with Zeus, Hercules, and Aphrodite respectively.(871) As we

know that Bel was a Babylonian, not a Persian deity, and that in later

times Anaitis was practically equivalent to the Babylonian Ishtar or

Astarte, a strong presumption is raised that Sandes also was a Babylonian

or at all events Semitic deity, and that in speaking of him as Persian the

historian confused the ancient Persians with the Babylonians and perhaps

other stocks of Western Asia. The presumption is strengthened when we find

that in Lydia the surname of Sandon, doubtless equivalent to Sandan, is

said to have been borne by Hercules because he wore a woman’s garment

called a _sandyx_, fine and diaphanous as gossamer, at the bidding of

Queen Omphale, whom the hero served for three years in the guise of a

female slave, clad in purple, humbly carding wool and submitting to be

slapped by the saucy queen with her golden slipper.(872) The familiar

legend that Hercules burned himself alive on a great pyre completes the

parallel between the effeminate Hercules Sandon of Lydia and the Assyrian

Sardanapalus. So exact a parallel must surely rest on a common base of

custom as well as of myth. That base, according to the conjecture of the

admirable scholar K. O. Müller, may have been a custom of dressing up an

effigy of an effeminate Asiatic deity in the semblance of a reveller, and

then publicly burning it on a pyre. Such a custom appears to have

prevailed not only at Tarsus in Cilicia, but also in Lydia; for a coin of

the Lydian Philadelphia, a city which lay not far from the old royal

capital Sardes, exhibits a device like that on coins of Tarsus, consisting

of a figure stretched on a pyre. “We may suppose,” says Müller, “that in

the old Assyrian mythology a certain being called Sandan, or perhaps

Sardan, figured beside Baal and Mylitta or Astarte. The character of this

mythical personage is one which often meets us in oriental religion—the

extreme of voluptuousness and sensuality combined with miraculous force

and heroic strength. We may imagine that at the great festivals of Nineveh

this Sandan or Sardan was exhibited as a buxom figure with womanish

features, the pale face painted with white lead, the eyebrows and

eyelashes blackened with kohl, his person loaded with golden chains,

rings, and earrings, arrayed in a bright red transparent garment, grasping

a goblet in one hand and perhaps, as a symbol of strength, a double axe in

the other, while he sat cross-legged and surrounded by women on a

splendidly adorned couch under a purple canopy, altogether not unlike the

figure of Adonis at the court festivals of Alexandria. Then the people of

‘mad Nineveh,’ as the poet Phocylides called it, ‘the well-favoured

harlot,’ as the prophet Nahum has it, would rejoice and make merry with

this their darling hero. Afterwards there may have been another show, when

this gorgeous Sandan or Sardan was to be seen on a huge pyre of precious

wood, draped in gold-embroidered tapestry and laden with incense and

spices of every sort, which being set on fire, to the howling of a

countless multitude and the deafening din of shrill music, sent up a

monstrous pillar of fire whirling towards heaven and flooded half Nineveh

with smoke and smell.”(873)

(M305) The distinguished scholar whom I have just quoted does not fail to

recognize the part which imagination plays in the picture he has set

before us; but he reminds us very properly that in historical enquiries

imagination must always supply the cement that binds together the broken

fragments of tradition. One thing, he thinks, emerges clearly from the

present investigation: the worship and legend of an effeminate hero like

Sandan appear to have spread, by means of an early diffusion of the

Semitic stock, first to the neighbourhood of Tarsus in Cilicia and

afterwards to Sardes in Lydia. In favour of the former prevalence of the

rite in Lydia it may be added that the oldest dynasty of Lydian kings

traced their descent, not only from the mythical Assyrian hero Ninus, but

also from the Greek hero Hercules,(874) whose legendary death in the fire

finds at least a curious echo in the story that Croesus, the last king of

Lydia, was laid by his Persian conqueror Cyrus on a great pyre of wood,

and was only saved at the last moment from being consumed in the

flames.(875) May not this story embody a reminiscence of the manner in

which the ancient kings of Lydia, as living embodiments of their god,

formerly met their end? It was thus, as we have seen, that the old

Prussian rulers used to burn themselves alive in front of the sacred

oak;(876) and by an odd coincidence, if it is nothing more, the Greek

Hercules directed that the pyre on which he was to be consumed should be

made of the wood of the oak and the wild olive.(877) Some grounds have

also been shewn for thinking that in certain South African tribes the

chiefs may formerly have been burnt alive as a religious or magical

ceremony.(878) All these facts and indications tend to support the view of

Movers that at the Sacaea also the man who played the god for five days

was originally burnt at the end of them.(879) Death by hanging or

crucifixion may have been a later mitigation of his sufferings, though it

is quite possible that both forms of execution or rather of sacrifice may

have been combined by hanging or crucifying the victim first and burning

him afterwards,(880) much as our forefathers used to disembowel traitors

after suspending them for a few minutes on a gibbet. At Tarsus apparently

the custom was still further softened by burning an effigy instead of a

man; but on this point the evidence is not explicit. It is worth observing

that as late as Lucian’s time the principal festival of the year at

Hierapolis—the great seat of the worship of Astarte—fell at the beginning

of spring and took its name of the Pyre or the Torch from the tall masts

which were burnt in the court of the temple with sheep, goats, and other

animals hanging from them.(881) Here the season, the fire, and the

gallows-tree all fit our hypothesis; only the man-god is wanting.