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The Golden Bough: a study of magic and religion

by Sir James George Frazer




CONTENTS

Preface

Subject Index


Chapter  1. The King of the Wood
              1. Diana and Virbius
              2. Artemis and Hippolytus
              3. Recapitulation

Chapter  2. Priestly Kings

Chapter  3. Sympathetic Magic
              1. The Principles of  Magic
              2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic
              3. Contagious Magic
              4. The Magician's Progress

Chapter  4. Magic and Religion

Chapter  5. The Magical Control of the Weather
              1. The Public Magician
              2. The Magical Control of Rain
              3. The Magical Control of the Sun
              4. The Magical Control of the Wind

Chapter  6. Magicians as Kings

Chapter  7. Incarnate Human Gods

Chapter  8. Departmental Kings of Nature

Chapter  9. The Worship of Trees
              1. Tree-spirits
              2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits

Chapter  10. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe

Chapter  11. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation

Chapter  12. The Sacred Marriage
              1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility
              2. The Marriage of the Gods

Chapter  13. The Kings of Rome and Alba
              1. Numa and Egeria
              2. The King as Jupiter

Chapter  14. Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium

Chapter  15. The Worship of the Oak

Chapter  16. Dianus and Diana

Chapter  17. The Burden of Royalty
              1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
              2. Divorce of the Spiritual from the Temporal Power

Chapter  18. The Perils of the Soul
              1. The Soul as a Mannikin
              2. Absence and Recall of the Soul
              3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection

Chapter  19. Tabooed Acts
              1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers
              2. Taboos on Eating and Drinking
              3. Taboos on Showing the Face
              4. Taboos on Quitting the House
              5. Taboos on Leaving Food over

Chapter  20. Tabooed Persons
              1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed
              2. Mourners tabooed
              3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth
              4. Warriors tabooed
              5. Manslayers tabooed
              6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed

Chapter  21. Tabooed Things
              1. The Meaning of  Taboo
              2. Iron tabooed
              3. Sharp Weapons tabooed
              4. Blood tabooed
              5. The Head tabooed
              6. Hair tabooed
              7. Ceremonies at Hair-cutting
              8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails
              9. Spittle tabooed
              10. Foods tabooed
              11. Knots and Rings tabooed

Chapter  22. Tabooed Words
              1. Personal Names tabooed
              2. Names of Relations tabooed
              3. Names of the Dead tabooed
              4. Names of Kings and other Sacred Persons tabooed
              5. Names of Gods tabooed

Chapter  23. Our Debt to the Savage

Chapter  24. The Killing of the Divine King
              1. The Mortality of the Gods
              2. Kings killed when their Strength fails
              3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term

Chapter  25. Temporary Kings

Chapter  26. Sacrifice of the Kings Son

Chapter  27. Succession to the Soul

Chapter  28. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit
              1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
              2. Burying the Carnival
              3. Carrying out Death
              4. Bringing in Summer
              5. Battle of Summer and Winter
              6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko
              7. Death and Revival of Vegetation
              8. Analogous Rites in India
              9. The Magic Spring

Chapter  29. The Myth of Adonis

Chapter  30. Adonis in Syria

Chapter  31. Adonis in Cyprus

Chapter  32. The Ritual of Adonis

Chapter  33. The Gardens of Adonis

Chapter  34. The Myth and Ritual of Attis

Chapter  35. Attis as a God of Vegetation

Chapter  36. Human Representatives of Attis

Chapter  37. Oriental Religions in the West

Chapter  38. The Myth of Osiris

Chapter  39. The Ritual of Osiris
              1. The Popular Rites
              2. The Official Rites

Chapter  40. The Nature of Osiris
              1. Osiris a Corn-god
              2. Osiris a Tree-spirit
              3. Osiris a God of Fertility
              4. Osiris a God of the Dead

Chapter  41. Isis

Chapter  42. Osiris and the Sun

Chapter  43. Dionysus

Chapter  44. Demeter and Persephone

Chapter  45. Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in N. Europe

Chapter  46. Corn-Mother in Many Lands
              1. The Corn-mother in America
              2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies
              3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings
              4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter

Chapter  47. Lityerses
              1. Songs of the Corn Reapers
              2. Killing the Corn-spirit
              3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops
              4. The Corn-spirit slain in his Human Representatives

Chapter  48. The Corn-Spirit as an Animal
              1. Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit
              2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog
              3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock
              4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare
              5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat
              6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat
              7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox
              8. The Corn-spirit  as a Horse or Mare
              9. The Corn-spirit  as a Pig (Boar or Sow)
              10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit

Chapter  49. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals
              1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull
              2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse
              3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig
              4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull
              5. Virbius and the Horse

Chapter  50. Eating the God
              1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits
              2. Eating the God among the Aztecs
              3. Many Manii at Aricia

Chapter  51. Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet

Chapter  52. Killing the Divine Animal
              1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
              2. Killing the Sacred Ram
              3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
              4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
              5. Killing the Sacred Bear

Chapter  53. The Propitiation of Wild Animals By Hunters

Chapter  54. Types of Animal Sacrament
              1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament
              2. Processions with Sacred Animals

Chapter  55. The Transference of Evil
              1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects
              2. The Transference to Animals
              3. The Transference to Men
              4. The Transference of Evil in Europe

Chapter  56. The Public Expulsion of Evils
              1. The Omnipresence of Demons
              2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils
              3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils

Chapter  57. Public Scapegoats
              1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils
              2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
              3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle
              4. On Scapegoats in General

Chapter  58. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity
              1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome
              2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece
              3. The Roman Saturnalia

Chapter  59. Killing the God in Mexico

Chapter  60. Between Heaven and Earth
              1. Not to touch the Earth
              2. Not to see the Sun
              3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty
              4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

Chapter  61. The Myth of Balder

Chapter  62. The Fire-Festivals of Europe
              1. The Fire-festivals in general
              2. The Lenten Fires
              3. The Easter Fires
              4. The Beltane Fires
              5. The Midsummer Fires
              6. The Halloween Fires
              7. The Midwinter Fires
              8. The Need-fire

Chapter  63. The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals
              1. On the Fire-festivals in general
              2. The Solar Theory of the Fire-festivals
              3. The Purificatory Theory of the Fire-festivals

Chapter  64. The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires
              1. The Burning of Effigies in the Fires
              2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires

Chapter  65. Balder and the Mistletoe

Chapter  66. The External Soul in Folk-Tales

Chapter  67. The External Soul in Folk-Custom
              1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things
              2. The External Soul in Plants
              3. The External Soul in Animals
              4. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection

Chapter  68. The Golden Bough

Chapter  69. Farewell to Nemi




Preface

THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which
regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia. When
I first set myself to solve the problem more than thirty years ago,
I thought that the solution could be propounded very briefly, but I
soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible it was
necessary to discuss certain more general questions, some of which
had hardly been broached before. In successive editions the
discussion of these and kindred topics has occupied more and more
space, the enquiry has branched out in more and more directions,
until the two volumes of the original work have expanded into
twelve. Meantime a wish has often been expressed that the book
should be issued in a more compendious form. This abridgment is an
attempt to meet the wish and thereby to bring the work within the
range of a wider circle of readers. While the bulk of the book has
been greatly reduced, I have endeavoured to retain its leading
principles, together with an amount of evidence sufficient to
illustrate them clearly. The language of the original has also for
the most part been preserved, though here and there the exposition
has been somewhat condensed. In order to keep as much of the text as
possible I have sacrificed all the notes, and with them all exact
references to my authorities. Readers who desire to ascertain the
source of any particular statement must therefore consult the larger
work, which is fully documented and provided with a complete
bibliography.

In the abridgment I have neither added new matter nor altered the
views expressed in the last edition; for the evidence which has come
to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either to
confirm my former conclusions or to furnish fresh illustrations of
old principles. Thus, for example, on the crucial question of the
practice of putting kings to death either at the end of a fixed
period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body
of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a custom has
been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking instance of
a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the powerful
mediaeval kingdom of the Khazars in Southern Russia, where the kings
were liable to be put to death either on the expiry of a set term or
whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth, or defeat in
war, seemed to indicate a failure of their natural powers. The
evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar kings, drawn from
the accounts of old Arab travellers, has been collected by me
elsewhere.[1] Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of
a similar practice of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps
is the custom formerly observed in Bunyoro of choosing every year
from a particular clan a mock king, who was supposed to incarnate
the late king, cohabited with his widows at his temple-tomb, and
after reigning for a week was strangled.[2] The custom presents a
close parallel to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, at
which a mock king was dressed in the royal robes, allowed to enjoy
the real king's concubines, and after reigning for five days was
stripped, scourged, and put to death. That festival in its turn has
lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian inscriptions,[3]
which seem to confirm the interpretation which I formerly gave of
the festival as a New Year celebration and the parent of the Jewish
festival of Purim.[4] Other recently discovered parallels to the
priestly kings of Aricia are African priests and kings who used to
be put to death at the end of seven or of two years, after being
liable in the interval to be attacked and killed by a strong man,
who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or the kingdom.[5]

[1] J. G. Frazer, "The Killing of the Khazar Kings," _Folk-lore,_
xxviii. (1917), pp. 382-407.

[2] Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Soul of Central Africa_ (London, 1922), p.
200. Compare J. G. Frazer, &147;The Mackie Ethnological Expedition
to Central Africa," _Man,_ xx. (1920), p. 181.

[3] H. Zimmern, _Zum babylonischen Neujahrsfest_ (Leipzig, 1918).
Compare A. H. Sayce, in _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,_ July
1921, pp. 440-442.

[4] _The Golden Bough,_ Part VI. _The Scapegoat,_ pp. 354 _sqq.,_
412 _sqq._

[5] P. Amaury Talbot in _Journal of the African Society,_ July 1916,
pp. 309 _sq.; id.,_ in _Folk-lore, xxvi._ (1916), pp. 79 _sq.;_ H.
R. Palmer, in _Journal of the African Society,_ July 1912, pp. 403,
407 _sq._

With these and other instances of like customs before us it is no
longer possible to regard the rule of succession to the priesthood
of Diana at Aricia as exceptional; it clearly exemplifies a
widespread institution, of which the most numerous and the most
similar cases have thus far been found in Africa. How far the facts
point to an early influence of Africa on Italy, or even to the
existence of an African population in Southern Europe, I do not
presume to say. The pre-historic historic relations between the two
continents are still obscure and still under investigation.

Whether the explanation which I have offered of the institution is
correct or not must be left to the future to determine. I shall
always be ready to abandon it if a better can be suggested. Meantime
in committing the book in its new form to the judgment of the public
I desire to guard against a misapprehension of its scope which
appears to be still rife, though I have sought to correct it before
now. If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the
worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its
importance in the history of religion, still less because I would
deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I
could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the
significance of a priest who bore the title of King of the Wood, and
one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough--the
Golden Bough--from a tree in the sacred grove. But I am so far from
regarding the reverence for trees as of supreme importance for the
evolution of religion that I consider it to have been altogether
subordinate to other factors, and in particular to the fear of the
human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the
most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. I hope that
after this explicit disclaimer I shall no longer be taxed with
embracing a system of mythology which I look upon not merely as
false but as preposterous and absurd. But I am too familiar with the
hydra of error to expect that by lopping off one of the monster's
heads I can prevent another, or even the same, from sprouting again.
I can only trust to the candour and intelligence of my readers to
rectify this serious misconception of my views by a comparison with
my own express declaration.

J. G. FRAZER.

1 BRICK COURT, TEMPLE, LONDON,
June 1922.



I. The King of the Wood


1. Diana and Virbius

WHO does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough? The scene,
suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine
mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural
landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of
Nemi-- "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients. No one
who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban
hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages
which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palace whose
terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the
stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself
might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands
wild.

In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and
recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under
the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is
perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis,
or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as
the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia (the modern La
Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban
Mount, and separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in
a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred
grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day,
and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to
prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering
warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon
by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he
looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in
his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the
priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and
having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a
stronger or a craftier.

The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the
title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was
visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out, in
summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his
lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at
the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the
smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put
him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant. To gentle
and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to
darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on
a bright day. The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of
summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded
but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to
ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated
wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are
falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying
year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music--the
background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and
stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of
the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the
shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and
now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder
whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down
at him through the matted boughs.

The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical
antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation
we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a
custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial
times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian
society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a
smooth-shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the
custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches
into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity
with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has
elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we
can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of
Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led
to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated
widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied
circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but
generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives,
with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in
classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age
the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an
inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood
did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will
be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness
with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object of
this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly
probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.

I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come
down to us on the subject. According to one story the worship of
Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas,
King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to
Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a
faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from
Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the
Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual
which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical
readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was
sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed
a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of
which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to
break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt
entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew
him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (_Rex
Nemorensis_). According to the public opinion of the ancients the
fateful branch was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl's bidding,
Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world
of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the
flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of
the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of
succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for
amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi
had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him;
and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the
Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still
the prize of victory in a single combat.

Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be
made out. From the votive offerings which have been found on the
site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a huntress,
and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting
expectant mothers an easy delivery. Again, fire seems to have played
a foremost part in her ritual. For during her annual festival, held
on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her
grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was
reflected by the lake; and throughout the length and breadth of
Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth.
Bronze statuettes found in her precinct represent the goddess
herself holding a torch in her raised right hand; and women whose
prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing
lighted torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows. Some
one unknown dedicated a perpetually burning lamp in a little shrine
at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family. The
terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove may
perhaps have served a like purpose for humbler persons. If so, the
analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy
candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the title of Vesta
borne by Diana at Nemi points clearly to the maintenance of a
perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at
the north-east corner of the temple, raised on three steps and
bearing traces of a mosaic pavement, probably supported a round
temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of
Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would seem to have
been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in
terra-cotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a perpetual
fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been common in
Latium from the earliest to the latest times. Further, at the annual
festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were crowned and wild beasts
were not molested; young people went through a purificatory ceremony
in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a
kid cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still
hanging in clusters on the boughs.

But Diana did not reign alone in her grove at Nemi. Two lesser
divinities shared her forest sanctuary. One was Egeria, the nymph of
the clear water which, bubbling from the basaltic rocks, used to
fall in graceful cascades into the lake at the place called Le Mole,
because here were established the mills of the modern village of
Nemi. The purling of the stream as it ran over the pebbles is
mentioned by Ovid, who tells us that he had often drunk of its
water. Women with child used to sacrifice to Egeria, because she was
believed, like Diana, to be able to grant them an easy delivery.
Tradition ran that the nymph had been the wife or mistress of the
wise king Numa, that he had consorted with her in the secrecy of the
sacred grove, and that the laws which he gave the Romans had been
inspired by communion with her divinity. Plutarch compares the
legend with other tales of the loves of goddesses for mortal men,
such as the love of Cybele and the Moon for the fair youths Attis
and Endymion. According to some, the trysting-place of the lovers
was not in the woods of Nemi but in a grove outside the dripping
Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria gushed
from a dark cavern. Every day the Roman Vestals fetched water from
this spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware
pitchers on their heads. In Juvenal's time the natural rock had been
encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of
poor Jews, who were suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove.
We may suppose that the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was
the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved
down from the Alban hills to the banks of the Tiber they brought the
nymph with them and found a new home for her in a grove outside the
gates. The remains of baths which have been discovered within the
sacred precinct, together with many terra-cotta models of various
parts of the human body, suggest that the waters of Egeria were used
to heal the sick, who may have signified their hopes or testified
their gratitude by dedicating likenesses of the diseased members to
the goddess, in accordance with a custom which is still observed in
many parts of Europe. To this day it would seem that the spring
retains medicinal virtues.

The other of the minor deities at Nemi was Virbius. Legend had it
that Virbius was the young Greek hero Hippolytus, chaste and fair,
who learned the art of venery from the centaur Chiron, and spent all
his days in the greenwood chasing wild beasts with the virgin
huntress Artemis (the Greek counterpart of Diana) for his only
comrade. Proud of her divine society, he spurned the love of women,
and this proved his bane. For Aphrodite, stung by his scorn,
inspired his stepmother Phaedra with love of him; and when he
disdained her wicked advances she falsely accused him to his father
Theseus. The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire
Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in
a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a
fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw
Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hoofs to
death. But Diana, for the love she bore Hippolytus, persuaded the
leech Aesculapius to bring her fair young hunter back to life by his
simples. Jupiter, indignant that a mortal man should return from the
gates of death, thrust down the meddling leech himself to Hades. But
Diana hid her favourite from the angry god in a thick cloud,
disguised his features by adding years to his life, and then bore
him far away to the dells of Nemi, where she entrusted him to the
nymph Egeria, to live there, unknown and solitary, under the name of
Virbius, in the depth of the Italian forest. There he reigned a
king, and there he dedicated a precinct to Diana. He had a comely
son, Virbius, who, undaunted by his father's fate, drove a team of
fiery steeds to join the Latins in the war against Aeneas and the
Trojans. Virbius was worshipped as a god not only at Nemi but
elsewhere; for in Campania we hear of a special priest devoted to
his service. Horses were excluded from the Arician grove and
sanctuary because horses had killed Hippolytus. It was unlawful to
touch his image. Some thought that he was the sun. "But the truth
is," says Servius, "that he is a deity associated with Diana, as
Attis is associated with the Mother of the Gods, and Erichthonius
with Minerva, and Adonis with Venus." What the nature of that
association was we shall enquire presently. Here it is worth
observing that in his long and chequered career this mythical
personage has displayed a remarkable tenacity of life. For we can
hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus of the Roman calendar, who
was dragged by horses to death on the thirteenth of August, Diana's
own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same name, who,
after dying twice over as a heathen sinner, has been happily
resuscitated as a Christian saint.

It needs no elaborate demonstration to convince us that the stories
told to account for Diana's worship at Nemi are unhistorical.
Clearly they belong to that large class of myths which are made up
to explain the origin of a religious ritual and have no other
foundation than the resemblance, real or imaginary, which may be
traced between it and some foreign ritual. The incongruity of these
Nemi myths is indeed transparent, since the foundation of the
worship is traced now to Orestes and now to Hippolytus, according as
this or that feature of the ritual has to be accounted for. The real
value of such tales is that they serve to illustrate the nature of
the worship by providing a standard with which to compare it; and
further, that they bear witness indirectly to its venerable age by
showing that the true origin was lost in the mists of a fabulous
antiquity. In the latter respect these Nemi legends are probably
more to be trusted than the apparently historical tradition, vouched
for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana
by a certain Egerius Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin
dictator, on behalf of the peoples of Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium,
Laurentum, Cora, Tibur, Pometia, and Ardea. This tradition indeed
speaks for the great age of the sanctuary, since it seems to date
its foundation sometime before 495 B.C., the year in which Pometia
was sacked by the Romans and disappears from history. But we cannot
suppose that so barbarous a rule as that of the Arician priesthood
was deliberately instituted by a league of civilised communities,
such as the Latin cities undoubtedly were. It must have been handed
down from a time beyond the memory of man, when Italy was still in a
far ruder state than any known to us in the historical period. The
credit of the tradition is rather shaken than confirmed by another
story which ascribes the foundation of the sanctuary to a certain
Manius Egerius, who gave rise to the saying, "There are many Manii
at Aricia." This proverb some explained by alleging that Manius
Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas
others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed
people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from _Mania,_ a
bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the
name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims
on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with
the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius
of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to the
mythical Egeria, excite our suspicion. Yet the tradition recorded by
Cato seems too circumstantial, and its sponsor too respectable, to
allow us to dismiss it as an idle fiction. Rather we may suppose
that it refers to some ancient restoration or reconstruction of the
sanctuary, which was actually carried out by the confederate states.
At any rate it testifies to a belief that the grove had been from
early times a common place of worship for many of the oldest cities
of the country, if not for the whole Latin confederacy.



2. Artemis and Hippolytus

I HAVE said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus,
though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they
may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it
with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask
ourselves, Why did the author of these legends pitch upon Orestes
and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood?
In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the
Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood, were
dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession
to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not
so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason
for the exclusion of horses from the grove; but this by itself seems
hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to
probe deeper by examining the worship as well as the legend or myth
of Hippolytus.

He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated
on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges
and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the
garden of Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the
foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil
bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon's sacred
island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this
fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a
temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest
who held office for life; every year a sacrificial festival was held
in his honour; and his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with
weeping and doleful chants, by unwedded maids. Youths and maidens
dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage. His
grave existed at Troezen, though the people would not show it. It
has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome
Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime, and
yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a
goddess who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis
is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for
the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said, under different
names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of
Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite. The theory
probably does no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For
Artemis was originally a great goddess of fertility, and, on the
principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself
be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort.
On this view, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and
the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and
maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with
the goddess, and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of
cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that
within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped
two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the
fertility of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered
from a dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images
of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had
they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again.
Moreover, at Troezen itself, and apparently within the precinct of
Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour
of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy to
show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the
express purpose of ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic
death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with
similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their
lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess.
These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the
legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the
violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of
the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty fleeting as
the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the
relation of the life of man to the life of nature--a sad philosophy
which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that
practice were, we shall learn later on.



3. Recapitulation

WE can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified
Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to
Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother
of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in
general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her
Greek counterpart, needed a male partner. That partner, if Servius
is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred
grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical
predecessor or archetype of the line of priests who served Diana
under the title of Kings of the Wood, and who came, like him, one
after the other, to a violent end. It is natural, therefore, to
conjecture that they stood to the goddess of the grove in the same
relation in which Virbius stood to her; in short, that the mortal
King of the Wood had for his queen the woodland Diana herself. If
the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as
seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not
only have worshipped it as his goddess but embraced it as his wife.
There is at least nothing absurd in the supposition, since even in
the time of Pliny a noble Roman used thus to treat a beautiful
beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He
embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine
on its trunk. Apparently he took the tree for the goddess. The
custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still
practised in India and other parts of the East. Why should it not
have obtained in ancient Latium?

Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship
of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and
immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of
woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle
and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men
and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her
holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round
temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a
water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana's own functions by
succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have
mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that
Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who
was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and,
lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical
times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly
perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in
a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long
as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.

Clearly these conclusions do not of themselves suffice to explain
the peculiar rule of succession to the priesthood. But perhaps the
survey of a wider field may lead us to think that they contain in
germ the solution of the problem. To that wider survey we must now
address ourselves. It will be long and laborious, but may possess
something of the interest and charm of a voyage of discovery, in
which we shall visit many strange foreign lands, with strange
foreign peoples, and still stranger customs. The wind is in the
shrouds: we shake out our sails to it, and leave the coast of Italy
behind us for a time.




II. Priestly Kings

THE questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two:
first, why had Diana's priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay
his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the
branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients
identified with Virgil's Golden Bough?

The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he
called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a
kingdom?

The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in
ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium
there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred
Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites. In
republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was
called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were
religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose
duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to
have centered round the Common Hearth of the state. Some Greek
states had several of these titular kings, who held office
simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King
had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order to
offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings. A
similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have
prevailed in Greece. In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it
is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely Greek
state which retained the kingly form of government in historical
times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings
as descendants of the god. One of the two Spartan kings held the
priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of Heavenly
Zeus.

This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is
familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of
various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred
slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and
spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such
priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. Teutonic kings, again,
in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to
have exercised the powers, of high priests. The Emperors of China
offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by
the ritual books. The King of Madagascar was high-priest of the
realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was
sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the
sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants
slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still
maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the
king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation of
human victims; and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar
union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly duties,
in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose
ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical
forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque.

When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also,
we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their
office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty
form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were
revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as
intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to
bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are
commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought,
if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and
invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and
sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange
as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early
modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly
drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the
supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by
supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses
and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to
their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he
sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to
his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine
weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should
happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own
person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage,
possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own
well-being and that of his fellow-men.

This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there
is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by
spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still
older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion
of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring
in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency.
The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as
it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of
superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as
well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power
by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art.
Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the
sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in
the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have
some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some
conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system of
superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all
countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some
detail.



III. Sympathetic Magic


1. The Principles of Magic

IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based,
they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first,
that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause;
and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each
other continue to act on each other at a distance after the
physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be
called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or
Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of
Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he
desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that
whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the
person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed
part of his body or not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may
be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law
of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic. To denote
the first of these branches of magic the term Homoeopathic is
perhaps preferable, for the alternative term Imitative or Mimetic
suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious agent who imitates,
thereby limiting the scope of magic too narrowly. For the same
principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art
are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of
inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws
of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not
limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of
natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false
science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural
law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the
sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called
Theoretical Magic: regarded as a set of precepts which human beings
observe in order to compass their ends, it may be called Practical
Magic. At the same time it is to be borne in mind that the
primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side; he never
analyses the mental processes on which his practice is based, never
reflects on the abstract principles involved in his actions. With
him, as with the vast majority of men, logic is implicit, not
explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food in complete
ignorance of the intellectual and physiological processes which are
essential to the one operation and to the other. In short, to him
magic is always an art, never a science; the very idea of science
is lacking in his undeveloped mind. It is for the philosophic
student to trace the train of thought which underlies the
magician's practice; to draw out the few simple threads of
which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract
principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern
the spurious science behind the bastard art.

If my analysis of the magician's logic is correct, its two great
principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of
the association of ideas. Homoeopathic magic is founded on the
association of ideas by similarity: contagious magic is founded on
the association of ideas by contiguity. Homoeopathic magic commits
the mistake of assuming that things which resemble each other are
the same: contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming that
things which have once been in contact with each other are always in
contact. But in practice the two branches are often combined; or, to
be more exact, while homoeopathic or imitative magic may be
practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to
involve an application of the homoeopathic or imitative principle.
Thus generally stated the two things may be a little difficult to
grasp, but they will readily become intelligible when they are
illustrated by particular examples. Both trains of thought are in
fact extremely simple and elementary. It could hardly be otherwise,
since they are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the
abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of
ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere. Both branches of magic,
the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be
comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both
assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret
sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by
means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not
unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely
similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect
each other through a space which appears to be empty.

It may be convenient to tabulate as follows the branches of
magic according to the laws of thought which underlie them:

                   Sympathetic Magic
                   (Law of Sympathy)
                           |
            -------------------------------
            |                             |
    Homoeopathic Magic             Contagious Magic
    (Law of Similarity)            (Law of Contact)


I will now illustrate these two great branches of sympathetic
magic by examples, beginning with homoeopathic magic.



2. Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic

PERHAPS the most familiar application of the principle that like
produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in
many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an
image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does
the man, and that when it perishes he must die. A few instances out
of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the
practice over the world and its remarkable persistence through the
ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of
ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome,
and at this day it is still resorted to by cunning and malignant
savages in Australia, Africa, and Scotland. Thus the North American
Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person
in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body,
and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other
injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person
represented. For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work
evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and
runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it,
believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the
image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in
the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the
person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain
magic words as he does so. The Peruvian Indians moulded images of
fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or
feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended
victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul.

A Malay charm of the same sort is as follows. Take parings of nails,
hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim,
enough to represent every part of his person, and then make them up
into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees' comb. Scorch the
figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven
nights, and say:


 "It is not wax that I am scorching,
  It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch."


After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die.
This charm obviously combines the principles of homoeopathic and
contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of
an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him,
namely, his nails, hair, and spittle. Another form of the Malay
charm, which resembles the Ojebway practice still more closely, is
to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees' comb and of the length
of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is
blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his
head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you
would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards;
enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were
praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where
your victim will be sure to step over it. In order that his blood
may not be on your head, you should say:


    "It is not I who am burying him,
     It is Gabriel who is burying him."


Thus the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the
archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than
you are.

If homoeopathic or imitative magic, working by means of images, has
commonly been practised for the spiteful purpose of putting
obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more
rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping
others into it. In other words, it has been used to facilitate
childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women. Thus among the
Bataks of Sumatra a barren woman, who would become a mother, will
make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing
that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish. In the Babar
Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man
who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to
Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which
the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it. Then the
father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the
woman's head, saying, "O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall,
let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall
and descend into my hands and on my lap." Then he asks the woman,
"Has the child come?" and she answers, "Yes, it is sucking already."
After that the man holds the fowl on the husband's head, and mumbles
some form of words. Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together
with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the
ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has
been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here
the pretence that a child has been born is a purely magical rite
designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child
really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy
of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise,
magic is here blent with and reinforced by religion.

Among some of the Dyaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labour,
a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a
rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime
another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same
end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in
fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to
his stomach by a cloth wrapt round his body represents the child in
the womb, and, following the directions shouted to him by his
colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this
make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the
movements of the real baby till the infant is born.

The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led
other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption,
and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life. If
you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man
who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of
primitive law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to
all intents and purposes. Thus Diodorus tells us that when Zeus
persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got
into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him
through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a
real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode
of adopting children was practised by the barbarians. At the present
time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian
Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or
pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her
very son, and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents.
Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a
grownup man or woman, a great many people assemble and have a feast.
The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat,
allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As
soon as he appears in front he is stroked with the sweet-scented
blossoms of the areca palm and tied to a woman. Then the adopting
mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle
to the end of the house and back again in front of all the
spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic
imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence committed against
an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against
a real child. In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed
erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites
had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone
through the form of being born again. He was passed through a
woman's lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out
to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed
might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India, under
similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first
night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and
water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a
syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed
all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant
woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more
all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth
up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over
again with due solemnity.

Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent
sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based
on homoeopathic magic, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was
to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things,
such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for
the patient a healthy red colour from a living, vigorous source,
namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the
following spell: "Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy
jaundice: in the colour of the red bull do we envelop thee! We
envelop thee in red tints, unto long life. May this person go
unscathed and be free of yellow colour! The cows whose divinity is
Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red (_rohinih_)--in their
every form and every strength we do envelop thee. Into the parrots,
into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and, furthermore, into the
yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice." While he uttered these
words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health into
the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed with the
hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal's back and made
the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red bull and
tied a piece of the skin to him. Then in order to improve his colour
by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He
first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of
tumeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three
yellow birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by
means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water
over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no
doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of
giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red
bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient's skin.
The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked
sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he
was cured of the disease. "Such is the nature," says Plutarch, "and
such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives
the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight." So
well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the
stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale they
kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it
and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay not in its
colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the
yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird,
to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a
jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He
mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because
its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.

One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the
cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of on that
of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience,
while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before him. For
example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour under the
impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about by the
patient's stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling
down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the organ
to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws
himself into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose of
unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next
hooks it up again in another series of contortions and grimaces,
while the patient experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five
francs. In like manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been fetched in
a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is
accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken out of
the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour the
other medicine-men loose the pretended dead man and bring him to
life; and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover
too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of homoeopathic
magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to
Theodosius the First, in his curious work on medicine. It is as
follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang one end of
it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of the fire.
As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up
and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to
the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily
by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the
moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer
recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a
falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting
from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that
comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples
will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to wipe
them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.

Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great
part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to secure
an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces
like, many things are done by him and his friends in deliberate
imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other
hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear some
more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be
disastrous.

Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically
carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in
the barren regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are divided
into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with the duty
of multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of
magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible animals and
plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these
ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe with food and other
necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the effect
which the people desire to produce; in other words, their magic is
homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among the Warramunga the headman of
the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white cockatoos by
holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the
Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem perform ceremonies for
multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as
food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime representing the
fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A
long narrow structure of branches is set up to imitate the chrysalis
case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who have the
grub for their totem, sit and sing of the creature in its various
stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as
they do so they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis. This
is supposed to multiply the numbers of the grubs. Again, in order to
multiply emus, which are an important article of food, the men of
the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem,
especially the parts of the emu which they like best to eat, namely,
the fat and the eggs. Round this painting the men sit and sing.
Afterwards performers, wearing head-dresses to represent the long
neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird as
it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions.

The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which
abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due
season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an
image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction
from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by
a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once. The
islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to
charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of
Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each
other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence
they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in
order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living
creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. In the
island of Nias, when a wild pig has fallen into the pit prepared for
it, the animal is taken out and its back is rubbed with nine fallen
leaves, in the belief that this will make nine more wild pigs fall
into the pit, just as the nine leaves fell from the tree. In the
East Indian islands of Saparoea, Haroekoe, and Noessa Laut, when a
fisherman is about to set a trap for fish in the sea, he looks out
for a tree, of which the fruit has been much pecked at by birds.
From such a tree he cuts a stout branch and makes of it the
principal post in his fish-trap; for he believes that, just as the
tree lured many birds to its fruit, so the branch cut from that tree
will lure many fish to the trap.

The western tribes of British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the
hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which haunts
coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which
the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick
fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a
man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his
nets and taken nothing, he strips himself naked, goes some way off,
then strolls up to the net as if he did not see it, lets himself be
caught in it, and cries, "Hillo! what's this? I'm afraid I'm
caught." After that the net is sure to catch game. A pantomime of
the same sort has been acted within the living memory in our
Scottish Highlands. The Rev. James Macdonald, now of Reay in
Caithness, tells us that in his boyhood when he was fishing with
companions about Loch Aline and they had had no bites for a long
time, they used to make a pretence of throwing one of their fellows
overboard and hauling him out of the water, as if he were a fish;
after that the trout or silloch would begin to nibble, according as
the boat was on fresh or salt water. Before a Carrier Indian goes
out to snare martens, he sleeps by himself for about ten nights
beside the fire with a little stick pressed down on his neck. This
naturally causes the fall-stick of his trap to drop down on the neck
of the marten. Among the Galelareese, who inhabit a district in the
northern part of Halmahera, a large island to the west of New
Guinea, it is a maxim that when you are loading your gun to go out
shooting, you should always put the bullet in your mouth before you
insert it in the gun; for by so doing you practically eat the game
that is to be hit by the bullet, which therefore cannot possibly
miss the mark. A Malay who has baited a trap for crocodiles, and is
awaiting results, is careful in eating his curry always to begin by
swallowing three lumps of rice successively; for this helps the bait
to slide more easily down the crocodile's throat. He is equally
scrupulous not to take any bones out of his curry; for, if he did,
it seems clear that the sharp-pointed stick on which the bait is
skewered would similarly work itself loose, and the crocodile would
get off with the bait. Hence in these circumstances it is prudent
for the hunter, before he begins his meal, to get somebody else to
take the bones out of his curry, otherwise he may at any moment have
to choose between swallowing a bone and losing the crocodile.

This last rule is an instance of the things which the hunter
abstains from doing lest, on the principle that like produces like,
they should spoil his luck. For it is to be observed that the system
of sympathetic magic is not merely composed of positive precepts; it
comprises a very large number of negative precepts, that is,
prohibitions. It tells you not merely what to do, but also what to
leave undone. The positive precepts are charms: the negative
precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all
events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special
application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of
similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not
formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by
the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to
regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. He
thinks that if he acts in a certain way, certain consequences will
inevitably follow in virtue of one or other of these laws; and if
the consequences of a particular act appear to him likely to prove
disagreeable or dangerous, he is naturally careful not to act in
that way lest he should incur them. In other words, he abstains from
doing that which, in accordance with his mistaken notions of cause
and effect, he falsely believes would injure him; in short, he
subjects himself to a taboo. Thus taboo is so far a negative
application of practical magic. Positive magic or sorcery says, "Do
this in order that so and so may happen." Negative magic or taboo
says, "Do not do this, lest so and so should happen." The aim of
positive magic or sorcery is to produce a desired event; the aim of
negative magic or taboo is to avoid an undesirable one. But both
consequences, the desirable and the undesirable, are supposed to be
brought about in accordance with the laws of similarity and contact.
And just as the desired consequence is not really effected by the
observance of a magical ceremony, so the dreaded consequence does
not really result from the violation of a taboo. If the supposed
evil necessarily followed a breach of taboo, the taboo would not be
a taboo but a precept of morality or common sense. It is not a taboo
to say, "Do not put your hand in the fire"; it is a rule of common
sense, because the forbidden action entails a real, not an imaginary
evil. In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just
as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery.
The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great
disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of
ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the
negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole
erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be
defined as the negative side of practical magic. To put this in
tabular form:


                Magic
                  |
       ----------------------
       |                    |
  Theoretical           Practical
  (Magic as a          (Magic as a
pseudo-science)         pseudo-art)
                              |
                         -----------------
                         |               |
                    Positive Magic   Negative Magic
		              or Sorcery      or Taboo



I have made these remarks on taboo and its relations to magic
because I am about to give some instances of taboos observed by
hunters, fishermen, and others, and I wished to show that they fall
under the head of Sympathetic Magic, being only particular
applications of that general theory. Thus, among the Esquimaux boys
are forbidden to play cat's cradle, because if they did so their
fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line.
Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity,
which is the basis of homoeopathic magic: as the child's fingers are
entangled by the string in playing cat's cradle, so they will be
entangled by the harpoonline when he is a man and hunts whales.
Again, among the Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains the wife of a
hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will
turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit
it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of
similarity. So, too, in most parts of ancient Italy women were
forbidden by law to spin on the highroads as they walked, or even to
carry their spindles openly, because any such action was believed to
injure the crops. Probably the notion was that the twirling of the
spindle would twirl the corn-stalks and prevent them from growing
straight. So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may
not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because
they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled
like the thread. For a like reason in Bilaspore, a district of
India, when the chief men of a village meet in council, no one
present should twirl a spindle; for they think that if such a thing
were to happen, the discussion, like the spindle, would move in a
circle and never be wound up. In some of the East Indian islands any
one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may
not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like
manner stop in front of the hunter's snares and then turn back,
instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it is a
rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or
loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman, for
such delay would retard the birth of the child; and in various parts
of Sumatra the woman herself in these circumstances is forbidden to
stand at the door or on the top rung of the house-ladder under pain
of suffering hard labour for her imprudence in neglecting so
elementary a precaution. Malays engaged in the search for camphor
eat their food dry and take care not to pound their salt fine. The
reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains
deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor tree.
Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for
camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be
found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he
ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large. Camphor
hunters in Borneo use the leathery sheath of the leaf-stalk of the
Penang palm as a plate for food, and during the whole of the
expedition they will never wash the plate, for fear that the camphor
might dissolve and disappear from the crevices of the tree.
Apparently they think that to wash their plates would be to wash out
the camphor crystals from the trees in which they are imbedded. The
chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac.
This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches
of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand.
All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from
washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest
by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the
other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set
a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat rosebuds on any
account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near
the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would make the bird itch,
with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would
merely sit and scratch himself. Following this train of thought the
eagle hunter also refrains from using an awl when he is looking
after his snares; for surely if he were to scratch with an awl, the
eagles would scratch him. The same disastrous consequence would
follow if his wives and children at home used an awl while he is out
after eagles, and accordingly they are forbidden to handle the tool
in his absence for fear of putting him in bodily danger.

Among the taboos observed by savages none perhaps are more numerous
or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods, and of such
prohibitions many are demonstrably derived from the law of
similarity and are accordingly examples of negative magic. Just as
the savage eats many animals or plants in order to acquire certain
desirable qualities with which he believes them to be endowed, so he
avoids eating many other animals and plants lest he should acquire
certain undesirable qualities with which he believes them to be
infected. In eating the former he practises positive magic; in
abstaining from the latter he practises negative magic. Many
examples of such positive magic will meet us later on; here I will
give a few instances of such negative magic or taboo. For example,
in Madagascar soldiers are forbidden to eat a number of foods lest
on the principle of homoeopathic magic they should be tainted by
certain dangerous or undesirable properties which are supposed to
inhere in these particular viands. Thus they may not taste hedgehog,
"as it is feared that this animal, from its propensity of coiling up
into a ball when alarmed, will impart a timid shrinking disposition
to those who partake of it." Again, no soldier should eat an ox's
knee, lest like an ox he should become weak in the knees and unable
to march. Further, the warrior should be careful to avoid partaking
of a cock that has died fighting or anything that has been speared
to death; and no male animal may on any account be killed in his
house while he is away at the wars. For it seems obvious that if he
were to eat a cock that had died fighting, he would himself be slain
on the field of battle; if he were to partake of an animal that had
been speared, he would be speared himself; if a male animal were
killed in his house during his absence, he would himself be killed
in like manner and perhaps at the same instant. Further, the
Malagasy soldier must eschew kidneys, because in the Malagasy
language the word for kidney is the same as that for "shot"; so shot
he would certainly be if he ate a kidney.

The reader may have observed that in some of the foregoing examples
of taboos the magical influence is supposed to operate at
considerable distances; thus among the Blackfeet Indians the wives
and children of an eagle hunter are forbidden to use an awl during
his absence, lest the eagles should scratch the distant husband and
father; and again no male animal may be killed in the house of a
Malagasy soldier while he is away at the wars, lest the killing of
the animal should entail the killing of the man. This belief in the
sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at
a distance is of the essence of magic. Whatever doubts science may
entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has
none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principles. A modern
advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have
no difficulty in convincing a savage; the savage believed in it long
ago, and what is more, he acted on his belief with a logical
consistency such as his civilised brother in the faith has not yet,
so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct. For the savage is
convinced not only that magical ceremonies affect persons and things
afar off, but that the simplest acts of daily life may do so too.
Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations
at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of
rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is
supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones. In
particular when a party of men are out hunting or fighting, their
kinsfolk at home are often expected to do certain things or to
abstain from doing certain others, for the sake of ensuring the
safety and success of the distant hunters or warriors. I will now
give some instances of this magical telepathy both in its positive
and in its negative aspect.

In Laos when an elephant hunter is starting for the chase, he warns
his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence; for if
she cut her hair the elephant would burst the toils, if she oiled
herself it would slip through them. When a Dyak village has turned
out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may
not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their
friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be
"butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.

Elephant-hunters in East Africa believe that, if their wives prove
unfaithful in their absence, this gives the elephant power over his
pursuer, who will accordingly be killed or severely wounded. Hence
if a hunter hears of his wife's misconduct, he abandons the chase
and returns home. If a Wagogo hunter is unsuccessful, or is attacked
by a lion, he attributes it to his wife's misbehaviour at home, and
returns to her in great wrath. While he is away hunting, she may not
let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits;
and she must lie on her face in bed. The Moxos Indians of Bolivia
thought that if a hunter's wife was unfaithful to him in his absence
he would be bitten by a serpent or a jaguar. Accordingly, if such an
accident happened to him, it was sure to entail the punishment, and
often the death, of the woman, whether she was innocent or guilty.
An Aleutian hunter of sea-otters thinks that he cannot kill a single
animal if during his absence from home his wife should be unfaithful
or his sister unchaste.

The Huichol Indians of Mexico treat as a demi-god a species of
cactus which throws the eater into a state of ecstasy. The plant
does not grow in their country, and has to be fetched every year by
men who make a journey of forty-three days for the purpose.
Meanwhile the wives at home contribute to the safety of their absent
husbands by never walking fast, much less running, while the men are
on the road. They also do their best to ensure the benefits which,
in the shape of rain, good crops, and so forth, are expected to flow
from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves
to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands.
During the whole of the time which elapses till the festival of the
cactus is held, neither party washes except on certain occasions,
and then only with water brought from the distant country where the
holy plant grows. They also fast much, eat no salt, and are bound to
strict continence. Any one who breaks this law is punished with
illness, and, moreover, jeopardises the result which all are
striving for. Health, luck, and life are to be gained by gathering
the cactus, the gourd of the God of Fire; but inasmuch as the pure
fire cannot benefit the impure, men and women must not only remain
chaste for the time being, but must also purge themselves from the
taint of past sin. Hence four days after the men have started the
women gather and confess to Grandfather Fire with what men they have
been in love from childhood till now. They may not omit a single
one, for if they did so the men would not find a single cactus. So
to refresh their memories each one prepares a string with as many
knots as she has had lovers. This she brings to the temple, and,
standing before the fire, she mentions aloud all the men she has
scored on her string, name after name. Having ended her confession,
she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed
it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in
peace. From now on the women are averse even to letting men pass
near them. The cactus-seekers themselves make in like manner a clean
breast of all their frailties. For every peccadillo they tie a knot
on a string, and after they have "talked to all the five winds" they
deliver the rosary of their sins to the leader, who burns it in the
fire.

Many of the indigenous tribes of Sarawak are firmly persuaded that
were the wives to commit adultery while their husbands are searching
for camphor in the jungle, the camphor obtained by the men would
evaporate. Husbands can discover, by certain knots in the tree, when
the wives are unfaithful; and it is said that in former days many
women were killed by jealous husbands on no better evidence than
that of these knots. Further, the wives dare not touch a comb while
their husbands are away collecting the camphor; for if they did so,
the interstices between the fibres of the tree, instead of being
filled with the precious crystals, would be empty like the spaces
between the teeth of a comb. In the Kei Islands, to the southwest of
New Guinea, as soon as a vessel that is about to sail for a distant
port has been launched, the part of the beach on which it lay is
covered as speedily as possible with palm branches, and becomes
sacred. No one may thenceforth cross that spot till the ship comes
home. To cross it sooner would cause the vessel to perish. Moreover,
all the time that the voyage lasts three or four young girls,
specially chosen for the duty, are supposed to remain in sympathetic
connexion with the mariners and to contribute by their behaviour to
the safety and success of the voyage. On no account, except for the
most necessary purpose, may they quit the room that has been
assigned to them. More than that, so long as the vessel is believed
to be at sea they must remain absolutely motionless, crouched on
their mats with their hands clasped between their knees. They may
not turn their heads to the left or to the right or make any other
movement whatsoever. If they did, it would cause the boat to pitch
and toss; and they may not eat any sticky stuff, such as rice boiled
in coco-nut milk, for the stickiness of the food would clog the
passage of the boat through the water. When the sailors are supposed
to have reached their destination, the strictness of these rules is
somewhat relaxed; but during the whole time that the voyage lasts
the girls are forbidden to eat fish which have sharp bones or
stings, such as the sting-ray, lest their friends at sea should be
involved in sharp, stinging trouble.

Where beliefs like these prevail as to the sympathetic connexion
between friends at a distance, we need not wonder that above
everything else war, with its stern yet stirring appeal to some of
the deepest and tenderest of human emotions, should quicken in the
anxious relations left behind a desire to turn the sympathetic bond
to the utmost account for the benefit of the dear ones who may at
any moment be fighting and dying far away. Hence, to secure an end
so natural and laudable, friends at home are apt to resort to
devices which will strike us as pathetic or ludicrous, according as
we consider their object or the means adopted to effect it. Thus in
some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife
or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night
in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may
not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning,
lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep
by an enemy. Among the Sea Dyaks of Banting in Sarawak the women
strictly observe an elaborate code of rules while the men are away
fighting. Some of the rules are negative and some are positive, but
all alike are based on the principles of magical homoeopathy and
telepathy. Amongst them are the following. The women must wake very
early in the morning and open the windows as soon as it is light;
otherwise their absent husbands will oversleep themselves. The women
may not oil their hair, or the men will slip. The women may neither
sleep nor doze by day, or the men will be drowsy on the march. The
women must cook and scatter popcorn on the verandah every morning;
so will the men be agile in their movements. The rooms must be kept
very tidy, all boxes being placed near the walls; for if any one
were to stumble over them, the absent husbands would fall and be at
the mercy of the foe. At every meal a little rice must be left in
the pot and put aside; so will the men far away always have
something to eat and need never go hungry. On no account may the
women sit at the loom till their legs grow cramped, otherwise their
husbands will likewise be stiff in their joints and unable to rise
up quickly or to run away from the foe. So in order to keep their
husbands' joints supple the women often vary their labours at the
loom by walking up and down the verandah. Further, they may not
cover up their faces, or the men would not to be able to find their
way through the tall grass or jungle. Again, the women may not sew
with a needle, or the men will tread on the sharp spikes set by the
enemy in the path. Should a wife prove unfaithful while her husband
is away, he will lose his life in the enemy's country. Some years
ago all these rules and more were observed by the women of Banting,
while their husbands were fighting for the English against rebels.
But alas! these tender precautions availed them little; for many a
man, whose faithful wife was keeping watch and ward for him at home,
found a soldier's grave.

In the island of Timor, while war is being waged, the high-priest
never quits the temple; his food is brought to him or cooked inside;
day and night he must keep the fire burning, for if he were to let
it die out, disaster would be fall the warriors and would continue
so long as the hearth was cold. Moreover, he must drink only hot
water during the time the army is absent; for every draught of cold
water would damp the spirits of the people, so that they could not
vanquish the enemy. In the Kei Islands, when the warriors have
departed, the women return indoors and bring out certain baskets
containing fruits and stones. These fruits and stones they anoint
and place on a board, murmuring as they do so, "O lord sun, moon,
let the bullets rebound from our husbands, brothers, betrothed, and
other relations, just as raindrops rebound from these objects which
are smeared with oil." As soon as the first shot is heard, the
baskets are put aside, and the women, seizing their fans, rush out
of the houses. Then, waving their fans in the direction of the
enemy, they run through the village, while they sing, "O golden
fans! let our bullets hit, and those of the enemy miss." In this
custom the ceremony of anointing stones, in order that the bullets
may recoil from the men like raindrops from the stones, is a piece
of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic; but the prayer to the sun,
that he will be pleased to give effect to the charm, is a religious
and perhaps later addition. The waving of the fans seems to be a
charm to direct the bullets towards or away from their mark,
according as they are discharged from the guns of friends or foes.

An old historian of Madagascar informs us that "while the men are at
the wars, and until their return, the women and girls cease not day
and night to dance, and neither lie down nor take food in their own
houses. And although they are very voluptuously inclined, they would
not for anything in the world have an intrigue with another man
while their husband is at the war, believing firmly that if that
happened, their husband would be either killed or wounded. They
believe that by dancing they impart strength, courage, and good
fortune to their husbands; accordingly during such times they give
themselves no rest, and this custom they observe very religiously."

Among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast the wives of men
who are away with the army paint themselves white, and adorn their
persons with beads and charms. On the day when a battle is expected
to take place, they run about armed with guns, or sticks carved to
look like guns, and taking green paw-paws (fruits shaped somewhat
like a melon), they hack them with knives, as if they were chopping
off the heads of the foe. The pantomime is no doubt merely an
imitative charm, to enable the men to do to the enemy as the women
do to the paw-paws. In the West African town of Framin, while the
Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw
a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to
the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short
petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very
short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long
projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs
profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long
white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced
they sang, "Our husbands have gone to Ashanteeland; may they sweep
their enemies off the face of the earth!"

Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on
the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals.
These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition.
The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks
forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and
forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or
warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing
their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was
particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving
apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the
enemy's country. They painted their faces red and sang as they
danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands
and help them to kill many foes. Some had eagle-down stuck on the
points of their sticks. When the dance was over, these weapons were
hidden. If a woman whose husband was at the war thought she saw hair
or a piece of a scalp on the weapon when she took it out, she knew
that her husband had killed an enemy. But if she saw a stain of
blood on it, she knew he was wounded or dead. When the men of the
Yuki tribe in California were away fighting, the women at home did
not sleep; they danced continually in a circle, chanting and waving
leafy wands. For they said that if they danced all the time, their
husbands would not grow tired. Among the Haida Indians of the Queen
Charlotte Islands, when the men had gone to war, the women at home
would get up very early in the morning and pretend to make war by
falling upon their children and feigning to take them for slaves.
This was supposed to help their husbands to go and do likewise. If a
wife were unfaithful to her husband while he was away on the
war-path, he would probably be killed. For ten nights all the women
at home lay with their heads towards the point of the compass to
which the war-canoes had paddled away. Then they changed about, for
the warriors were supposed to be coming home across the sea. At
Masset the Haida women danced and sang war-songs all the time their
husbands were away at the wars, and they had to keep everything
about them in a certain order. It was thought that a wife might kill
her husband by not observing these customs. When a band of Carib
Indians of the Orinoco had gone on the war-path, their friends left
in the village used to calculate as nearly as they could the exact
moment when the absent warriors would be advancing to attack the
enemy. Then they took two lads, laid them down on a bench, and
inflicted a most severe scourging on their bare backs. This the
youths submitted to without a murmur, supported in their sufferings
by the firm conviction, in which they had been bred from childhood,
that on the constancy and fortitude with which they bore the cruel
ordeal depended the valour and success of their comrades in the
battle.

Among the many beneficent uses to which a mistaken ingenuity has
applied the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, is that of
causing trees and plants to bear fruit in due season. In Thüringen
the man who sows flax carries the seed in a long bag which reaches
from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so
that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this
will cause the flax to wave in the wind. In the interior of Sumatra
rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down
their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have
long stalks. Similarly, in ancient Mexico a festival was held in
honour of the goddess of maize, or "the long-haired mother," as she
was called. It began at the time "when the plant had attained its
full growth, and fibres shooting forth from the top of the green ear
indicated that the grain was fully formed. During this festival the
women wore their long hair unbound, shaking and tossing it in the
dances which were the chief feature in the ceremonial, in order that
the tassel of the maize might grow in like profusion, that the grain
might be correspondingly large and flat, and that the people might
have abundance." In many parts of Europe dancing or leaping high in
the air are approved homoeopathic modes of making the crops grow
high. Thus in Franche-Comté they say that you should dance at the
Carnival in order to make the hemp grow tall.

The notion that a person can influence a plant homoeopathically by
his act or condition comes out clearly in a remark made by a Malay
woman. Being asked why she stripped the upper part of her body naked
in reaping the rice, she explained that she did it to make the
rice-husks thinner, as she was tired of pounding thick-husked rice.
Clearly, she thought that the less clothing she wore the less husk
there would be on the rice. The magic virtue of a pregnant woman to
communicate fertility is known to Bavarian and Austrian peasants,
who think that if you give the first fruit of a tree to a woman with
child to eat, the tree will bring forth abundantly next year. On the
other hand, the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her
husband's garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from
bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced. The
Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of
the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might
teem and the corn swell in the ear. When a Catholic priest
remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women
to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts,
the men answered, "Father, you don't understand these things, and
that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear
children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of
the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two
or three basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now
why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and
know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them
sow, then; we men don't know as much about it as they do."

Thus on the theory of homoeopathic magic a person can influence
vegetation either for good or for evil according to the good or the
bad character of his acts or states: for example, a fruitful woman
makes plants fruitful, a barren woman makes them barren. Hence this
belief in the noxious and infectious nature of certain personal
qualities or accidents has given rise to a number of prohibitions or
rules of avoidance: people abstain from doing certain things lest
they should homoeopathically infect the fruits of the earth with
their own undesirable state or condition. All such customs of
abstention or rules of avoidance are examples of negative magic or
taboo. Thus, for example, arguing from what may be called the
infectiousness of personal acts or states, the Galelareese say that
you ought not to shoot with a bow and arrows under a fruit-tree, or
the tree will cast its fruit even as the arrows fall to the ground;
and that when you are eating water-melon you ought not to mix the
pips which you spit out of your mouth with the pips which you have
put aside to serve as seed; for if you do, though the pips you spat
out may certainly spring up and blossom, yet the blossoms will keep
falling off just as the pips fell from your mouth, and thus these
pips will never bear fruit. Precisely the same train of thought
leads the Bavarian peasant to believe that if he allows the graft of
a fruit-tree to fall on the ground, the tree that springs from that
graft will let its fruit fall untimely. When the Chams of
Cochinchina are sowing their dry rice fields and desire that no
shower should fall, they eat their rice dry in order to prevent rain
from spoiling the crop.

In the foregoing cases a person is supposed to influence vegetation
homoeopathically. He infects trees or plants with qualities or
accidents, good or bad, resembling and derived from his own. But on
the principle of homoeopathic magic the influence is mutual: the
plant can infect the man just as much as the man can infect the
plant. In magic, as I believe in physics, action and reaction are
equal and opposite. The Cherokee Indians are adepts in practical
botany of the homoeopathic sort. Thus wiry roots of the catgut plant
are so tough that they can almost stop a plowshare in the furrow.
Hence Cherokee women wash their heads with a decoction of the roots
to make the hair strong, and Cherokee ball-players wash themselves
with it to toughen their muscles. It is a Galelareese belief that if
you eat a fruit which has fallen to the ground, you will yourself
contract a disposition to stumble and fall; and that if you partake
of something which has been forgotten (such as a sweet potato left
in the pot or a banana in the fire), you will become forgetful. The
Galelareese are also of opinion that if a woman were to consume two
bananas growing from a single head she would give birth to twins.
The Guarani Indians of South America thought that a woman would
become a mother of twins if she ate a double grain of millet. In
Vedic times a curious application of this principle supplied a charm
by which a banished prince might be restored to his kingdom. He had
to eat food cooked on a fire which was fed with wood which had grown
out of the stump of a tree which had been cut down. The recuperative
power manifested by such a tree would in due course be communicated
through the fire to the food, and so to the prince, who ate the food
which was cooked on the fire which was fed with the wood which grew
out of the tree. The Sudanese think that if a house is built of the
wood of thorny trees, the life of the people who dwell in that house
will likewise be thorny and full of trouble.

There is a fruitful branch of homoeopathic magic which works by
means of the dead; for just as the dead can neither see nor hear nor
speak, so you may on homoeopathic principles render people blind,
deaf and dumb by the use of dead men's bones or anything else that
is tainted by the infection of death. Thus among the Galelareese,
when a young man goes a-wooing at night, he takes a little earth
from a grave and strews it on the roof of his sweetheart's house
just above the place where her parents sleep. This, he fancies, will
prevent them from waking while he converses with his beloved, since
the earth from the grave will make them sleep as sound as the dead.
Burglars in all ages and many lands have been patrons of this
species of magic, which is very useful to them in the exercise of
their profession. Thus a South Slavonian housebreaker sometimes
begins operations by throwing a dead man's bone over the house,
saying, with pungent sarcasm, "As this bone may waken, so may these
people waken"; after that not a soul in the house can keep his or
her eyes open. Similarly, in Java the burglar takes earth from a
grave and sprinkles it round the house which he intends to rob; this
throws the inmates into a deep sleep. With the same intention a
Hindoo will strew ashes from a pyre at the door of the house;
Indians of Peru scatter the dust of dead men's bones; and Ruthenian
burglars remove the marrow from a human shin-bone, pour tallow into
it, and having kindled the tallow, march thrice round the house with
this candle burning, which causes the inmates to sleep a death-like
sleep. Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone
and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are overcome
with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent
purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in giving birth to
her first child; but the arm had to be stolen. With it they beat the
ground before they entered the house which they designed to plunder;
this caused every one in the house to lose all power of speech and
motion; they were as dead, hearing and seeing everything, but
perfectly powerless; some of them, however, really slept and even
snored. In Europe similar properties were ascribed to the Hand of
Glory, which was the dried and pickled hand of a man who had been
hanged. If a candle made of the fat of a malefactor who had also
died on the gallows was lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory as
in a candlestick, it rendered motionless all persons to whom it was
presented; they could not stir a finger any more than if they were
dead. Sometimes the dead man's hand is itself the candle, or rather
bunch of candles, all its withered fingers being set on fire; but
should any member of the household be awake, one of the fingers will
not kindle. Such nefarious lights can only be extinguished with
milk. Often it is prescribed that the thief's candle should be made
of the finger of a new-born or, still better, unborn child;
sometimes it is thought needful that the thief should have one such
candle for every person in the house, for if he has one candle too
little somebody in the house will wake and catch him. Once these
tapers begin to burn, there is nothing but milk that will put them
out. In the seventeenth century robbers used to murder pregnant
women in order thus to extract candles from their wombs. An ancient
Greek robber or burglar thought he could silence and put to flight
the fiercest watchdogs by carrying with him a brand plucked from a
funeral pyre. Again, Servian and Bulgarian women who chafe at the
restraints of domestic life will take the copper coins from the eyes
of a corpse, wash them in wine or water, and give the liquid to
their husbands to drink. After swallowing it, the husband will be as
blind to his wife's peccadilloes as the dead man was on whose eyes
the coins were laid.

Further, animals are often conceived to possess qualities of
properties which might be useful to man, and homoeopathic or
imitative magic seeks to communicate these properties to human
beings in various ways. Thus some Bechuanas wear a ferret as a
charm, because, being very tenacious of life, it will make them
difficult to kill. Others wear a certain insect, mutilated, but
living, for a similar purpose. Yet other Bechuana warriors wear the
hair of a hornless ox among their own hair, and the skin of a frog
on their mantle, because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no
horns, is hard to catch; so the man who is provided with these
charms believes that he will be as hard to hold as the ox and the
frog. Again, it seems plain that a South African warrior who twists
tufts of rat's hair among his own curly black locks will have just
as many chances of avoiding the enemy's spear as the nimble rat has
of avoiding things thrown at it; hence in these regions rats' hair
is in great demand when war is expected. One of the ancient books of
India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the
earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a
place where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the
boar will be in that earth. When you are playing the one-stringed
lute, and your fingers are stiff, the thing to do is to catch some
long-legged field spiders and roast them, and then rub your fingers
with the ashes; that will make your fingers as lithe and nimble as
the spiders' legs--at least so think the Galelareese. To bring back
a runaway slave an Arab will trace a magic circle on the ground,
stick a nail in the middle of it, and attach a beetle by a thread to
the nail, taking care that the sex of the beetle is that of the
fugitive. As the beetle crawls round and round, it will coil the
thread about the nail, thus shortening its tether and drawing nearer
to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopathic magic
the runaway slave will be drawn back to his master.

Among the western tribes of British New Guinea, a man who has killed
a snake will burn it and smear his legs with the ashes when he goes
into the forest; for no snake will bite him for some days
afterwards. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer and steal at
market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then throw
a pinch of its ashes over the person with whom he is higgling; after
that he can take what he likes from the booth, and the owner will
not be a bit the wiser, having become as blind as the deceased cat
with whose ashes he has been sprinkled. The thief may even ask
boldly, "Did I pay for it?" and the deluded huckster will reply,
"Why, certainly." Equally simple and effectual is the expedient
adopted by natives of Central Australia who desire to cultivate
their beards. They prick the chin all over with a pointed bone, and
then stroke it carefully with a magic stick or stone, which
represents a kind of rat that has very long whiskers. The virtue of
these whiskers naturally passes into the representative stick or
stone, and thence by an easy transition to the chin, which,
consequently, is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard. The
ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful
nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that to smear the
eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give
him the eagle's vision; and that a raven's eggs would restore the
blackness of the raven to silvery hair. Only the person who adopted
this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most
careful to keep his mouth full of oil all the time he applied the
eggs to his venerable locks, else his teeth as well as his hair
would be dyed raven black, and no amount of scrubbing and scouring
would avail to whiten them again. The hair-restorer was in fact a
shade too powerful, and in applying it you might get more than you
bargained for.

The Huichol Indians admire the beautiful markings on the backs of
serpents. Hence when a Huichol woman is about to weave or embroider,
her husband catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick,
while the woman strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole
length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead
and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the
web as the markings on the back of the serpent.

On the principle of homoeopathic magic, inanimate things, as well as
plants and animals, may diffuse blessing or bane around them,
according to their own intrinsic nature and the skill of the wizard
to tap or dam, as the case may be, the stream of weal or woe. In
Samaracand women give a baby sugar candy to suck and put glue in the
palm of its hand, in order that, when the child grows up, his words
may be sweet and precious things may stick to his hands as if they
were glued. The Greeks thought that a garment made from the fleece
of a sheep that had been torn by a wolf would hurt the wearer,
setting up an itch or irritation in his skin. They were also of
opinion that if a stone which had been bitten by a dog were dropped
in wine, it would make all who drank of that wine to fall out among
themselves. Among the Arabs of Moab a childless woman often borrows
the robe of a woman who has had many children, hoping with the robe
to acquire the fruitfulness of its owner. The Caffres of Sofala, in
East Africa, had a great dread of being struck with anything hollow,
such as a reed or a straw, and greatly preferred being thrashed with
a good thick cudgel or an iron bar, even though it hurt very much.
For they thought that if a man were beaten with anything hollow, his
inside would waste away till he died. In eastern seas there is a
large shell which the Buginese of Celebes call the "old man"
(_kadjâwo_). On Fridays they turn these "old men" upside down and
place them on the thresholds of their houses, believing that whoever
then steps over the threshold of the house will live to be old. At
initiation a Brahman boy is made to tread with his right foot on a
stone, while the words are repeated, "Tread on this stone; like a
stone be firm"; and the same ceremony is performed, with the same
words, by a Brahman bride at her marriage. In Madagascar a mode of
counteracting the levity of fortune is to bury a stone at the foot
of the heavy house-post. The common custom of swearing upon a stone
may be based partly on a belief that the strength and stability of
the stone lend confirmation to an oath. Thus the old Danish
historian Saxo Grammaticus tells us that "the ancients, when they
were to choose a king, were wont to stand on stones planted in the
ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow from the
steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be lasting."

But while a general magical efficacy may be supposed to reside in
all stones by reason of their common properties of weight and
solidity, special magical virtues are attributed to particular
stones, or kinds of stone, in accordance with their individual or
specific qualities of shape and colour. For example, the Indians of
Peru employed certain stones for the increase of maize, others for
the increase of potatoes, and others again for the increase of
cattle. The stones used to make maize grow were fashioned in the
likeness of cobs of maize, and the stones destined to multiply
cattle had the shape of sheep.

In some parts of Melanesia a like belief prevails that certain
sacred stones are endowed with miraculous powers which correspond in
their nature to the shape of the stone. Thus a piece of water-worn
coral on the beach often bears a surprising likeness to a
bread-fruit. Hence in the Banks Islands a man who finds such a coral
will lay it at the root of one of his bread-fruit trees in the
expectation that it will make the tree bear well. If the result
answers his expectation, he will then, for a proper remuneration,
take stones of less-marked character from other men and let them lie
near his, in order to imbue them with the magic virtue which resides
in it. Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring
in money; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small
ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to
offer money upon it would bring him pigs. In these and similar cases
the Melanesians ascribe the marvellous power, not to the stone
itself, but to its indwelling spirit; and sometimes, as we have just
seen, a man endeavours to propitiate the spirit by laying down
offerings on the stone. But the conception of spirits that must be
propitiated lies outside the sphere of magic, and within that of
religion. Where such a conception is found, as here, in conjunction
with purely magical ideas and practices, the latter may generally be
assumed to be the original stock on which the religious conception
has been at some later time engrafted. For there are strong grounds
for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded
religion. But to this point we shall return presently.

The ancients set great store on the magical qualities of precious
stones; indeed it has been maintained, with great show of reason,
that such stones were used as amulets long before they were worn as
mere ornaments. Thus the Greeks gave the name of tree-agate to a
stone which exhibits tree-like markings, and they thought that if
two of these gems were tied to the horns or necks of oxen at the
plough, the crop would be sure to be plentiful. Again, they
recognised a milkstone which produced an abundant supply of milk in
women if only they drank it dissolved in honey-mead. Milk-stones are
used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the
present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to
ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks believed in a
stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone;
to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and
sprinkle the powder on the wound. The wine-coloured amethyst
received its name, which means "not drunken," because it was
supposed to keep the wearer of it sober; and two brothers who
desired to live at unity were advised to carry magnets about with
them, which, by drawing the twain together, would clearly prevent
them from falling out.

The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after sunset
on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till the
stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star appears, he
should point it out to her, and, addressing the star, say, "Firm art
thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou with me, O thriving
one!" Then, turning to his wife, he should say, "To me Brihaspati
has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live
with me a hundred autumns." The intention of the ceremony is plainly
to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of
earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is
the wish expressed in Keats's last sonnet:


    Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
    Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.


Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its
ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude
philosophy of sympathy and resemblance which here engages our
attention, to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its
tides and the life of man, of animals, and of plants. In the flowing
tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of
prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a
real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness,
and of death. The Breton peasant fancies that clover sown when the
tide is coming in will grow well, but that if the plant be sown at
low water or when the tide is going out, it will never reach
maturity, and that the cows which feed on it will burst. His wife
believes that the best butter is made when the tide has just turned
and is beginning to flow, that milk which foams in the churn will go
on foaming till the hour of high water is past, and that water drawn
from the well or milk extracted from the cow while the tide is
rising will boil up in the pot or saucepan and overflow into the
fire. According to some of the ancients, the skins of seals, even
after they had been parted from their bodies, remained in secret
sympathy with the sea, and were observed to ruffle when the tide was
on the ebb. Another ancient belief, attributed to Aristotle, was
that no creature can die except at ebb tide. The belief, if we can
trust Pliny, was confirmed by experience, so far as regards human
beings, on the coast of France. Philostratus also assures us that at
Cadiz dying people never yielded up the ghost while the water was
high. A like fancy still lingers in some parts of Europe. On the
Cantabrian coast they think that persons who die of chronic or acute
disease expire at the moment when the tide begins to recede. In
Portugal, all along the coast of Wales, and on some parts of the
coast of Brittany, a belief is said to prevail that people are born
when the tide comes in, and die when it goes out. Dickens attests
the existence of the same superstition in England. "People can't
die, along the coast," said Mr. Pegotty, "except when the tide's
pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in--not
properly born till flood." The belief that most deaths happen at ebb
tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from
Northumberland to Kent. Shakespeare must have been familiar with it,
for he makes Falstaff die "even just between twelve and one, e'en at
the turning o' the tide." We meet the belief again on the Pacific
coast of North America among the Haidas. Whenever a good Haida is
about to die he sees a canoe manned by some of his dead friends, who
come with the tide to bid him welcome to the spirit land. "Come with
us now," they say, "for the tide is about to ebb and we must
depart." At Port Stephens, in New South Wales, the natives always
buried their dead at flood tide, never at ebb, lest the retiring
water should bear the soul of the departed to some distant country.

To ensure a long life the Chinese have recourse to certain
complicated charms, which concentrate in themselves the magical
essence emanating, on homoeopathic principles, from times and
seasons, from persons and from things. The vehicles employed to
transmit these happy influences are no other than grave-clothes.
These are provided by many Chinese in their lifetime, and most
people have them cut out and sewn by an unmarried girl or a very
young woman, wisely calculating that, since such a person is likely
to live a great many years to come, a part of her capacity to live
long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus stave off for many
years the time when they shall be put to their proper use. Further,
the garments are made by preference in a year which has an
intercalary month; for to the Chinese mind it seems plain that
grave-clothes made in a year which is unusually long will possess
the capacity of prolonging life in an unusually high degree. Amongst
the clothes there is one robe in particular on which special pains
have been lavished to imbue it with this priceless quality. It is a
long silken gown of the deepest blue colour, with the word
"longevity" embroidered all over it in thread of gold. To present an
aged parent with one of these costly and splendid mantles, known as
"longevity garments," is esteemed by the Chinese an act of filial
piety and a delicate mark of attention. As the garment purports to
prolong the life of its owner, he often wears it, especially on
festive occasions, in order to allow the influence of longevity,
created by the many golden letters with which it is bespangled, to
work their full effect upon his person. On his birthday, above all,
he hardly ever fails to don it, for in China common sense bids a man
lay in a large stock of vital energy on his birthday, to be expended
in the form of health and vigour during the rest of the year.
Attired in the gorgeous pall, and absorbing its blessed influence at
every pore, the happy owner receives complacently the
congratulations of friends and relations, who warmly express their
admiration of these magnificent cerements, and of the filial piety
which prompted the children to bestow so beautiful and useful a
present on the author of their being.

Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in
the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected
by its shape, and that they must vary according to the character of
the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus it is related
that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines of which are
like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the depredations of
the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped like a
fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the
plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst. These pagodas,
which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, have ever since
exercised the happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting
the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes
the imaginary carp. Some forty years ago the wise men of Shanghai
were much exercised to discover the cause of a local rebellion. On
careful enquiry they ascertained that the rebellion was due to the
shape of a large new temple which had most unfortunately been built
in the shape of a tortoise, an animal of the very worst character.
The difficulty was serious, the danger was pressing; for to pull
down the temple would have been impious, and to let it stand as it
was would be to court a succession of similar or worse disasters.
However, the genius of the local professors of geomancy, rising to
the occasion, triumphantly surmounted the difficulty and obviated
the danger. By filling up two wells, which represented the eyes of
the tortoise, they at once blinded that disreputable animal and
rendered him incapable of doing further mischief.

Sometimes homoeopathic or imitative magic is called in to annul an
evil omen by accomplishing it in mimicry. The effect is to
circumvent destiny by substituting a mock calamity for a real one.
In Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a
regular system. Here every man's fortune is determined by the day or
hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one his fate
is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the phrase goes,
by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the mischief are
various. For example, if a man is born on the first day of the
second month (February), his house will be burnt down when he comes
of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe, the
friends of the infant will set up a shed in a field or in the
cattle-fold and burn it. If the ceremony is to be really effective,
the child and his mother should be placed in the shed and only
plucked, like brands, from the burning hut before it is too late.
Again, dripping November is the month of tears, and he who is born
in it is born to sorrow. But in order to disperse the clouds that
thus gather over his future, he has nothing to do but to take the
lid off a boiling pot and wave it about. The drops that fall from it
will accomplish his destiny and so prevent the tears from trickling
from his eyes. Again, if fate has decreed that a young girl, still
unwed, should see her children, still unborn, descend before her
with sorrow to the grave, she can avert the calamity as follows. She
kills a grasshopper, wraps it in a rag to represent a shroud, and
mourns over it like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to
be comforted. Moreover, she takes a dozen or more other
grasshoppers, and having removed some of their superfluous legs and
wings she lays them about their dead and shrouded fellow. The buzz
of the tortured insects and the agitated motions of their mutilated
limbs represent the shrieks and contortions of the mourners at a
funeral. After burying the deceased grasshopper she leaves the rest
to continue their mourning till death releases them from their pain;
and having bound up her dishevelled hair she retires from the grave
with the step and carriage of a person plunged in grief. Thenceforth
she looks cheerfully forward to seeing her children survive her; for
it cannot be that she should mourn and bury them twice over. Once
more, if fortune has frowned on a man at his birth and penury has
marked him for her own, he can easily erase the mark in question by
purchasing a couple of cheap pearls, price three halfpence, and
burying them. For who but the rich of this world can thus afford to
fling pearls away?



3. Contagious Magic

THUS far we have been considering chiefly that branch of sympathetic
magic which may be called homoeopathic or imitative. Its leading
principle, as we have seen, is that like produces like, or, in other
words, that an effect resembles its cause. The other great branch of
sympathetic magic, which I have called Contagious Magic, proceeds
upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must
remain ever afterwards, even when quite dissevered from each other,
in such a sympathetic relation that whatever is done to the one must
similarly affect the other. Thus the logical basis of Contagious
Magic, like that of Homoeopathic Magic, is a mistaken association of
ideas; its physical basis, if we may speak of such a thing, like the
physical basis of Homoeopathic Magic, is a material medium of some
sort which, like the ether of modern physics, is assumed to unite
distant objects and to convey impressions from one to the other. The
most familiar example of Contagious Magic is the magical sympathy
which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of
his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of
human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the
person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide;
instances of it in regard to hair and nails will be noticed later on
in this work.

Among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock out
one or more of a boy's front teeth at those ceremonies of initiation
to which every male member had to submit before he could enjoy the
rights and privileges of a full-grown man. The reason of the
practice is obscure; all that concerns us here is the belief that a
sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and his
teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums. Thus among
some of the tribes about the river Darling, in New South Wales, the
extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near a river or
water-hole; if the bark grew over the tooth, or if the tooth fell
into the water, all was well; but if it were exposed and the ants
ran over it, the natives believed that the boy would suffer from a
disease of the mouth. Among the Murring and other tribes of New
South Wales the extracted tooth was at first taken care of by an old
man, and then passed from one headman to another, until it had gone
all round the community, when it came back to the lad's father, and
finally to the lad himself. But however it was thus conveyed from
hand to hand, it might on no account be placed in a bag containing
magical substances, for to do so would, they believed, put the owner
of the tooth in great danger. The late Dr. Howitt once acted as
custodian of the teeth which had been extracted from some novices at
a ceremony of initiation, and the old men earnestly besought him not
to carry them in a bag in which they knew that he had some quartz
crystals. They declared that if he did so the magic of the crystals
would pass into the teeth, and so injure the boys. Nearly a year
after Dr. Howitt's return from the ceremony he was visited by one of
the principal men of the Murring tribe, who had travelled some two
hundred and fifty miles from his home to fetch back the teeth. This
man explained that he had been sent for them because one of the boys
had fallen into ill health, and it was believed that the teeth had
received some injury which had affected him. He was assured that the
teeth had been kept in a box apart from any substances, like quartz
crystals, which could influence them; and he returned home bearing
the teeth with him carefully wrapt up and concealed.

The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these
should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt
graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic
on it. In Sussex some fifty years ago a maid-servant remonstrated
strongly against the throwing away of children's cast teeth,
affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the
child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the
animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old
Master Simmons, who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw, a
personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who
threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog's trough.
A similar belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of
homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones.
Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted
teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in
the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist
between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the
same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents. For
example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among
the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should
insert it in a mouse's hole. To do so with a child's milk-tooth
which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache.
Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards
over your head, saying "Mouse, give me your iron tooth; I will give
you my bone tooth." After that your other teeth will remain good.
Far away from Europe, at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child's
tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:


    "Big rat! little rat!
     Here is my old tooth.
     Pray give me a new one."


Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats
make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for
invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats' teeth were the
strongest known to the natives.

Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic
union with the body, after the physical connexion has been severed,
are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta. So
intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be, that the fortunes of
the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed
to be bound up with one or other of these portions of his person, so
that if his navel-string or afterbirth is preserved and properly
treated, he will be prosperous; whereas if it be injured or lost, he
will suffer accordingly. Thus certain tribes of Western Australia
believe that a man swims well or ill, according as his mother at his
birth threw the navel-string into water or not. Among the natives on
the Pennefather River in Queensland it is believed that a part of
the child's spirit (_cho-i_) stays in the afterbirth. Hence the
grandmother takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand. She
marks the spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground
in a circle, tying their tops together so that the structure
resembles a cone. When Anjea, the being who causes conception in
women by putting mud babies into their wombs, comes along and sees
the place, he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his
haunts, such as a tree, a hole in a rock, or a lagoon where it may
remain for years. But sometime or other he will put the spirit again
into a baby, and it will be born once more into the world. In
Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, the navel-string is placed in a
shell and then disposed of in such a way as shall best adapt the
child for the career which the parents have chosen for him; for
example, if they wish to make him a good climber, they will hang the
navel-string on a tree. The Kei islanders regard the navel-string as
the brother or sister of the child, according to the sex of the
infant. They put it in a pot with ashes, and set it in the branches
of a tree, that it may keep a watchful eye on the fortunes of its
comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other peoples of
the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child's younger
brother or sister, the sex being determined by the sex of the child,
and it is buried under the house. According to the Bataks it is
bound up with the child's welfare, and seems, in fact, to be the
seat of the transferable soul, of which we shall hear something
later on. The Karo Bataks even affirm that of a man's two souls it
is the true soul that lives with the placenta under the house; that
is the soul, they say, which begets children.

The Baganda believe that every person is born with a double, and
this double they identify with the afterbirth, which they regard as
a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a
plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has
ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the
family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried
under a corn-mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a good
baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the
woods, in order that he may be a hunter. The Incas of Peru preserved
the navel-string with the greatest care, and gave it to the child to
suck whenever it fell ill. In ancient Mexico they used to give a
boy's navel-string to soldiers, to be buried by them on a field of
battle, in order that the boy might thus acquire a passion for war.
But the navel-string of a girl was buried beside the domestic
hearth, because this was believed to inspire her with a love of home
and taste for cooking and baking.

Even in Europe many people still believe that a person's destiny is
more or less bound up with that of his navel-string or afterbirth.
Thus in Rhenish Bavaria the navel-string is kept for a while wrapt
up in a piece of old linen, and then cut or pricked to pieces
according as the child is a boy or a girl, in order that he or she
may grow up to be a skilful workman or a good sempstress. In Berlin
the midwife commonly delivers the dried navel-string to the father
with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully, for so long as it
is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from sickness. In
Beauce and Perche the people are careful to throw the navel-string
neither into water nor into fire, believing that if that were done
the child would be drowned or burned.

Thus in many parts of the world the navel-string, or more commonly
the afterbirth, is regarded as a living being, the brother or sister
of the infant, or as the material object in which the guardian
spirit of the child or part of its soul resides. Further, the
sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a person and his
afterbirth or navel-string comes out very clearly in the widespread
custom of treating the afterbirth or navel-string in ways which are
supposed to influence for life the character and career of the
person, making him, if it is a man, a nimble climber, a strong
swimmer, a skilful hunter, or a brave soldier, and making her, if it
is a woman, a cunning sempstress, a good baker, and so forth. Thus
the beliefs and usages concerned with the afterbirth or placenta,
and to a less extent with the navel-string, present a remarkable
parallel to the widespread doctrine of the transferable or external
soul and the customs founded on it. Hence it is hardly rash to
conjecture that the resemblance is no mere chance coincidence, but
that in the afterbirth or placenta we have a physical basis (not
necessarily the only one) for the theory and practice of the
external soul. The consideration of that subject is reserved for a
later part of this work.

A curious application of the doctrine of contagious magic is the
relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the
agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to
the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or
evil. Thus Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are
sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound,
and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated. In
Melanesia, if a man's friends get possession of the arrow which
wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves, for
then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside.
Meantime the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate
the wound by all the means in his power. For this purpose he and his
friends drink hot and burning juices and chew irritating leaves, for
this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound. Further, they keep
the bow near the fire to make the wound which it has inflicted hot;
and for the same reason they put the arrow-head, if it has been
recovered, into the fire. Moreover, they are careful to keep the
bow-string taut and to twang it occasionally, for this will cause
the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and spasms of
tetanus. "It is constantly received and avouched," says Bacon, "that
the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the
wound itself. In this experiment, upon the relation of men of credit
(though myself, as yet, am not fully inclined to believe it), you
shall note the points following: first, the ointment wherewith this
is done is made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and
hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man
unburied, and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of
generation." The precious ointment compounded out of these and other
ingredients was applied, as the philosopher explains, not to the
wound but to the weapon, and that even though the injured man was at
a great distance and knew nothing about it. The experiment, he tells
us, had been tried of wiping the ointment off the weapon without the
knowledge of the person hurt, with the result that he was presently
in a great rage of pain until the weapon was anointed again.
Moreover, "it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon, yet if
you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling the weapon into the
wound, whereby it bleedeth, the anointing of that instrument will
serve and work the effect." Remedies of the sort which Bacon deemed
worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties
of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook
or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils
it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he
calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted
thorn. A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a
thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was
festering, he remarked, "That didn't ought to, for I greased the
bush well after I pulled it out." If a horse wounds its foot by
treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the
nail, clean it, and grease it every day, to prevent the foot from
festering. Similarly Cambridgeshire labourers think that if a horse
has run a nail into its foot, it is necessary to grease the nail
with lard or oil and put it away in some safe place, or the horse
will not recover. A few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for
to attend a horse which had ripped its side open on the hinge of a
farm gatepost. On arriving at the farm he found that nothing had
been done for the wounded horse, but that a man was busy trying to
pry the hinge out of the gatepost in order that it might be greased
and put away, which, in the opinion of the Cambridge wiseacres,
would conduce to the recovery of the animal. Similarly Essex rustics
opine that, if a man has been stabbed with a knife, it is essential
to his recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the
bed on which the sufferer is lying. So in Bavaria you are directed
to anoint a linen rag with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe
that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards. As the
grease on the axe dries, your wound heals. Similarly in the Harz
Mountains they say that if you cut yourself, you ought to smear the
knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry
place in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
As the knife dries, the wound heals. Other people, however, in
Germany say that you should stick the knife in some damp place in
the ground, and that your hurt will heal as the knife rusts. Others
again, in Bavaria, recommend you to smear the axe or whatever it is
with blood and put it under the eaves.

The train of reasoning which thus commends itself to English and
German rustics, in common with the savages of Melanesia and America,
is carried a step further by the aborigines of Central Australia,
who conceive that under certain circumstances the near relations of
a wounded man must grease themselves, restrict their diet, and
regulate their behaviour in other ways in order to ensure his
recovery. Thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is not
yet healed, his mother may not eat opossum, or a certain kind of
lizard, or carpet snake, or any kind of fat, for otherwise she would
retard the healing of the boy's wound. Every day she greases her
digging-sticks and never lets them out of her sight; at night she
sleeps with them close to her head. No one is allowed to touch them.
Every day also she rubs her body all over with grease, as in some
way this is believed to help her son's recovery. Another refinement
of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of the German peasant.
It is said that when one of his pigs or sheep breaks its leg, a
farmer of Rhenish Bavaria or Hesse will bind up the leg of a chair
with bandages and splints in due form. For some days thereafter no
one may sit on that chair, move it, or knock up against it; for to
do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and hinder the cure. In
this last case it is clear that we have passed wholly out of the
region of contagious magic and into the region of homoeopathic or
imitative magic; the chair-leg, which is treated instead of the
beast's leg, in no sense belongs to the animal, and the application
of bandages to it is a mere simulation of the treatment which a more
rational surgery would bestow on the real patient.

The sympathetic connexion supposed to exist between a man and the
weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that
the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his
body. For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off New
Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with
which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these
rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically
thereby. Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled
constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his faithful
wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into the
sea. Strained and unnatural as this idea may seem to us, it is
perhaps less so than the belief that magic sympathy is maintained
between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is done to the
clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he may be far
away at the time. In the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria a wizard would
sometimes get hold of a man's opossum rug and roast it slowly in the
fire, and as he did so the owner of the rug would fall sick. If the
wizard consented to undo the charm, he would give the rug back to
the sick man's friends, bidding them put it in water, "so as to wash
the fire out." When that happened, the sufferer would feel a
refreshing coolness and probably recover. In Tanna, one of the New
Hebrides, a man who had a grudge at another and desired his death
would try to get possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat
of his enemy's body. If he succeeded, he rubbed the cloth carefully
over with the leaves and twigs of a certain tree, rolled and bound
cloth, twigs, and leaves into a long sausage-shaped bundle, and
burned it slowly in the fire. As the bundle was consumed, the victim
fell ill, and when it was reduced to ashes, he died. In this last
form of enchantment, however, the magical sympathy may be supposed
to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as between the
man and the sweat which issued from his body. But in other cases of
the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is enough to give
the sorcerer a hold upon his victim. The witch in Theocritus, while
she melted an image or lump of wax in order that her faithless lover
might melt with love of her, did not forget to throw into the fire a
shred of his cloak which he had dropped in her house. In Prussia
they say that if you cannot catch a thief, the next best thing you
can do is to get hold of a garment which he may have shed in his
flight; for if you beat it soundly, the thief will fall sick. This
belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind. Some eighty or ninety
years ago, in the neighbourhood of Berend, a man was detected trying
to steal honey, and fled, leaving his coat behind him. When he heard
that the enraged owner of the honey was mauling his lost coat, he
was so alarmed that he took to his bed and died.

Again, magic may be wrought on a man sympathetically, not only
through his clothes and severed parts of himself, but also through
the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular, it
is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure
the feet that made them. Thus the natives of South-eastern Australia
think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz,
glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are
often attributed by them to this cause. Seeing a Tatungolung man
very lame, Mr. Howitt asked him what was the matter. He said, "some
fellow has put _bottle_ in my foot." He was suffering from
rheumatism, but believed that an enemy had found his foot-track and
had buried it in a piece of broken bottle, the magical influence of
which had entered his foot.

Similar practices prevail in various parts of Europe. Thus in
Mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a man's
footprint he will fall lame; sometimes it is required that the nail
should be taken from a coffin. A like mode of injuring an enemy is
resorted to in some parts of France. It is said that there was an
old woman who used to frequent Stow in Suffolk, and she was a witch.
If, while she walked, any one went after her and stuck a nail or a
knife into her footprint in the dust, the dame could not stir a step
till it was withdrawn. Among the South Slavs a girl will dig up the
earth from the footprints of the man she loves and put it in a
flower-pot. Then she plants in the pot a marigold, a flower that is
thought to be fadeless. And as its golden blossom grows and blooms
and never fades, so shall her sweetheart's love grow and bloom, and
never, never fade. Thus the love-spell acts on the man through the
earth he trod on. An old Danish mode of concluding a treaty was
based on the same idea of the sympathetic connexion between a man
and his footprints: the covenanting parties sprinkled each other's
footprints with their own blood, thus giving a pledge of fidelity.
In ancient Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been
current, for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the track of
a wolf he was seized with numbness; and a maxim ascribed to
Pythagoras forbade people to pierce a man's footprints with a nail
or a knife.

The same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many parts
of the world for the purpose of running down the game. Thus a German
huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spoor
of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the animal from
escaping. The aborigines of Victoria put hot embers in the tracks of
the animals they were pursuing. Hottentot hunters throw into the air
a handful of sand taken from the footprints of the game, believing
that this will bring the animal down. Thompson Indians used to lay
charms on the tracks of wounded deer; after that they deemed it
superfluous to pursue the animal any further that day, for being
thus charmed it could not travel far and would soon die. Similarly,
Ojebway Indians placed "medicine" on the track of the first deer or
bear they met with, supposing that this would soon bring the animal
into sight, even if it were two or three days' journey off; for this
charm had power to compress a journey of several days into a few
hours. Ewe hunters of West Africa stab the footprints of game with a
sharp-pointed stick in order to maim the quarry and allow them to
come up with it.

But though the footprint is the most obvious it is not the only
impression made by the body through which magic may be wrought on a
man. The aborigines of South-eastern Australia believe that a man
may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz, glass, and so
forth in the mark made by his reclining body; the magical virtue of
these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute pains
which the ignorant European puts down to rheumatism. We can now
understand why it was a maxim with the Pythagoreans that in rising
from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on
the bed-clothes. The rule was simply an old precaution against
magic, forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which
antiquity fathered on Pythagoras, though doubtless they were
familiar to the barbarous forefathers of the Greeks long before the
time of that philosopher.



4. The Magician's Progress

WE have now concluded our examination of the general principles of
sympathetic magic. The examples by which I have illustrated them
have been drawn for the most part from what may be called private
magic, that is from magical rites and incantations practised for the
benefit or the injury of individuals. But in savage society there is
commonly to be found in addition what we may call public magic, that
is, sorcery practised for the benefit of the whole community.
Wherever ceremonies of this sort are observed for the common good,
it is obvious that the magician ceases to be merely a private
practitioner and becomes to some extent a public functionary. The
development of such a class of functionaries is of great importance
for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For
when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the
performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a
position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the
rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly
draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of
the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour,
wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The
acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother
and to play on his superstition for their own advantage. Not that
the sorcerer is always a knave and impostor; he is often sincerely
convinced that he really possesses those wonderful powers which the
credulity of his fellows ascribes to him. But the more sagacious he
is, the more likely he is to see through the fallacies which impose
on duller wits. Thus the ablest members of the profession must tend
to be more or less conscious deceivers; and it is just these men who
in virtue of their superior ability will generally come to the top
and win for themselves positions of the highest dignity and the most
commanding authority. The pitfalls which beset the path of the
professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of
coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through
them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single
profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false;
not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or
unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his
own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more
likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor.
The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations
will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only
really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as
they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish
colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure,
and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by his
disappointed and angry employers.

The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the
supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest
intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. If we could
balance the harm they do by their knavery against the benefits they
confer by their superior sagacity, it might well be found that the
good greatly outweighed the evil. For more mischief has probably
been wrought in the world by honest fools in high places than by
intelligent rascals. Once your shrewd rogue has attained the height
of his ambition, and has no longer any selfish end to further, he
may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his
resources, to the service of the public. Many men who have been
least scrupulous in the acquisition of power have been most
beneficent in the use of it, whether the power they aimed at and won
was that of wealth, political authority, or what not. In the field
of politics the wily intriguer, the ruthless victor, may end by
being a wise and magnanimous ruler, blessed in his lifetime,
lamented at his death, admired and applauded by posterity. Such men,
to take two of the most conspicuous instances, were Julius Caesar
and Augustus. But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the
power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he
makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach
with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not
been an honest dullard.

Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the
constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of
affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of
power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a
democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the
savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but
by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and
whatever the character of the early rulers, was on the whole very
beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential
condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being
is so hide-bound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage;
in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and
difficult. The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind
is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible
master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who
haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of
iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to
which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least possible
scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for
the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and
dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise,
while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a
uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the
natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn
capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality.
From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues
and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the
Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by
opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of
authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all
who have the real good of their fellows at heart. Once these
elevating influences have begun to operate--and they cannot be for
ever suppressed--the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively
rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry
through changes in a single lifetime which previously many
generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often
happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he
will readily avail himself of the opportunity. Even the whims and
caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of
custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe
ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders,
and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it
becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of
aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly
favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress. For
extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary
submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and
slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual
struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of
devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which
is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of
man.

Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art and
science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be dissociated
from industrial or economic progress, and that in its turn receives
an immense impulse from conquest and empire. It is no mere accident
that the most vehement outbursts of activity of the human mind have
followed close on the heels of victory, and that the great
conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and
spread civilisation, thus healing in peace the wounds they inflicted
in war. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs are our
witnesses in the past: we may yet live to see a similar outburst in
Japan. Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it
an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation
have been made under despotic and theocratic governments, like those
of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and
received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double
character of a king and a god. It is hardly too much to say that at
this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and,
paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more
liberty in the best sense--liberty to think our own thoughts and to
fashion our own destinies--under the most absolute despotism, the
most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage
life, where the individual's lot is cast from the cradle to the
grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.

So far, therefore, as the public profession of magic has been one of
the roads by which the ablest men have passed to supreme power, it
has contributed to emancipate mankind from the thraldom of tradition
and to elevate them into a larger, freer life, with a broader
outlook on the world. This is no small service rendered to humanity.
And when we remember further that in another direction magic has
paved the way for science, we are forced to admit that if the black
art has done much evil, it has also been the source of much good;
that if it is the child of error, it has yet been the mother of
freedom and truth.




IV. Magic and Religion

THE examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate
the general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to
which we have given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious
respectively. In some cases of magic which have come before us we
have seen that the operation of spirits is assumed, and that an
attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and sacrifice. But
these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic tinged
and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its
pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows
another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any
spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is
identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system
is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity
of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will
always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper
ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be
attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations
should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of
another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour
of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful
deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means
arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly
conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws
of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break
these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure, and may
even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril.
If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional
sovereignty rigorously limited in its scope and exercised in exact
conformity with ancient usage. Thus the analogy between the magical
and the scientific conceptions of the world is close. In both of
them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and
certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which
can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice,
of chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature.
Both of them open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to
him who knows the causes of things and can touch the secret springs
that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world.
Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have
exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both
have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary
enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of
disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the
future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain
and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet,
a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with
unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.

The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a
sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception
of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If
we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been
passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as
fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already
indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other
of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of
ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in
space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces
homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of
contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of
association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely
essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied
they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the
bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a
tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren;
for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be
magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a
search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural
phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has
scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden
and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the
body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire
how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that
relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have
formed of the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may
reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before
he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably
no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the
nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would
satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer
can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and
afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout
his work. By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or
conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct
and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined,
religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical,
namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to
propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first,
since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we
can attempt to please him. But unless the belief leads to a
corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology;
in the language of St. James, "faith, if it hath not works, is dead,
being alone." In other words, no man is religious who does not
govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On
the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is
also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and
yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts
from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts
from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as
his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence
belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are
equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of
them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always
take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the
offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward
ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if the deity is one
who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in oblations
of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his
worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves
before him, by intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with
costly gifts, but by being pure and merciful and charitable towards
men, for in so doing they will imitate, so far as human infirmity
allows, the perfections of the divine nature. It was this ethical
side of religion which the Hebrew prophets, inspired with a noble
ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary of
inculcating. Thus Micah says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is
good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And at a later time
much of the force by which Christianity conquered the world was
drawn from the same high conception of God's moral nature and the
duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it. "Pure religion and
undefiled," says St. James, "before God and the Father is this, To
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep
himself unspotted from the world."

But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who
rule the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it
clearly assumes that the course of nature is to some extent elastic
or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings
who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events
from the channel in which they would otherwise flow. Now this
implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed to
the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume
that the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their
operation, and that they can as little be turned from their course
by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The
distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns
on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces which govern
the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal?
Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the
former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that
the being conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his
conduct is in some measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed
upon to vary it in the desired direction by a judicious appeal to
his interests, his appetites, or his emotions. Conciliation is never
employed towards things which are regarded as inanimate, nor towards
persons whose behaviour in the particular circumstances is known to
be determined with absolute certainty. Thus in so far as religion
assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be
turned from their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental
antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for
granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions
or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable
laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the assumption is only
implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often
deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by
religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them
exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is,
it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating
them as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings,
whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those
impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless
can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate them
by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient Egypt, for
example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the
highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with
destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite
so far as that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones
of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved
contumacious. Similarly in India at the present day the great Hindoo
trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the
sorcerers, who, by means of their spells, exercise such an
ascendency over the mightiest deities, that these are bound
submissively to execute on earth below, or in heaven above, whatever
commands their masters the magicians may please to issue. There is a
saying everywhere current in India: "The whole universe is subject
to the gods; the gods are subject to the spells (_mantras_); the
spells to the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our gods."

This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion
sufficiently explains the relentless hostility with which in history
the priest has often pursued the magician. The haughty
self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the
higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like
theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his awful
sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence
of it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an
impious and blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to
God alone. And sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred to
whet the edge of the priest's hostility. He professed to be the
proper medium, the true intercessor between God and man, and no
doubt his interests as well as his feelings were often injured by a
rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road to
fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.

Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its
appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an
earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often
combined or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet
differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose man wooed the
good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the
same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he
hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the
help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical
rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in
the same breath, knowing or recking little of the theoretical
inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he
contrived to get what he wanted. Instances of this fusion or
confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the
practices of Melanesians and of other peoples.

The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples
that have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in ancient
India and ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European
peasantry at the present day. With regard to ancient India we are
told by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that "the sacrificial ritual at
the earliest period of which we have detailed information is
pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of the most
primitive magic." Speaking of the importance of magic in the East,
and especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that "we ought
not to attach to the word magic the degrading idea which it almost
inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the
very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some
favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands
on the deity, and this arrest could only be effected by means of a
certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the
god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do what was
demanded of him."

Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of
ideas, the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in various
forms. Thus we are told that in France "the majority of the peasants
still believe that the priest possesses a secret and irresistible
power over the elements. By reciting certain prayers which he alone
knows and has the right to utter, yet for the utterance of which he
must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an occasion of
pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the
eternal laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail,
and the rain are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is
subject to him, and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished
at his word." For example, French peasants used to be, perhaps are
still, persuaded that the priests could celebrate, with certain
special rites, a Mass of the Holy Spirit, of which the efficacy was
so miraculous that it never met with any opposition from the divine
will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him in this
form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of
impiety or irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those
who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this
singular means to take the kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular
priests generally refused to say the Mass of the Holy Spirit; but
the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had the reputation of
yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious and
distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to
be laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact
counterpart of the power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to
their magicians. Again, to take another example, in many villages of
Provence the priest is still reputed to possess the faculty of
averting storms. It is not every priest who enjoys this reputation;
and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the
parishioners are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the
power (_pouder_), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy
storm they put him to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the
threatening clouds; and if the result answers to their hopes, the
new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and respect of his flock. In
some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in this respect
stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between the two
have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to
translate the rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants
believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will
sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint
Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those
who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked
priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite
sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at
the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch,
can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The
Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted
church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming,
where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the
desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his
light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble
the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the
midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black
and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks
the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has
been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground
and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good
Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and
dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said
withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter
with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know
that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion
in many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking
that this fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when
man trusted to magic alone for the satisfaction of such wants as
transcended his immediate animal cravings. In the first place a
consideration of the fundamental notions of magic and religion may
incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion in the
history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is
nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most
elementary processes of the mind, namely the association of ideas by
virtue of resemblance or contiguity; and that on the other hand
religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal agents,
superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the
conception of personal agents is more complex than a simple
recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory
which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious
agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its
apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection,
than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of
their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts associate the ideas
of things that are like each other or that have been found together
in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if they
ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the
phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals
or by one enormous and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes?
It is probably no injustice to the brutes to assume that the honour
of devising a theory of this latter sort must be reserved for human
reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately from elementary
processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which the
mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions
which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have
yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose before
religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend
nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments
before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible
deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.

The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a
consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is
confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines
of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate
information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the
sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems
to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are
magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can
influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic,
but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.

But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us
we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously
absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of
the world have also at some period of their history passed through a
similar intellectual phase, that they attempted to force the great
powers of nature to do their pleasure before they thought of
courting their favour by offerings and prayer--in short that, just
as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been
an Age of Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere
been an Age of Magic? There are reasons for answering this question
in the affirmative. When we survey the existing races of mankind
from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore,
we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great
variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to
speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but
descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths,
nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family,
so that the surface of society all over the world is cracked and
seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning
crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious
dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences,
which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the
community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of
intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and
the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority
of mankind. One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century
was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of
the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity everywhere.
It is beneath our feet--and not very far beneath them--here in
Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the surface in the
heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a
higher civilisation has not crushed it under ground. This universal
faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of
magic. While religious systems differ not only in different
countries, but in the same country in different ages, the system of
sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times substantially
alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant and
superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was
thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among
the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world.
If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads,
the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the
Catholic Church, to the proud motto, "_Quod semper, quod ubique,
quod ab omnibus,_" as the sure and certain credential of its own
infallibility.

It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent
existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of
society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and
culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate
observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly
regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We
seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the
subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow
murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of
what is going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is
startled by a paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland
an image has been found stuck full of pins for the purpose of
killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how a woman has been slowly
roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been
murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human
tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade
unseen. But whether the influences that make for further progress,
or those that threaten to undo what has already been accomplished,
will ultimately prevail; whether the impulsive energy of the
minority or the dead weight of the majority of mankind will prove
the stronger force to carry us up to higher heights or to sink us
into lower depths, are questions rather for the sage, the moralist,
and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans the future, than for the
humble student of the present and the past. Here we are only
concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality, and the
permanence of a belief in magic, compared with the endless variety
and the shifting character of religious creeds, raises a presumption
that the former represents a ruder and earlier phase of the human
mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are
passing on their way to religion and science.

If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise,
been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should
enquire what causes have led mankind, or rather a portion of them,
to abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake
themselves to religion instead. When we reflect upon the multitude,
the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be explained, and
the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall be ready
to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound
a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in
the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less
plausible conjecture. With all due diffidence, then, I would suggest
that a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of
magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a
truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her
resources to account. The shrewder intelligences must in time have
come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not
really effect the results which they were designed to produce, and
which the majority of their simpler fellows still believed that they
did actually produce. This great discovery of the inefficacy of
magic must have wrought a radical though probably slow revolution in
the minds of those who had the sagacity to make it. The discovery
amounted to this, that men for the first time recognised their
inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which
hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It
was a confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he
had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts
to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. His
painful toil had been wasted, his curious ingenuity had been
squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to which
nothing was attached; he had been marching, as he thought, straight
to the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow
circle. Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce
did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced,
but not by him. The rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the sun
still pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the
sky: the silent procession of the seasons still moved in light and
shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born
to labour and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were
gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things
indeed went on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose
eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the
pleasing illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heaven
in their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great
revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the
death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of the
resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments; he now
knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger
than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he
was powerless to control.

Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a
troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in
himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must
have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest, as in a
quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and
practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts
and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over
nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went
on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be
because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger,
who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all
the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be
dependent on his own magic. It was they, as he now believed, and not
he himself, who made the stormy wind to blow, the lightning to
flash, and the thunder to roll; who had laid the foundations of the
solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea that it might not
pass; who caused all the glorious lights of heaven to shine; who
gave the fowls of the air their meat and the wild beasts of the
desert their prey; who bade the fruitful land to bring forth in
abundance, the high hills to be clothed with forests, the bubbling
springs to rise under the rocks in the valleys, and green pastures
to grow by still waters; who breathed into man's nostrils and made
him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and pestilence and
war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the
gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself,
humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and
beseeching them of their mercy to furnish him with all good things,
to defend him from the perils and dangers by which our mortal life
is compassed about on every hand, and finally to bring his immortal
spirit, freed from the burden of the body, to some happier world,
beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest with them
and with the spirits of good men in joy and felicity for ever.

In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived
to have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even
in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it
proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or less
perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's powerlessness
to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been
gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied
dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driven back from
his proud position; foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh,
the ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the
wind, now the rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder, that he
confessed himself unable to wield at will; and as province after
province of nature thus fell from his grasp, till what had once
seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison, man must have
been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own
helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he
believed himself to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a
slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends
with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's
entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing
is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the
mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit
his will to theirs: _In la sua volontade è nostra pace._ But this
deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the
divine will in all things, affects only those higher intelligences
who have breadth of view enough to comprehend the vastness of the
universe and the littleness of man. Small minds cannot grasp great
ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing
seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly
rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their
betters into an outward conformity with its precepts and a verbal
profession of its tenets; but at heart they cling to their old
magical superstitions, which may be discountenanced and forbidden,
but cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they have their
roots deep down in the mental framework and constitution of the
great majority of mankind.

The reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that intelligent
men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they
continue to cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to
disappointment? With what heart persist in playing venerable antics
that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained
without effect? Why cling to beliefs which were so flatly
contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had
failed so often? The answer seems to be that the fallacy was far
from easy to detect, the failure by no means obvious, since in many,
perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actually follow, at a
longer or shorter interval, the performance of the rite which was
designed to bring it about; and a mind of more than common acuteness
was needed to perceive that, even in these cases, the rite was not
necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended to make the
wind blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will
always be followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence it is meant
to bring to pass; and primitive man may be excused for regarding the
occurrence as a direct result of the ceremony, and the best possible
proof of its efficacy. Similarly, rites observed in the morning to
help the sun to rise, and in spring to wake the dreaming earth from
her winter sleep, will invariably appear to be crowned with success,
at least within the temperate zones; for in these regions the sun
lights his golden lamp in the east every morning, and year by year
the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of green.
Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might
well turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter,
the philosophic radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and
spring might not, after all, be direct consequences of the punctual
performance of certain daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun
might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom though the
ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued
altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally be repelled by
the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of
the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience. "Can anything
be plainer," he might say, "than that I light my twopenny candle on
earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven? I
should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in
spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same? These are facts
patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain
practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and
choppers of logic. Theories and speculation and all that may be very
well in their way, and I have not the least objection to your
indulging in them, provided, of course, you do not put them in
practice. But give me leave to stick to facts; then I know where I
am." The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us, because it
happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our
minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied
to matters which are still under debate, and it may be questioned
whether a British audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem
the speaker who used it a safe man--not brilliant or showy, perhaps,
but thoroughly sensible and hard-headed. If such reasonings could
pass muster among ourselves, need we wonder that they long escaped
detection by the savage?



V. The Magical Control of the Weather



1. The Public Magician

THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the
labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of
man-god. This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through
the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence,
resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have
already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have
still to climb.

As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods
may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the magical
man-god respectively. In the former, a being of an order different
from and superior to man is supposed to become incarnate, for a
longer or a shorter time, in a human body, manifesting his
super-human power and knowledge by miracles wrought and prophecies
uttered through the medium of the fleshly tabernacle in which he has
deigned to take up his abode. This may also appropriately be called
the inspired or incarnate type of man-god. In it the human body is
merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine and immortal
spirit. On the other hand, a man-god of the magical sort is nothing
but a man who possesses in an unusually high degree powers which
most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a smaller scale; for
in rude society there is hardly a person who does not dabble in
magic. Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type
derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his
heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man-god of
the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain
physical sympathy with nature. He is not merely the receptacle of a
divine spirit. His whole being, body and soul, is so delicately
attuned to the harmony of the world that a touch of his hand or a
turn of his head may send a thrill vibrating through the universal
framework of things; and conversely his divine organism is acutely
sensitive to such slight changes of environment as would leave
ordinary mortals wholly unaffected. But the line between these two
types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is
seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows
I shall not insist on it.

We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the
benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that
according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it
may be called private or public magic. Further, I pointed out that
the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from
which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by step
to the rank of a chief or king. Thus an examination of public magic
conduces to an understanding of the early kingship, since in savage
and barbarous society many chiefs and kings appear to owe their
authority in great measure to their reputation as magicians.

Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to
secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The
examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of
food--the hunter, the fisher, the farmer--all resort to magical
practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so
as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their
families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest
of the whole people. It is otherwise when the rites are performed,
not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by
professional magicians on their behalf. In primitive society, where
uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the
community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every
man is more or less his own magician; he practises charms and
incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. But a
great step in advance has been taken when a special class of
magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men
have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole
community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the
healing of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation
of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The
impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to
accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense
importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men
relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need
of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay,
expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret
ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their interest to know
more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that
could aid man in his arduous struggle with nature, everything that
could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties
of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain and drought, of thunder
and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon,
the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars,
the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must
have excited the wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated
them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust
on their attention in the most practical form by the importunate
demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand
but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man.
That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly
be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in
perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at
the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views
of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear
to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were
legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of
experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who
devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered
to them after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had
stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these savage
sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely
necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life.
This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of
concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most
powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since,
if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is
actually to know it. Thus, however justly we may reject the
extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions
which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of
this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of
incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors,
not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators
and discoverers in every branch of natural science. They began the
work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent
issues by their successors in after ages; and if the beginning was
poor and feeble, this is to be imputed to the inevitable
difficulties which beset the path of knowledge rather than to the
natural incapacity or wilful fraud of the men themselves.



2. The Magical Control of Rain

OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the
good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and
especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain. Water is an essential
of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends upon
showers. Without rain vegetation withers, animals and men languish
and die. Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a very
important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists
for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply. The methods
by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are
commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homoeopathic
or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they simulate it by
sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is to stop
rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and
fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture. Such
attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might
imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like Central
Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often
for months together the pitiless sun beats down out of a blue and
cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to
be, common enough among outwardly civilised folk in the moister
climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn
from the practice both of public and private magic.

Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain
was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old
sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small
cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire-brands together
and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who
was called "the rain-maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he
sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides. To put an end to drought
and bring down rain, women and girls of the village of Ploska are
wont to go naked by night to the boundaries of the village and there
pour water on the ground. In Halmahera, or Gilolo, a large island to
the west of New Guinea, a wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a
particular kind of tree in water and then scattering the moisture
from the dripping bough over the ground. In New Britain the
rain-maker wraps some leaves of a red and green striped creeper in a
banana-leaf, moistens the bundle with water, and buries it in the
ground; then he imitates with his mouth the plashing of rain.
Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America, when the corn is
withering for want of rain, the members of the sacred Buffalo
Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four times round
it. One of them drinks some of the water and spirts it into the air,
making a fine spray in imitation of a mist or drizzling rain. Then
he upsets the vessel, spilling the water on the ground; whereupon
the dancers fall down and drink up the water, getting mud all over
their faces. Lastly, they squirt the water into the air, making a
fine mist. This saves the corn. In spring-time the Natchez of North
America used to club together to purchase favourable weather for
their crops from the wizards. If rain was needed, the wizards fasted
and danced with pipes full of water in their mouths. The pipes were
perforated like the nozzle of a watering-can, and through the holes
the rain-maker blew the water towards that part of the sky where the
clouds hung heaviest. But if fine weather was wanted, he mounted the
roof of his hut, and with extended arms, blowing with all his might,
he beckoned to the clouds to pass by. When the rains do not come in
due season the people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called
the rain-temple. Here they clear away the grass, and the leader
pours beer into a pot which is buried in the ground, while he says,
"Master _Chauta,_ you have hardened your heart towards us, what
would you have us do? We must perish indeed. Give your children the
rains, there is the beer we have given you." Then they all partake
of the beer that is left over, even the children being made to sip
it. Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain.
When they return to the village they find a vessel of water set at
the doorway by an old woman; so they dip their branches in it and
wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops. After that the rain is
sure to come driving up in heavy clouds. In these practices we see a
combination of religion with magic; for while the scattering of the
water-drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony, the
prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites.
In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia the rain-maker goes to a
pool and sings over it his magic song. Then he takes some of the
water in his hands, drinks it, and spits it out in various
directions. After that he throws water all over himself, scatters it
about, and returns quietly to the camp. Rain is supposed to follow.
The Arab historian Makrizi describes a method of stopping rain which
is said to have been resorted to by a tribe of nomads called Alqamar
in Hadramaut. They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert,
set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water.
After that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water
vanished when it fell on the glowing brand. Some of the Eastern
Angamis of Manipur are said to perform a some-what similar ceremony
for the opposite purpose, in order, namely, to produce rain. The
head of the village puts a burning brand on the grave of a man who
has died of burns, and quenches the brand with water, while he prays
that rain may fall. Here the putting out the fire with water, which
is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead
man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for
the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his pangs.

Other people besides the Arabs have used fire as a means of stopping
rain. Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in the fire
and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the
air. They think that the rain will soon cease to fall, for it does
not like to be burned by the hot stones or ashes. The Telugus send a
little girl out naked into the rain with a burning piece of wood in
her hand, which she has to show to the rain. That is supposed to
stop the downpour. At Port Stevens in New South Wales the
medicine-men used to drive away rain by throwing fire-sticks into
the air, while at the same time they puffed and shouted. Any man of
the Anula tribe in Northern Australia can stop rain by simply
warming a green stick in the fire, and then striking it against the
wind.

In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly
lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own
half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote
predecessors, whom they call Mura-muras, to grant them power to make
a heavy rain-fall. For they believe that the clouds are bodies in
which rain is generated by their own ceremonies or those of
neighbouring tribes, through the influence of the Mura-muras. The
way in which they set about drawing rain from the clouds is this. A
hole is dug about twelve feet long and eight or ten broad, and over
this hole a conical hut of logs and branches is made. Two wizards,
supposed to have received a special inspiration from the Mura-muras,
are bled by an old and influential man with a sharp flint; and the
blood, drawn from their arms below the elbow, is made to flow on the
other men of the tribe, who sit huddled together in the hut. At the
same time the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of
which adheres to the blood-stained bodies of their comrades, while
the rest floats in the air. The blood is thought to represent the
rain, and the down the clouds. During the ceremony two large stones
are placed in the middle of the hut; they stand for gathering clouds
and presage rain. Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two
stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as
they can in the tallest tree. Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum,
pound it fine, and throw it into a water-hole. This the Mura-muras
see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky. Lastly, the
men, young and old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it
with their heads, like so many rams. Thus they force their way
through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process
till the hut is wrecked. In doing this they are forbidden to use
their hands or arms; but when the heavy logs alone remain, they are
allowed to pull them out with their hands. "The piercing of the hut
with their heads symbolises the piercing of the clouds; the fall of
the hut, the fall of the rain." Obviously, too, the act of placing
high up in trees the two stones, which stand for clouds, is a way of
making the real clouds to mount up in the sky. The Dieri also
imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a
great power of producing rain. Hence the Great Council of the tribe
always keeps a small stock of foreskins ready for use. They are
carefully concealed, being wrapt up in feathers with the fat of the
wild dog and of the carpet snake. A woman may not see such a parcel
opened on any account. When the ceremony is over, the foreskin is
buried, its virtue being exhausted. After the rains have fallen,
some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which
consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp
flint. The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the
flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it. Raised scars are
thus produced. The reason alleged by the natives for this practice
is that they are pleased with the rain, and that there is a
connexion between the rain and the scars. Apparently the operation
is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is
going on. Indeed, little children have been seen to crowd round the
operator and patiently take their turn; then after being operated
on, they ran away, expanding their little chests and singing for the
rain to beat upon them. However, they were not so well pleased next
day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore. In Java, when rain
is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods
till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood
represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the
ground. The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia, used to
engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against
village, for a week together every January for the purpose of
procuring rain. Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the
custom. However, the following year the rain was deficient, and the
popular outcry so great that the emperor yielded to it, and allowed
the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two days a year only.
The writer who mentions the custom regards the blood shed on these
occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to spirits who control
the showers; but perhaps, as in the Australian and Javanese
ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The prophets of Baal, who
sought to procure rain by cutting themselves with knives till the
blood gushed out, may have acted on the same principle.

There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical
powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This
curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of
British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular
restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact
meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus the
Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the
weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of
the twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always
fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man
they hate. They can also call the salmon and the olachen or
candle-fish, and so they are known by a name which means "making
plentiful." In the opinion of the Kwakiutl Indians of British
Columbia twins are transformed salmon; hence they may not go near
water, lest they should be changed back again into the fish. In
their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands,
and they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by
swinging a large wooden rattle. The Nootka Indians of British
Columbia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon.
Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or
even handle the fresh fish. They can make fair or foul weather, and
can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then
washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark
clouds. The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate
twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly
bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with
supernatural powers. In particular they can make good or bad
weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the
air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood
attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down
on the ends of spruce branches.

The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to twins by
the Baronga, a tribe of Bantu negroes who, inhabit the shores of
Delagoa Bay in South-eastern Africa. They bestow the name of
_Tilo_--that is, the sky--on a woman who has given birth to twins,
and the infants themselves are called the children of the sky. Now
when the storms which generally burst in the months of September and
October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its
prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature, scorched and
burnt up by a sun that has shone for six months from a cloudless
sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South African
spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the longed-for
rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all their
garments, they assume in their stead girdles and head-dresses of
grass, or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular sort
of creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing ribald
songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of the mud
and impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells, it may be
said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid unwholesome
water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the house of one
of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench her
with water, which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so they
go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing
immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going their
rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside. When
they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the
graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often happens,
too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the
graves of twins. For they think that the grave of a twin ought
always to be moist, for which reason twins are regularly buried near
a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they
will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on
the side of a hill. "No wonder," says the wizard in such a case,
"that the sky is fiery. Take up his body and dig him a grave on the
shore of the lake." His orders are at once obeyed, for this is
supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain.

Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which
Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a
Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian
collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of
the Sakvari¯ song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's
weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and
dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student
who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow-men, and
to retire from the village into the forest. Here for a space of
time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law,
from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life,
among which were the following. Thrice a day he had to touch water;
he must wear black garments and eat black food; when it rained, he
might not seek the shelter of a roof, but had to sit in the rain and
say, "Water is the Sakvari¯ song"; when the lightning flashed, he
said, "That is like the Sakvari¯ song"; when the thunder pealed, he
said, "The Great One is making a great noise." He might never cross
a running stream without touching water; he might never set foot on
a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he must be sure
to touch water when he went on board; "for in water," so ran the
saying, "lies the virtue of the Sakvari¯ song." When at last he was
allowed to learn the song itself, he had to dip his hands in a
vessel of water in which plants of all sorts had been placed. If a
man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya,
it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man. It is clear,
as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that "all these rules are
intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as
it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their
hostility. The black garments and the black food have the same
significance; no one will doubt that they refer to the rain-clouds
when he remembers that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain;
'it is black, for such is the nature of rain.' In respect of another
rain-charm it is said plainly, 'He puts on a black garment edged
with black, for such is the nature of rain.' We may therefore assume
that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of the Vedic schools
there have been preserved magical practices of the most remote
antiquity, which were intended to prepare the rain-maker for his
office and dedicate him to it."

It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is
desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe
precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of Java,
where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the rainfall,
ceremonies for the making of rain are rare, but ceremonies for the
prevention of it are not uncommon. When a man is about to give a
great feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes
to a weather-doctor and asks him to "prop up the clouds that may be
lowering." If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers,
he begins to regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon as his
customer has departed. He must observe a fast, and may neither drink
nor bathe; what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may
he touch water. The host, on his side, and his servants, both male
and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast
lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict
chastity. The doctor seats himself on a new mat in his bedroom, and
before a small oil-lamp he murmurs, shortly before the feast takes
place, the following prayer or incantation: "Grandfather and
Grandmother Sroekoel" (the name seems to be taken at random; others
are sometimes used), "return to your country. Akkemat is your
country. Put down your water-cask, close it properly, that not a
drop may fall out." While he utters this prayer the sorcerer looks
upwards, burning incense the while. So among the Toradjas the
rain-doctor, whose special business it is to drive away rain, takes
care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of
his professional duties. He does not bathe, he eats with unwashed
hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a
stream he is careful not to step in the water. Having thus prepared
himself for his task he has a small hut built for himself outside of
the village in a rice-field, and in this hut he keeps up a little
fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out. In the fire he
burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess the
property of driving off rain; and he puffs in the direction from
which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of
leaves and bark which derive a similar cloud-compelling virtue, not
from their chemical composition, but from their names, which happen
to signify something dry or volatile. If clouds should appear in the
sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and
blows it towards them. The lime, being so very dry, is obviously
well adapted to disperse the damp clouds. Should rain afterwards be
wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the
rain will descend in sheets.

The reader will observe how exactly the Javanese and Toradja
observances, which are intended to prevent rain, form the antithesis
of the Indian observances, which aim at producing it. The Indian
sage is commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as
on various special occasions; the Javanese and Toradja wizards may
not touch it at all. The Indian lives out in the forest, and even
when it rains he may not take shelter; the Javanese and the Toradja
sit in a house or a hut. The one signifies his sympathy with water
by receiving the rain on his person and speaking of it respectfully;
the others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the
rain away. Yet the principle on which all three act is the same;
each of them, by a sort of childish make-believe, identifies himself
with the phenomenon which he desires to produce. It is the old
fallacy that the effect resembles its cause: if you would make wet
weather, you must be wet; if you would make dry weather, you must be
dry.

In South-eastern Europe at the present day ceremonies are
observed for the purpose of making rain which not only rest on the
same general train of thought as the preceding, but even in their
details resemble the ceremonies practised with the same intention
by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay. Among the Greeks of Thessaly and
Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary
to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs
of the neighbourhood. At the head of the procession walks a girl
adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at
every halting-place, while they sing an invocation, of which the
following is part:


   "Perperia all fresh bedewed,
    Freshen all the neighbourhood;
    By the woods, on the highway,
    As thou goest, to God now pray:
    O my God, upon the plain,
    Send thou us a still, small rain;
    That the fields may fruitful be,
    And vines in blossom we may see;
    That the grain be full and sound,
    And wealthy grow the folks around."


In time of drought the Serbians strip a girl to her skin and clothe
her from head to foot in grass, herbs, and flowers, even her face
being hidden behind a veil of living green. Thus disguised she is
called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of
girls. They stop before every house; the Dodola keeps turning
herself round and dancing, while the other girls form a ring about
her singing one of the Dodola songs, and the housewife pours a pail
of water over her. One of the songs they sing runs thus:


   "We go through the village;
    The clouds go in the sky;
    We go faster,
    Faster go the clouds;
    They have overtaken us,
    And wetted the corn and the vine."


At Poona in India, when rain is needed, the boys dress up one of
their number in nothing but leaves and call him King of Rain. Then
they go round to every house in the village, where the house-holder
or his wife sprinkles the Rain King with water, and gives the party
food of various kinds. When they have thus visited all the houses,
they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast upon what they
have gathered.

Bathing is practised as a rain-charm in some parts of Southern and
Western Russia. Sometimes after service in church the priest in his
robes has been thrown down on the ground and drenched with water by
his parishioners. Sometimes it is the women who, without stripping
off their clothes, bathe in crowds on the day of St. John the
Baptist, while they dip in the water a figure made of branches,
grass, and herbs, which is supposed to represent the saint. In
Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the
women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or
souse him from head to foot. Later on we shall see that a passing
stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some
natural power. It is recorded in official documents that during a
drought in 1790 the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected all
the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that rain might
fall. An Armenian rain-charm is to throw the wife of a priest into
the water and drench her. The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy
man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought. In
Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a
rain-charm. In Central Celebes when there has been no rain for a
long time and the rice-stalks begin to shrivel up, many of the
villagers, especially the young folk, go to a neighbouring brook and
splash each other with water, shouting noisily, or squirt water on
one another through bamboo tubes. Sometimes they imitate the plump
of rain by smacking the surface of the water with their hands, or by
placing an inverted gourd on it and drumming on the gourd with their
fingers.

Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing,
or pretending to plough. Thus the Pshaws and Chewsurs of the
Caucasus have a ceremony called "ploughing the rain," which they
observe in time of drought. Girls yoke themselves to a plough and
drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles. In
the same circumstances Armenian girls and women do the same. The
oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress, while
the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water
against the stream. In the Caucasian province of Georgia, when a
drought has lasted long, marriageable girls are yoked in couples
with an ox-yoke on their shoulders, a priest holds the reins, and
thus harnessed they wade through rivers, puddles, and marshes,
praying, screaming, weeping, and laughing. In a district of
Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls
strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also
naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a
brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and
keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then
they leave the harrow in the water and go home. A similar rain-charm
is resorted to in some parts of India; naked women drag a plough
across a field by night, while the men keep carefully out of the
way, for their presence would break the spell.

Sometimes the rain-charm operates through the dead. Thus in New
Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a
dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the
skeleton over some taro leaves. Water was poured over the skeleton
to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the
deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it
down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not
long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted
with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who had drunk
himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or lake, fully
persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In
1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged drought,
induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk district to
dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had died in the
preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was
left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others
poured water on it through a sieve. Here the pouring of water
through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds
us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that
rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in order to procure rain, the
Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of the dead. Thus, in the
village of Kalingooa, there is the grave of a famous chief, the
grandfather of the present ruler. When the land suffers from
unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water on it,
and say, "O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that
this year we should eat, then give rain." After that they hang a
bamboo full of water over the grave; there is a small hole in the
lower end of the bamboo, so that the water drips from it
continually. The bamboo is always refilled with water until rain
drenches the ground. Here, as in New Caledonia, we find religion
blent with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely
religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his
grave. We have seen that the Baronga of Delagoa Bay drench the tombs
of their ancestors, especially the tombs of twins, as a raincharm.
Among some of the Indian tribes in the region of the Orinoco it was
customary for the relations of a deceased person to disinter his
bones a year after burial, burn them, and scatter the ashes to the
winds, because they believed that the ashes were changed into rain,
which the dead man sent in return for his obsequies. The Chinese are
convinced that when human bodies remain unburied, the souls of their
late owners feel the discomfort of rain, just as living men would do
if they were exposed without shelter to the inclemency of the
weather. These wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to
prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too
successful. Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities
in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its
train. Hence it has been a common practice of the Chinese
authorities in time of drought to inter the dry bones of the
unburied dead for the purpose of putting an end to the scourge and
conjuring down the rain.

Animals, again, often play an important part in these
weather-charms. The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the
dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the
bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a
snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water
for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of
the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in
imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that
all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner
or later the rain will fall. They explain this procedure by saying
that long ago the dollar-bird had as a mate at this spot a snake,
who lived in the pool and used to make rain by spitting up into the
sky till a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell. A common way
of making rain in many parts of Java is to bathe a cat or two cats,
a male and a female; sometimes the animals are carried in procession
with music. Even in Batavia you may from time to time see children
going about with a cat for this purpose; when they have ducked it in
a pool, they let it go.

Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make
rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine,
and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the
people live together. Then he slits the stomachs of the animals and
scatters their contents in all directions. After that he pours water
and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has succeeded, the water
boils up and rain follows. On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes
to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the
hut, and there heats a rock-crystal in a calabash. In order to
procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and
black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain-maker
wears black clothes during the rainy season. Among the Matabele the
rain-charm employed by sorcerers was made from the blood and gall of
a black ox. In a district of Sumatra, in order to procure rain, all
the women of the village, scantily clad, go to the river, wade into
it, and splash each other with the water. A black cat is thrown into
the stream and made to swim about for a while, then allowed to
escape to the bank, pursued by the splashing of the women. The Garos
of Assam offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in
time of drought. In all these cases the colour of the animal is part
of the charm; being black, it will darken the sky with rain-clouds.
So the Bechuanas burn the stomach of an ox at evening, because they
say, "The black smoke will gather the clouds and cause the rain to
come." The Timorese sacrifice a black pig to the Earth-goddess for
rain, a white or red one to the Sun-god for sunshine. The Angoni
sacrifice a black ox for rain and a white one for fine weather.
Among the high mountains of Japan there is a district in which, if
rain has not fallen for a long time, a party of villagers goes in
procession to the bed of a mountain torrent, headed by a priest, who
leads a black dog. At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a
stone, and make it a target for their bullets and arrows. When its
life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their
weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon
divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a
shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement. Custom has
prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim shall be
black, as an emblem of the wished-for rain-clouds. But if fine
weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a spot.

The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned
for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain;
and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed
showers from the sky. Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the
toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared
to kill the creature. They have been known to keep frogs under a pot
and to beat them with rods when there was a drought. It is said that
the Aymara Indians often make little images of frogs and other
aquatic animals and place them on the tops of the hills as a means
of bringing down rain. The Thompson Indians of British Columbia and
some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to
fall. In order to procure rain people of low caste in the Central
Provinces of India will tie a frog to a rod covered with green
leaves and branches of the _nîm_ tree (_Azadirachta Indica_) and
carry it from door to door singing:


    "Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water!
     And ripen the wheat and millet in the field."


The Kapus or Reddis are a large caste of cultivators and landowners
in the Madras Presidency. When rain fails, women of the caste will
catch a frog and tie it alive to a new winnowing fan made of bamboo.
On this fan they spread a few margosa leaves and go from door to
door singing, "Lady frog must have her bath. Oh! rain-god, give a
little water for her at least." While the Kapu women sing this song,
the woman of the house pours water over the frog and gives an alms,
convinced that by so doing she will soon bring rain down in
torrents.

Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the
usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too
angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and
curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of
heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off
at the main. In a Japanese village, when the guardian divinity had
long been deaf to the peasants' prayers for rain, they at last threw
down his image and, with curses loud and long, hurled it head
foremost into a stinking rice-field. "There," they said, "you may
stay yourself for a while, to see how _you_ will feel after a few
days' scorching in this broiling sun that is burning the life from
our cracking fields." In the like circumstances the Feloupes of
Senegambia cast down their fetishes and drag them about the fields,
cursing them till rain falls.

The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by
storm. Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon of paper or
wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it about in procession;
but if no rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated and torn to
pieces. At other times they threaten and beat the god if he does not
give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of
deity. On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls, the god is
promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree. In April 1888 the
mandarins of Canton prayed to the god Lung-wong to stop the
incessant downpour of rain; and when he turned a deaf ear to their
petitions they put him in a lock-up for five days. This had a
salutary effect. The rain ceased and the god was restored to
liberty. Some years before, in time of drought, the same deity had
been chained and exposed to the sun for days in the courtyard of his
temple in order that he might feel for himself the urgent need of
rain. So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in the
blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples
and let the rain pour down on the idols. They think that the
inconvenience to which the gods are thus subjected will induce them
to grant the wishes of their worshippers.

The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but
precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in
Christian Europe within our own lifetime. By the end of April 1893
there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water. The drought
had lasted six months. Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of
cloudless blue. The gardens of the Conca d'Oro, which surround
Palermo with a magnificent belt of verdure, were withering. Food was
becoming scarce. The people were in great alarm. All the most
approved methods of procuring rain had been tried without effect.
Processions had traversed the streets and the fields. Men, women,
and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the
holy images. Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the
churches. Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on
the trees. At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old custom, the
dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the
fields. In ordinary years these holy sweepings preserve the crops;
but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever.
At Nicosia the inhabitants, bare-headed and bare-foot, carried the
crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other
with iron whips. It was all in vain. Even the great St. Francis of
Paolo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is
carried every spring through the market-gardens, either could not or
would not help. Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations,
fire-works--nothing could move him. At last the peasants began to
lose patience. Most of the saints were banished. At Palermo they
dumped St. Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for
himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain
fell. Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their
faces to the wall. Others again, stripped of their beautiful robes,
were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted,
ducked in horse-ponds. At Caltanisetta the golden wings of St.
Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with
wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout
wrapt about him instead. At Licata the patron saint, St. Angelo,
fared even worse, for he was left without any garments at all; he
was reviled, he was put in irons, he was threatened with drowning or
hanging. "Rain or the rope!" roared the angry people at him, as they
shook their fists in his face.

Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods. When their corn
is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a "heaven
bird," kill it, and throw it into a pool. Then the heaven melts with
tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining,
wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their
children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a
distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time. The sky is supposed
to melt with pity at the sight. Then the women dig the children out
and feel sure that rain will soon follow. They say that they call to
"the lord above" and ask him to send rain. If it comes they declare
that "Usondo rains." In times of drought the Guanches of Teneriffe
led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they separated the lambs
from their dams, that their plaintive bleating might touch the heart
of the god. In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in
the left ear of a dog. The animal howls with pain, his howls are
heard by Indra, and out of pity for the beast's sufferings the god
stops the rain. Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain as
follows. They place the stalks of certain plants in water, saying,
"Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain falls I will not plant
you again, but there shall you die." Also they string some
fresh-water snails on a cord, and hang the cord on a tree, and say
to the snails, "Go and ask for rain, and so long as no rain comes, I
will not take you back to the water." Then the snails go and weep,
and the gods take pity and send rain. However, the foregoing
ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an
appeal to the compassion of higher powers.

Stones are often supposed to possess the property of bringing on
rain, provided they be dipped in water or sprinkled with it, or
treated in some other appropriate manner. In a Samoan village a
certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the
rain-making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the
stone in procession and dipped it in a stream. Among the Ta-ta-thi
tribe of New South Wales, the rain-maker breaks off a piece of
quartz-crystal and spits it towards the sky; the rest of the crystal
he wraps in emu feathers, soaks both crystal and feathers in water,
and carefully hides them. In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales
the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round
flat stone, then covers up and conceals it. Among some tribes of
North-western Australia the rain-maker repairs to a piece of ground
which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making. There he builds a
heap of stones or sand, places on the top of it his magic stone, and
walks or dances round the pile chanting his incantations for hours,
till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken
by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are
kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic
ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to
procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits
and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the
sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with
stones, while a spell is chanted. After that rain should follow. In
Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a
stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella. When rain
is wanted, the rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles
it on the stone. At Sagami in Japan there is a stone which draws
down rain whenever water is poured on it. When the Wakondyo, a tribe
of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell
at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a
"rain-stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash
the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of
water. After that the rain cannot fail to come. In the arid wastes
of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by
carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular
point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds
would soon gather, and that rain would begin to fall.

But customs of this sort are not confined to the wilds of Africa and
Asia or the torrid deserts of Australia and the New World. They have
been practised in the cool air and under the grey skies of Europe.
There is a fountain called Barenton, of romantic fame, in those
"wild woods of Broceliande," where, if legend be true, the wizard
Merlin still sleeps his magic slumber in the hawthorn shade. Thither
the Breton peasants used to resort when they needed rain. They
caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab near
the spring. On Snowdon there is a lonely tarn called Dulyn, or the
Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and
dangerous rocks." A row of stepping-stones runs out into the lake,
and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet the
farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance
that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather."
In these cases it appears probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is
regarded as more or less divine. This appears from the custom
sometimes observed of dipping a cross in the Fountain of Barenton to
procure rain, for this is plainly a Christian substitute for the old
pagan way of throwing water on the stone. At various places in
France it is, or used till lately to be, the practice to dip the
image of a saint in water as a means of procuring rain. Thus, beside
the old priory of Commagny, there is a spring of St. Gervais,
whither the inhabitants go in procession to obtain rain or fine
weather according to the needs of the crops. In times of great
drought they throw into the basin of the fountain an ancient stone
image of the saint that stands in a sort of niche from which the
fountain flows. At Collobrières and Carpentras a similar practice
was observed with the images of St. Pons and St. Gens respectively.
In several villages of Navarre prayers for rain used to be offered
to St. Peter, and by way of enforcing them the villagers carried the
image of the saint in procession to the river, where they thrice
invited him to reconsider his resolution and to grant their prayers;
then, if he was still obstinate, they plunged him in the water,
despite the remonstrances of the clergy, who pleaded with as much
truth as piety that a simple caution or admonition administered to
the image would produce an equally good effect. After this the rain
was sure to fall within twenty-four hours. Catholic countries do not
enjoy a monopoly of making rain by ducking holy images in water. In
Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take
a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a
shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of
Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such
cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm,
however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or
a threat.

Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by
magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual. For
example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with
drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain
spring on Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty
cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode of
making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near
New Guinea. The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot
which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower they shook
the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of the
chariot was meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that mock
thunder and lightning form part of a rain-charm in Russia and Japan.
The legendary Salmoneus, King of Elis, made mock thunder by dragging
bronze kettles behind his chariot, or by driving over a bronze
bridge, while he hurled blazing torches in imitation of lightning.
It was his impious wish to mimic the thundering car of Zeus as it
rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed he declared that he was
actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as
such. Near a temple of Mars, outside the walls of Rome, there was
kept a certain stone known as the _lapis manalis._ In time of
drought the stone was dragged into Rome, and this was supposed to
bring down rain immediately.



3. The Magical Control of the Sun

AS THE MAGICIAN thinks he can make rain, so he fancies he can cause
the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down. At an
eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun was being
extinguished. So they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping
thus to rekindle his expiring light. The Sencis of Peru also shot
burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they did
this not so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage beast
with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely during an
eclipse of the moon some tribes of the Orinoco used to bury lighted
brands in the ground; because, said they, if the moon were to be
extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished with her,
except such as was hidden from her sight. During an eclipse of the
sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to bring out fire from their huts and
pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer addressed
to the sun shows that this ceremony was religious rather than
magical. Purely magical, on the other hand, was the ceremony
observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin Indians. Men and
women tucked up their robes, as they do in travelling, and then
leaning on staves, as if they were heavy laden, they continued to
walk in a circle till the eclipse was over. Apparently they thought
thus to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary
round in the sky. Similarly in ancient Egypt the king, as the
representative of the sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a
temple in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily
journey round the sky without the interruption of an eclipse or
other mishap. And after the autumnal equinox the ancient Egyptians
held a festival called "the nativity of the sun's walking-stick,"
because, as the luminary declined daily in the sky, and his light
and heat diminished, he was supposed to need a staff on which to
lean. In New Caledonia when a wizard desires to make sunshine, he
takes some plants and corals to the burial-ground, and fashions them
into a bundle, adding two locks of hair cut from a living child of
his family, also two teeth or an entire jawbone from the skeleton of
an ancestor. He then climbs a mountain whose top catches the first
rays of the morning sun. Here he deposits three sorts of plants on a
flat stone, places a branch of dry coral beside them, and hangs the
bundle of charms over the stone. Next morning he returns to the spot
and sets fire to the bundle at the moment when the sun rises from
the sea. As the smoke curls up, he rubs the stone with the dry
coral, invokes his ancestors and says: "Sun! I do this that you may
be burning hot, and eat up all the clouds in the sky." The same
ceremony is repeated at sunset. The New Caledonians also make a
drought by means of a disc-shaped stone with a hole in it. At the
moment when the sun rises, the wizard holds the stone in his hand
and passes a burning brand repeatedly into the hole, while he says:
"I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up
our land, so that it may produce nothing." The Banks Islanders make
sunshine by means of a mock sun. They take a very round stone,
called a _vat loa_ or sunstone, wind red braid about it, and stick
it with owls' feathers to represent rays, singing the proper spell
in a low voice. Then they hang it on some high tree, such as a
banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.

The offering made by the Brahman in the morning is supposed to
produce the sun, and we are told that "assuredly it would not rise,
were he not to make that offering." The ancient Mexicans conceived
the sun as the source of all vital force; hence they named him
Ipalnemohuani, "He by whom men live." But if he bestowed life on the
world, he needed also to receive life from it. And as the heart is
the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men and animals were
presented to the sun to maintain him in vigour and enable him to run
his course across the sky. Thus the Mexican sacrifices to the sun
were magical rather than religious, being designed, not so much to
please and propitiate him, as physically to renew his energies of
heat, light, and motion. The constant demand for human victims to
feed the solar fire was met by waging war every year on the
neighbouring tribes and bringing back troops of captives to be
sacrificed on the altar. Thus the ceaseless wars of the Mexicans and
their cruel system of human sacrifices, the most monstrous on
record, sprang in great measure from a mistaken theory of the solar
system. No more striking illustration could be given of the
disastrous consequences that may flow in practice from a purely
speculative error. The ancient Greeks believed that the sun drove in
a chariot across the sky; hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun
as their chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses
to him, and flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they
thought that after a year's work his old horses and chariot would be
worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of
Judah dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the Spartans,
Persians, and Massagetae sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans
performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Taygetus, the beautiful
range behind which they saw the great luminary set every night. It
was as natural for the inhabitants of the valley of Sparta to do
this as it was for the islanders of Rhodes to throw the chariot and
horses into the sea, into which the sun seemed to them to sink at
evening. For thus, whether on the mountain or in the sea, the fresh
horses stood ready for the weary god where they would be most
welcome, at the end of his day's journey.

As some people think they can light up the sun or speed him on his
way, so others fancy they can retard or stop him. In a pass of the
Peruvian Andes stand two ruined towers on opposite hills. Iron hooks
are clamped into their walls for the purpose of stretching a net
from one tower to the other. The net is intended to catch the sun.
Stories of men who have caught the sun in a noose are widely spread.
When the sun is going southward in the autumn, and sinking lower and
lower in the Arctic sky, the Esquimaux of Iglulik play the game of
cat's cradle in order to catch him in the meshes of the string and
so prevent his disappearance. On the contrary, when the sun is
moving northward in the spring, they play the game of cup-and-ball
to hasten his return. When an Australian blackfellow wishes to stay
the sun from going down till he gets home, he puts a sod in the fork
of a tree, exactly facing the setting sun. On the other hand, to
make it go down faster, the Australians throw sand into the air and
blow with their mouths towards the sun, perhaps to waft the
lingering orb westward and bury it under the sands into which it
appears to sink at night.

As some people imagine they can hasten the sun, so others fancy they
can jog the tardy moon. The natives of New Guinea reckon months by
the moon, and some of them have been known to throw stones and
spears at the moon, in order to accelerate its progress and so to
hasten the return of their friends, who were away from home for
twelve months working on a tobacco plantation. The Malays think that
a bright glow at sunset may throw a weak person into a fever. Hence
they attempt to extinguish the glow by spitting out water and
throwing ashes at it. The Shuswap Indians believe that they can
bring on cold weather by burning the wood of a tree that has been
struck by lightning. The belief may be based on the observation that
in their country cold follows a thunder-storm. Hence in spring, when
these Indians are travelling over the snow on high ground, they burn
splinters of such wood in the fire in order that the crust of the
snow may not melt.



4. The Magical Control of the Wind

ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow or to be
still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he
takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish,
winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick.
He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze
begins to blow. In order to procure a cool wind for nine days the
stone should first be dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and
then presented to the sun, while the sorcerer makes three turns
contrary to the course of the luminary. If a Hottentot desires the
wind to drop, he takes one of his fattest skins and hangs it on the
end of a pole, in the belief that by blowing the skin down the wind
will lose all its force and must itself fall. Fuegian wizards throw
shells against the wind to make it drop. The natives of the island
of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind by blowing with
their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say, "The Bibili
folk are at it again, blowing away." Another way of making wind
which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a "wind-stone" lightly
with a stick; to strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So in
Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water
and beating it thrice on a stone, saying:


   "I knok this rag upone this stane
    To raise the wind in the divellis name,
    It sall not lye till I please againe."


In Greenland a woman in child-bed and for some time after delivery
is supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to
go out of doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming back into the
house blow it out again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth
which enjoyed the reputation of being able to still the raging wind;
but we do not know in what manner its members exercised a useful
function, which probably earned for them a more solid recompense
than mere repute among the seafaring population of the isthmus. Even
in Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain
Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on a charge of binding the
winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and
Syria were detained afar off by calms or head-winds, to the rage and
disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used
to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was enclosed in
three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang
up; if the second, it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane.
Indeed the Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by
an arm of the sea, still believe in the magical powers of their
northern neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the
north and north-east, bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in
their train, are set down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the
machinations of the Finnish wizards and witches. In particular they
regard with special dread three days in spring to which they give
the name of Days of the Cross; one of them falls on the Eve of
Ascension Day. The people in the neighbourhood of Fellin fear to go
out on these days lest the cruel winds from Lappland should smite
them dead. A popular Esthonian song runs:


    Wind of the Cross! rushing and mighty!
    Heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping past!
    Wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow,
    Wizards of Finland ride by on the blast.


It is said, too, that sailors, beating up against the wind in the
Gulf of Finland, sometimes see a strange sail heave in sight astern
and overhaul them hand over hand. On she comes with a cloud of
canvas--all her studding-sails out--right in the teeth of the wind,
forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing back the spray
in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to bursting, every
rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she hails from
Finland.

The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so that the more knots
are loosed the stronger will blow the wind, has been attributed to
wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis, and the Isle
of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds in the shape of knotted
handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim to rule the
storms. There are said to be ancient crones in Lerwick now who live
by selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from
Aeolus, King of the Winds. The Motumotu in New Guinea think that
storms are sent by an Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind he has a bamboo
which he opens at pleasure. On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a
district of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is
supposed to control the wind and the rain. His priest is said to
keep the winds shut up in great pots.

Often the stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be
intimidated, driven away, or killed. When storms and bad weather
have lasted long and food is scarce with the Central Esquimaux, they
endeavour to conjure the tempest by making a long whip of seaweed,
armed with which they go down to the beach and strike out in the
direction of the wind, crying "_Taba_ (it is enough)!" Once when
north-westerly winds had kept the ice long on the coast and food was
becoming scarce, the Esquimaux performed a ceremony to make a calm.
A fire was kindled on the shore, and the men gathered round it and
chanted. An old man then stepped up to the fire and in a coaxing
voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and warm
himself. When he was supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to
which each man present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by
an old man, and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot
where the fire had been. They thought that the demon would not stay
where he had been so badly treated. To complete the effect, guns
were discharged in various directions, and the captain of a European
vessel was invited to fire on the wind with cannon. On the
twenty-first of February 1883 a similar ceremony was performed by
the Esquimaux of Point Barrow, Alaska, with the intention of killing
the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from their houses with
clubs and knives, with which they made passes in the air; and the
men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles and crushed
him under a heavy stone the moment that steam rose in a cloud from
the smouldering embers, on which a tub of water had just been
thrown.

The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a
whirl-wind to the passage of a spirit and they fling sticks at it to
frighten it away. When the wind blows down their huts, the Payaguas
of South America snatch up firebrands and run against the wind,
menacing it with the blazing brands, while others beat the air with
their fists to frighten the storm. When the Guaycurus are threatened
by a severe storm, the men go out armed, and the women and children
scream their loudest to intimidate the demon. During a tempest the
inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been seen to rush
from their houses armed with sword and lance. The rajah placed
himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and
hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be
specially active in the defence of her house, slashing the air right
and left with a long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the peals
sounding very near, the Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw
their swords threateningly half out of their scabbards, as if to
frighten away the demons of the storm. In Australia the huge columns
of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by
the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young
black ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with
boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very
weary, saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but that Koochee
had growled at him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of Eastern
Africa it is said that "no whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path
without being pursued by a dozen savages with drawn creeses, who
stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the
evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast."

In the light of these examples a story told by Herodotus, which his
modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly credible. He
says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale, that once
in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing from
the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the people took
counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south wind. But
when they entered the desert the simoon swept down on them and
buried them to a man. The story may well have been told by one who
watched them disappearing, in battle array, with drums and cymbals
beating, into the red cloud of whirling sand.




VI. Magicians as Kings

THE FOREGOING evidence may satisfy us that in many lands and many
races magic has claimed to control the great forces of nature for
the good of man. If that has been so, the practitioners of the art
must necessarily be personages of importance and influence in any
society which puts faith in their extravagant pretensions, and it
would be no matter for surprise if, by virtue of the reputation
which they enjoy and of the awe which they inspire, some of them
should attain to the highest position of authority over their
credulous fellows. In point of fact magicians appear to have often
developed into chiefs and kings.

Let us begin by looking at the lowest race of men as to whom we
possess comparatively full and accurate information, the aborigines
of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings.
So far as their tribes can be said to have a political constitution,
it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men,
who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the
practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly
answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for
such a government of elders we might call it a _gerontocracy._ The
elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs
of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their
respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert
nature of the country and the almost complete isolation from foreign
influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives on the
whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various
totem clans are charged with the important task of performing
magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the
great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it
follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people
with food by means of magic. Others have to make the rain to fall or
to render other services to the community. In short, among the
tribes of Central Australia the headmen are public magicians.
Further, their most important function is to take charge of the
sacred storehouse, usually a cleft in the rocks or a hole in the
ground, where are kept the holy stones and sticks (_churinga_) with
which the souls of all the people, both living and dead, are
apparently supposed to be in a manner bound up. Thus while the
headmen have certainly to perform what we should call civil duties,
such as to inflict punishment for breaches of tribal custom, their
principal functions are sacred or magical.

When we pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though the
natives stand at a far higher level of culture than the Australian
aborigines, the constitution of society among them is still
essentially democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship exists only
in embryo. Thus Sir William MacGregor tells us that in British New
Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough, bold enough, and strong
enough to become the despot even of a single district. "The nearest
approach to this has been the very distant one of some person
becoming a renowned wizard; but that has only resulted in levying a
certain amount of blackmail."

According to a native account, the origin of the power of Melanesian
chiefs lies entirely in the belief that they have communication with
mighty ghosts, and wield that supernatural power whereby they can
bring the influence of the ghosts to bear. If a chief imposed a
fine, it was paid because the people universally dreaded his ghostly
power, and firmly believed that he could inflict calamity and
sickness upon such as resisted him. As soon as any considerable
number of his people began to disbelieve in his influence with the
ghosts, his power to levy fines was shaken. Again, Dr. George Brown
tells us that in New Britain "a ruling chief was always supposed to
exercise priestly functions, that is, he professed to be in constant
communication with the _tebarans_ (spirits), and through their
influence he was enabled to bring rain or sunshine, fair winds or
foul ones, sickness or health, success or disaster in war, and
generally to procure any blessing or curse for which the applicant
was willing to pay a sufficient price."

Still rising in the scale of culture we come to Africa, where both
the chieftainship and the kingship are fully developed; and here the
evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magician, and
especially out of the rain-maker, is comparatively plentiful. Thus
among the Wambugwe, a Bantu people of East Africa, the original form
of government was a family republic, but the enormous power of the
sorcerers, transmitted by inheritance, soon raised them to the rank
of petty lords or chiefs. Of the three chiefs living in the country
in 1894 two were much dreaded as magicians, and the wealth of cattle
they possessed came to them almost wholly in the shape of presents
bestowed for their services in that capacity. Their principal art
was that of rain-making. The chiefs of the Wataturu, another people
of East Africa, are said to be nothing but sorcerers destitute of
any direct political influence. Again, among the Wagogo of East
Africa the main power of the chiefs, we are told, is derived from
their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot make rain himself, he
must procure it from some one who can.

Again, among the tribes of the Upper Nile the medicine-men are
generally the chiefs. Their authority rests above all upon their
supposed power of making rain, for "rain is the one thing which
matters to the people in those districts, as if it does not come
down at the right time it means untold hardships for the community.
It is therefore small wonder that men more cunning than their
fellows should arrogate to themselves the power of producing it, or
that having gained such a reputation, they should trade on the
credulity of their simpler neighbours." Hence "most of the chiefs of
these tribes are rain-makers, and enjoy a popularity in proportion
to their powers to give rain to their people at the proper season. .
. . Rain-making chiefs always build their villages on the slopes of
a fairly high hill, as they no doubt know that the hills attract the
clouds, and that they are, therefore, fairly safe in their weather
forecasts." Each of these rain-makers has a number of rain-stones,
such as rock-crystal, aventurine, and amethyst, which he keeps in a
pot. When he wishes to produce rain he plunges the stones in water,
and taking in his hand a peeled cane, which is split at the top, he
beckons with it to the clouds to come or waves them away in the way
they should go, muttering an incantation the while. Or he pours
water and the entrails of a sheep or goat into a hollow in a stone
and then sprinkles the water towards the sky. Though the chief
acquires wealth by the exercise of his supposed magical powers, he
often, perhaps generally, comes to a violent end; for in time of
drought the angry people assemble and kill him, believing that it is
he who prevents the rain from falling. Yet the office is usually
hereditary and passes from father to son. Among the tribes which
cherish these beliefs and observe these customs are the Latuka,
Bari, Laluba, and Lokoiya.

In Central Africa, again, the Lendu tribe, to the west of Lake
Albert, firmly believe that certain people possess the power of
making rain. Among them the rain-maker either is a chief or almost
invariably becomes one. The Banyoro also have a great respect for
the dispensers of rain, whom they load with a profusion of gifts.
The great dispenser, he who has absolute and uncontrollable power
over the rain, is the king; but he can depute his power to other
persons, so that the benefit may be distributed and the heavenly
water laid on over the various parts of the kingdom.

In Western as well as in Eastern and Central Africa we meet with the
same union of chiefly with magical functions. Thus in the Fan tribe
the strict distinction between chief and medicine-man does not
exist. The chief is also a medicine-man and a smith to boot; for the
Fans esteem the smith's craft sacred, and none but chiefs may meddle
with it.

As to the relation between the offices of chief and rain-maker in
South Africa a well-informed writer observes: "In very old days the
chief was the great Rain-maker of the tribe. Some chiefs allowed no
one else to compete with them, lest a successful Rain-maker should
be chosen as chief. There was also another reason: the Rain-maker
was sure to become a rich man if he gained a great reputation, and
it would manifestly never do for the chief to allow any one to be
too rich. The Rain-maker exerts tremendous control over the people,
and so it would be most important to keep this function connected
with royalty. Tradition always places the power of making rain as
the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems
probable that it may have been the origin of chieftainship. The man
who made the rain would naturally become the chief. In the same way
Chaka [the famous Zulu despot] used to declare that he was the only
diviner in the country, for if he allowed rivals his life would be
insecure." Similarly speaking of the South African tribes in
general, Dr. Moffat says that "the rain-maker is in the estimation
of the people no mean personage, possessing an influence over the
minds of the people superior even to that of the king, who is
likewise compelled to yield to the dictates of this arch-official."

The foregoing evidence renders it probable that in Africa the king
has often been developed out of the public magician, and especially
out of the rain-maker. The unbounded fear which the magician
inspires and the wealth which he amasses in the exercise of his
profession may both be supposed to have contributed to his
promotion. But if the career of a magician and especially of a
rain-maker offers great rewards to the successful practitioner of
the art, it is beset with many pitfalls into which the unskilful or
unlucky artist may fall. The position of the public sorcerer is
indeed a very precarious one; for where the people firmly believe
that he has it in his power to make the rain to fall, the sun to
shine, and the fruits of the earth to grow, they naturally impute
drought and dearth to his culpable negligence or wilful obstinacy,
and they punish him accordingly. Hence in Africa the chief who fails
to procure rain is often exiled or killed. Thus, in some parts of
West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the king have
failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him with ropes and take
him by force to the grave of his forefathers that he may obtain from
them the needed rain. The Banjars in West Africa ascribe to their
king the power of causing rain or fine weather. So long as the
weather is fine they load him with presents of grain and cattle. But
if long drought or rain threatens to spoil the crops, they insult
and beat him till the weather changes. When the harvest fails or the
surf on the coast is too heavy to allow of fishing, the people of
Loango accuse their king of a "bad heart" and depose him. On the
Grain Coast the high priest or fetish king, who bears the title of
Bodio, is responsible for the health of the community, the fertility
of the earth, and the abundance of fish in the sea and rivers; and
if the country suffers in any of these respects the Bodio is deposed
from his office. In Ussukuma, a great district on the southern bank
of the Victoria Nyanza, "the rain and locust question is part and
parcel of the Sultan's government. He, too, must know how to make
rain and drive away the locusts. If he and his medicine-men are
unable to accomplish this, his whole existence is at stake in times
of distress. On a certain occasion, when the rain so greatly desired
by the people did not come, the Sultan was simply driven out (in
Ututwa, near Nassa). The people, in fact, hold that rulers must have
power over Nature and her phenomena." Again, we are told of the
natives of the Nyanaza region generally that "they are persuaded
that rain only falls as a result of magic, and the important duty of
causing it to descend devolves on the chief of the tribe. If rain
does not come at the proper time, everybody complains. More than one
petty king has been banished his country because of drought." Among
the Latuka of the Upper Nile, when the crops are withering, and all
the efforts of the chief to draw down rain have proved fruitless,
the people commonly attack him by night, rob him of all he
possesses, and drive him away. But often they kill him.

In many other parts of the world kings have been expected to
regulate the course of nature for the good of their people and have
been punished if they failed to do so. It appears that the
Scythians, when food was scarce, used to put their king in bonds. In
ancient Egypt the sacred kings were blamed for the failure of the
crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsible for the
course of nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen on
the land, in consequence of a long and severe drought, the priests
took the animals by night and threatened them, but if the evil did
not abate they slew the beasts. On the coral island of Niue¯ or
Savage Island, in the South Pacific, there formerly reigned a line
of kings. But as the kings were also high priests, and were supposed
to make the food grow, the people became angry with them in times of
scarcity and killed them; till at last, as one after another was
killed, no one would be king, and the monarchy came to an end.
Ancient Chinese writers inform us that in Corea the blame was laid
on the king whenever too much or too little rain fell and the crops
did not ripen. Some said that he must be deposed, others that he
must be slain.

Among the American Indians the furthest advance towards civilisation
was made under the monarchical and theocratic governments of Mexico
and Peru; but we know too little of the early history of these
countries to say whether the predecessors of their deified kings
were medicine-men or not. Perhaps a trace of such a succession may
be detected in the oath which the Mexican kings, when they mounted
the throne, swore that they would make the sun to shine, the clouds
to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring forth
fruits in abundance. Certainly, in aboriginal America the sorcerer
or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of mystery and an atmosphere
of awe, was a personage of great influence and importance, and he
may well have developed into a chief or king in many tribes, though
positive evidence of such a development appears to be lacking. Thus
Catlin tells us that in North America the medicine-men "are valued
as dignitaries in the tribe, and the greatest respect is paid to
them by the whole community; not only for their skill in their
_materia medica,_ but more especially for their tact in magic and
mysteries, in which they all deal to a very great extent. . . . In
all tribes their doctors are conjurers--are magicians--are
sooth-sayers, and I had like to have said high-priests, inasmuch as
they superintend and conduct all their religious ceremonies; they
are looked upon by all as oracles of the nation. In all councils of
war and peace, they have a seat with the chiefs, are regularly
consulted before any public step is taken, and the greatest
deference and respect is paid to their opinions." Similarly in
California "the shaman was, and still is, perhaps the most important
individual among the Maidu. In the absence of any definite system of
government, the word of a shaman has great weight: as a class they
are regarded with much awe, and as a rule are obeyed much more than
the chief."

In South America also the magicians or medicine-men seem to have
been on the highroad to chieftainship or kingship. One of the
earliest settlers on the coast of Brazil, the Frenchman Thevet,
reports that the Indians "hold these _pages_ (or medicine-men) in
such honour and reverence that they adore, or rather idolise them.
You may see the common folk go to meet them, prostrate themselves,
and pray to them, saying, 'Grant that I be not ill, that I do not
die, neither I nor my children,' or some such request. And he
answers, 'You shall not die, you shall not be ill,' and such like
replies. But sometimes if it happens that these _pages_ do not tell
the truth, and things turn out otherwise than they predicted, the
people make no scruple of killing them as unworthy of the title and
dignity of _pages._" Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco
every clan has its cazique or chief, but he possesses little
authority. In virtue of his office he has to make many presents, so
he seldom grows rich and is generally more shabbily clad than any of
his subjects. "As a matter of fact the magician is the man who has
most power in his hands, and he is accustomed to receive presents
instead of to give them." It is the magician's duty to bring down
misfortune and plagues on the enemies of his tribe, and to guard his
own people against hostile magic. For these services he is well
paid, and by them he acquires a position of great influence and
authority.

Throughout the Malay region the rajah or king is commonly regarded
with superstitious veneration as the possessor of supernatural
powers, and there are grounds for thinking that he too, like
apparently so many African chiefs, has been developed out of a
simple magician. At the present day the Malays firmly believe that
the king possesses a personal influence over the works of nature,
such as the growth of the crops and the bearing of fruit-trees. The
same prolific virtue is supposed to reside, though in a lesser
degree, in his delegates, and even in the persons of Europeans who
chance to have charge of districts. Thus in Selangor, one of the
native states of the Malay Peninsula, the success or failure of the
rice-crops is often attributed to a change of district officers. The
Toorateyas of Southern Celebes hold that the prosperity of the rice
depends on the behaviour of their princes, and that bad government,
by which they mean a government which does not conform to ancient
custom, will result in a failure of the crops.

The Dyaks of Sarawak believed that their famous English ruler, Rajah
Brooke, was endowed with a certain magical virtue which, if properly
applied, could render the rice-crops abundant. Hence when he visited
a tribe, they used to bring him the seed which they intended to sow
next year, and he fertilised it by shaking over it the women's
necklaces, which had been previously dipped in a special mixture.
And when he entered a village, the women would wash and bathe his
feet, first with water, and then with the milk of a young coco-nut,
and lastly with water again, and all this water which had touched
his person they preserved for the purpose of distributing it on
their farms, believing that it ensured an abundant harvest. Tribes
which were too far off for him to visit used to send him a small
piece of white cloth and a little gold or silver, and when these
things had been impregnated by his generative virtue they buried
them in their fields, and confidently expected a heavy crop. Once
when a European remarked that the rice-crops of the Samban tribe
were thin, the chief immediately replied that they could not be
otherwise, since Rajah Brooke had never visited them, and he begged
that Mr. Brooke might be induced to visit his tribe and remove the
sterility of their land.

The belief that kings possess magical or supernatural powers by
virtue of which they can fertilise the earth and confer other
benefits on their subjects would seem to have been shared by the
ancestors of all the Aryan races from India to Ireland, and it has
left clear traces of itself in our own country down to modern times.
Thus the ancient Hindoo law-book called _The Laws of Manu_ describes
as follows the effects of a good king's reign: "In that country
where the king avoids taking the property of mortal sinners, men are
born in due time and are long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen
spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no
misshaped offspring is born." In Homeric Greece kings and chiefs
were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine
and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a
good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley,
the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the
sea to yield fish. In the Middle Ages, when Waldemar I., King of
Denmark, travelled in Germany, mothers brought their infants and
husbandmen their seed for him to lay his hands on, thinking that
children would both thrive the better for the royal touch, and for a
like reason farmers asked him to throw the seed for them. It was the
belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the
customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops
plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and
the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of
their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among
the blessings that attend the reign of a just king "fine weather,
calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit." On the other
hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight of fruit, and scarcity of corn
were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad.

Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about
our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula by
their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King's Evil.
Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous gift of healing. On
Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a hundred patients at
one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood. But it was under his son
Charles the Second that the practice seems to have attained its
highest vogue. It is said that in the course of his reign Charles
the Second touched near a hundred thousand persons for scrofula. The
press to get near him was sometimes terrific. On one occasion six or
seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death. The
cool-headed William the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself
to the hocuspocus; and when his palace was besieged by the usual
unsavoury crowd, he ordered them to be turned away with a dole. On
the only occasion when he was importuned into laying his hand on a
patient, he said to him, "God give you better health and more
sense." However, the practice was continued, as might have been
expected, by the dull bigot James the Second and his dull daughter
Queen Anne.

The kings of France also claimed to possess the same gift of healing
by touch, which they are said to have derived from Clovis or from
St. Louis, while our English kings inherited it from Edward the
Confessor. Similarly the savage chiefs of Tonga were believed to
heal scrofula and cases of indurated liver by the touch of their
feet; and the cure was strictly homoeopathic, for the disease as
well as the cure was thought to be caused by contact with the royal
person or with anything that belonged to it.

On the whole, then, we seem to be justified in inferring that in
many parts of the world the king is the lineal successor of the old
magician or medicine-man. When once a special class of sorcerers has
been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the
discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are
believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power,
till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great
social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in
despotism is attended by an intellectual revolution which affects
both the conception and the functions of royalty. For as time goes
on, the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent to the
acuter minds and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words,
the magician gives way to the priest, who, renouncing the attempt to
control directly the processes of nature for the good of man, seeks
to attain the same end indirectly by appealing to the gods to do for
him what he no longer fancies he can do for himself. Hence the king,
starting as a magician, tends gradually to exchange the practice of
magic for the priestly functions of prayer and sacrifice. And while
the distinction between the human and the divine is still
imperfectly drawn, it is often imagined that men may themselves
attain to godhead, not merely after their death, but in their
lifetime, through the temporary or permanent possession of their
whole nature by a great and powerful spirit. No class of the
community has benefited so much as kings by this belief in the
possible incarnation of a god in human form. The doctrine of that
incarnation, and with it the theory of the divinity of kings in the
strict sense of the word, will form the subject of the following
chapter.



VII. Incarnate Human Gods

THE INSTANCES which in the preceding chapters I have drawn from the
beliefs and practices of rude peoples all over the world, may
suffice to prove that the savage fails to recognise those
limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In
a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less
with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the
distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has
scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings
endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in
degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the
course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are
not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be
frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of
thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in it,
whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing
of tolerable equality. But with the growth of his knowledge man
learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his own
littleness and feebleness in presence of it. The recognition of his
helplessness does not, however, carry with it a corresponding belief
in the impotence of those supernatural beings with which his
imagination peoples the universe. On the contrary, it enhances his
conception of their power. For the idea of the world as a system of
impersonal forces acting in accordance with fixed and invariable
laws has not yet fully dawned or darkened upon him. The germ of the
idea he certainly has, and he acts upon it, not only in magic art,
but in much of the business of daily life. But the idea remains
undeveloped, and so far as he attempts to explain the world he lives
in, he pictures it as the manifestation of conscious will and
personal agency. If then he feels himself to be so frail and slight,
how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control the
gigantic machinery of nature! Thus as his old sense of equality with
the gods slowly vanishes, he resigns at the same time the hope of
directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that
is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole
repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to
share with them. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer
and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and
magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is
gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a
black art. It is not regarded as an encroachment, at once vain and
impious, on the domain of the gods, and as such encounters the
steady opposition of the priests, whose reputation and influence
rise or fall with those of their gods. Hence, when at a late period
the distinction between religion and superstition has emerged, we
find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and
enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of
the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the
conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way
to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it
implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of
cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the
obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by
investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the
way for science. Alchemy leads up to chemistry.

The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or
supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period of
religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as beings
of much the same order, and before they are divided by the
impassable gulf which, to later thought, opens out between them.
Strange, therefore, as may seem to us the idea of a god incarnate in
human form, it has nothing very startling for early man, who sees in
a man-god or a god-man only a higher degree of the same supernatural
powers which he arrogates in perfect good faith to himself. Nor does
he draw any very sharp distinction between a god and a powerful
sorcerer. His gods are often merely invisible magicians who behind
the veil of nature work the same sort of charms and incantations
which the human magician works in a visible and bodily form among
his fellows. And as the gods are commonly believed to exhibit
themselves in the likeness of men to their worshippers, it is easy
for the magician, with his supposed miraculous powers, to acquire
the reputation of being an incarnate deity. Thus beginning as little
more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magician tends to
blossom out into a full-blown god and king in one. Only in speaking
of him as a god we must beware of importing into the savage
conception of deity those very abstract and complex ideas which we
attach to the term. Our ideas on this profound subject are the fruit
of a long intellectual and moral evolution, and they are so far from
being shared by the savage that he cannot even understand them when
they are explained to him. Much of the controversy which has raged
as to the religion of the lower races has sprung merely from a
mutual misunderstanding. The savage does not understand the thoughts
of the civilised man, and few civilised men understand the thoughts
of the savage. When the savage uses his word for god, he has in his
mind a being of a certain sort: when the civilised man uses his word
for god, he has in his mind a being of a very different sort; and
if, as commonly happens, the two men are equally unable to place
themselves at the other's point of view, nothing but confusion and
mistakes can result from their discussions. If we civilised men
insist on limiting the name of God to that particular conception of
the divine nature which we ourselves have formed, then we must
confess that the savage has no god at all. But we shall adhere more
closely to the facts of history if we allow most of the higher
savages at least to possess a rudimentary notion of certain
supernatural beings who may fittingly be called gods, though not in
the full sense in which we use the word. That rudimentary notion
represents in all probability the germ out of which the civilised
peoples have gradually evolved their own high conceptions of deity;
and if we could trace the whole course of religious development, we
might find that the chain which links our idea of the Godhead with
that of the savage is one and unbroken.

With these explanations and cautions I will now adduce some examples
of gods who have been believed by their worshippers to be incarnate
in living human beings, whether men or women. The persons in whom a
deity is thought to reveal himself are by no means always kings or
descendants of kings; the supposed incarnation may take place even
in men of the humblest rank. In India, for example, one human god
started in life as a cotton-bleacher and another as the son of a
carpenter. I shall therefore not draw my examples exclusively from
royal personages, as I wish to illustrate the general principle of
the deification of living men, in other words, the incarnation of a
deity in human form. Such incarnate gods are common in rude society.
The incarnation may be temporary or permanent. In the former case,
the incarnation--commonly known as inspiration or
possession--reveals itself in supernatural knowledge rather than in
supernatural power. In other words, its usual manifestations are
divination and prophecy rather than miracles. On the other hand,
when the incarnation is not merely temporary, when the divine spirit
has permanently taken up its abode in a human body, the god-man is
usually expected to vindicate his character by working miracles.
Only we have to remember that by men at this stage of thought
miracles are not considered as breaches of natural law. Not
conceiving the existence of natural law, primitive man cannot
conceive a breach of it. A miracle is to him merely an unusually
striking manifestation of a common power.

The belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is world-wide.
Certain persons are supposed to be possessed from time to time by a
spirit or deity; while the possession lasts, their own personality
lies in abeyance, the presence of the spirit is revealed by
convulsive shiverings and shakings of the man's whole body, by wild
gestures and excited looks, all of which are referred, not to the
man himself, but to the spirit which has entered into him; and in
this abnormal state all his utterances are accepted as the voice of
the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through him. Thus,
for example, in the Sandwich Islands, the king, personating the god,
uttered the responses of the oracle from his concealment in a frame
of wicker-work. But in the southern islands of the Pacific the god
"frequently entered the priest, who, inflated as it were with the
divinity, ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but moved and
spoke as entirely under supernatural influence. In this respect
there was a striking resemblance between the rude oracles of the
Polynesians, and those of the celebrated nations of ancient Greece.
As soon as the god was supposed to have entered the priest, the
latter became violently agitated, and worked himself up to the
highest pitch of apparent frenzy, the muscles of the limbs seemed
convulsed, the body swelled, the countenance became terrific, the
features distorted, and the eyes wild and strained. In this state he
often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring
under the influence of the divinity by whom he was possessed, and,
in shrill cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed
the will of the god. The priests, who were attending, and versed in
the mysteries, received, and reported to the people, the
declarations which had been thus received. When the priest had
uttered the response of the oracle, the violent paroxysm gradually
subsided, and comparative composure ensued. The god did not,
however, always leave him as soon as the communication had been
made. Sometimes the same _taura,_ or priest, continued for two or
three days possessed by the spirit or deity; a piece of a native
cloth, of a peculiar kind, worn round one arm, was an indication of
inspiration, or of the indwelling of the god with the individual who
wore it. The acts of the man during this period were considered as
those of the god, and hence the greatest attention was paid to his
expressions, and the whole of his deportment. . . . When _uruhia_
(under the inspiration of the spirit), the priest was always
considered as sacred as the god, and was called, during this period,
_atua,_ god, though at other times only denominated _taura_ or
priest."

But examples of such temporary inspiration are so common in every
part of the world and are now so familiar through books on ethnology
that it is needless to multiply illustrations of the general
principle. It may be well, however, to refer to two particular modes
of producing temporary inspiration, because they are perhaps less
known than some others, and because we shall have occasion to refer
to them later on. One of these modes of producing inspiration is by
sucking the fresh blood of a sacrificed victim. In the temple of
Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a
month; a woman, who had to observe a rule of chastity, tasted the
blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied
or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of Earth drank the
fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to
prophesy. Similarly among the Kuruvikkarans, a class of
bird-catchers and beggars in Southern India, the goddess Kali is
believed to descend upon the priest, and he gives oracular replies
after sucking the blood which streams from the cut throat of a goat.
At a festival of the Alfoors of Minahassa, in Northern Celebes,
after a pig has been killed, the priest rushes furiously at it,
thrusts his head into the carcase, and drinks of the blood. Then he
is dragged away from it by force and set on a chair, whereupon he
begins to prophesy how the rice-crop will turn out that year. A
second time he runs at the carcase and drinks of the blood; a second
time he is forced into the chair and continues his predictions. It
is thought that there is a spirit in him which possesses the power
of prophecy.

The other mode of producing temporary inspiration, to which I shall
here refer, consists in the use of a sacred tree or plant. Thus in
the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the sacred cedar;
and the Dainyal or sibyl, with a cloth over her head, inhales the
thick pungent smoke till she is seized with convulsions and falls
senseless to the ground. Soon she rises and raises a shrill chant,
which is caught up and loudly repeated by her audience. So Apollo's
prophetess ate the sacred laurel and was fumigated with it before
she prophesied. The Bacchanals ate ivy, and their inspired fury was
by some believed to be due to the exciting and intoxicating
properties of the plant. In Uganda the priest, in order to be
inspired by his god, smokes a pipe of tobacco fiercely till he works
himself into a frenzy; the loud excited tones in which he then talks
are recognised as the voice of the god speaking through him. In
Madura, an island off the north coast of Java, each spirit has its
regular medium, who is oftener a woman than a man. To prepare
herself for the reception of the spirit she inhales the fumes of
incense, sitting with her head over a smoking censer. Gradually she
falls into a sort of trance accompanied by shrieks, grimaces, and
violent spasms. The spirit is now supposed to have entered into her,
and when she grows calmer her words are regarded as oracular, being
the utterances of the indwelling spirit, while her own soul is
temporarily absent.

The person temporarily inspired is believed to acquire, not merely
divine knowledge, but also, at least occasionally, divine power. In
Cambodia, when an epidemic breaks out, the inhabitants of several
villages unite and go with a band of music at their head to look for
the man whom the local god is supposed to have chosen for his
temporary incarnation. When found, the man is conducted to the altar
of the god, where the mystery of incarnation takes place. Then the
man becomes an object of veneration to his fellows, who implore him
to protect the village against the plague. A certain image of
Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae near Magnesia, was
thought to impart superhuman strength. Sacred men, inspired by it,
leaped down precipices, tore up huge trees by the roots, and carried
them on their backs along the narrowest defiles. The feats performed
by inspired dervishes belong to the same class.

Thus far we have seen that the savage, failing to discern the limits
of his ability to control nature, ascribes to himself and to all men
certain powers which we should now call supernatural. Further, we
have seen that, over and above this general supernaturalism, some
persons are supposed to be inspired for short periods by a divine
spirit, and thus temporarily to enjoy the knowledge and power of the
indwelling deity. From beliefs like these it is an easy step to the
conviction that certain men are permanently possessed by a deity, or
in some other undefined way are endued with so high a degree of
supernatural power as to be ranked as gods and to receive the homage
of prayer and sacrifice. Sometimes these human gods are restricted
to purely supernatural or spiritual functions. Sometimes they
exercise supreme political power in addition. In the latter case
they are kings as well as gods, and the government is a theocracy.
Thus in the Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men
who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a
supernatural power over the elements: they could give abundant
harvests or smite the ground with barrenness; and they could inflict
disease or death. Human sacrifices were offered to them to avert
their wrath. There were not many of them, at the most one or two in
each island. They lived in mystic seclusion. Their powers were
sometimes, but not always, hereditary. A missionary has described
one of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a
very old man who lived in a large house within an enclosure. In the
house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the
trees round it were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered
the enclosure except the persons dedicated to the service of the
god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary
people penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more
sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of
scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human
victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he
inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and
offerings were sent to him from every side. Again, of the South Sea
Islands in general we are told that each island had a man who
represented or personified the divinity. Such men were called gods,
and their substance was confounded with that of the deity. The
man-god was sometimes the king himself; oftener he was a priest or
subordinate chief.

The ancient Egyptians, far from restricting their adoration to cats
and dogs and such small deer, very liberally extended it to men. One
of these human deities resided at the village of Anabis, and burnt
sacrifices were offered to him on the altars; after which, says
Porphyry, he would eat his dinner just as if he were an ordinary
mortal. In classical antiquity the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles
gave himself out to be not merely a wizard but a god. Addressing his
fellow-citizens in verse he said:


   "O friends, in this great city that climbs the yellow slope
    Of Agrigentum's citadel, who make good works your scope,
    Who offer to the stranger a haven quiet and fair,
    All hail! Among you honoured I walk with lofty air.
    With garlands, blooming garlands you crown my noble brow,
    A mortal man no longer, a deathless godhead now.
    Where e'er I go, the people crowd round and worship pay,
    And thousands follow seeking to learn the better way.
    Some crave prophetic visions, some smit with anguish sore
    Would fain hear words of comfort and suffer pain no more."


He asserted that he could teach his disciples how to make the wind
to blow or be still, the rain to fall and the sun to shine, how to
banish sickness and old age and to raise the dead. When Demetrius
Poliorcetes restored the Athenian democracy in 307 B.C., the
Athenians decreed divine honours to him and his father Antigonus,
both of them being then alive, under the title of the Saviour Gods.
Altars were set up to the Saviours, and a priest appointed to attend
to their worship. The people went forth to meet their deliverer with
hymns and dances, with garlands and incense and libations; they
lined the streets and sang that he was the only true god, for the
other gods slept, or dwelt far away, or were not. In the words of a
contemporary poet, which were chanted in public and sung in private:


   "Of all the gods the greatest and the dearest
    To the city are come.
    For Demeter and Demetrius
    Together time has brought.
    She comes to hold the Maiden's awful rites,
    And he joyous and fair and laughing,
    As befits a god.
    A glorious sight, with all his friends about him,
    He in their midst,
    They like to stars, and he the sun.
    Son of Poseidon the mighty, Aphrodite's son,
    All hail!
    The other gods dwell far away,
    Or have no ears,
    Or are not, or pay us no heed.
    But thee we present see,
    No god of wood or stone, but godhead true.
    Therefore to thee we pray."


The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women,
and accordingly consulted them as oracles. Their sacred women, we
are told, looked on the eddying rivers and listened to the murmur or
the roar of the water, and from the sight and sound foretold what
would come to pass. But often the veneration of the men went
further, and they worshipped women as true and living goddesses. For
example, in the reign of Vespasian a certain Veleda, of the tribe of
the Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity, and in that character
reigned over her people, her sway being acknowledged far and wide.
She lived in a tower on the river Lippe, a tributary of the Rhine.
When the people of Cologne sent to make a treaty with her, the
ambassadors were not admitted to her presence; the negotiations were
conducted through a minister, who acted as the mouthpiece of her
divinity and reported her oracular utterances. The example shows how
easily among our rude forefathers the ideas of divinity and royalty
coalesced. It is said that among the Getae down to the beginning of
our era there was always a man who personified a god and was called
God by the people. He dwelt on a sacred mountain and acted as
adviser to the king.

According to the early Portuguese historian, Dos Santos, the Zimbas,
or Muzimbas, a people of South-eastern Africa, "do not adore idols
or recognize any god, but instead they venerate and honour their
king, whom they regard as a divinity, and they say he is the
greatest and best in the world. And the said king says of himself
that he alone is god of the earth, for which reason if it rains when
he does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots arrows at the
sky for not obeying him." The Mashona of Southern Africa informed
their bishop that they had once had a god, but that the Matabeles
had driven him away. "This last was in reference to a curious custom
in some villages of keeping a man they called their god. He seemed
to be consulted by the people and had presents given to him. There
was one at a village belonging to a chief Magondi, in the old days.
We were asked not to fire off any guns near the village, or we
should frighten him away." This Mashona god was formerly bound to
render an annual tribute to the king of the Matabele in the shape of
four black oxen and one dance. A missionary has seen and described
the deity discharging the latter part of his duty in front of the
royal hut. For three mortal hours, without a break, to the banging
of a tambourine, the click of castanettes, and the drone of a
monotonous song, the swarthy god engaged in a frenzied dance,
crouching on his hams like a tailor, sweating like a pig, and
bounding about with an agility which testified to the strength and
elasticity of his divine legs.

The Baganda of Central Africa believed in a god of Lake Nyanza, who
sometimes took up his abode in a man or woman. The incarnate god was
much feared by all the people, including the king and the chiefs.
When the mystery of incarnation had taken place, the man, or rather
the god, removed about a mile and a half from the margin of the
lake, and there awaited the appearance of the new moon before he
engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that the crescent moon
appeared faintly in the sky, the king and all his subjects were at
the command of the divine man, or _Lubare_ (god), as he was called,
who reigned supreme not only in matters of faith and ritual, but
also in questions of war and state policy. He was consulted as an
oracle; by his word he could inflict or heal sickness, withhold
rain, and cause famine. Large presents were made him when his advice
was sought. The chief of Urua, a large region to the west of Lake
Tanganyika, "arrogates to himself divine honours and power and
pretends to abstain from food for days without feeling its
necessity; and, indeed, declares that as a god he is altogether
above requiring food and only eats, drinks, and smokes for the
pleasure it affords him." Among the Gallas, when a woman grows tired
of the cares of housekeeping, she begins to talk incoherently and to
demean herself extravagantly. This is a sign of the descent of the
holy spirit Callo upon her. Immediately her husband prostrates
himself and adores her; she ceases to bear the humble title of wife
and is called "Lord"; domestic duties have no further claim on her,
and her will is a divine law.

The king of Loango is honoured by his people "as though he were a
god; and he is called Sambee and Pango, which mean god. They believe
that he can let them have rain when he likes; and once a year, in
December, which is the time they want rain, the people come to beg
of him to grant it to them." On this occasion the king, standing on
his throne, shoots an arrow into the air, which is supposed to bring
on rain. Much the same is said of the king of Mombasa. Down to a few
years ago, when his spiritual reign on earth was brought to an
abrupt end by the carnal weapons of English marines and bluejackets,
the king of Benin was the chief object of worship in his dominions.
"He occupies a higher post here than the Pope does in Catholic
Europe; for he is not only God's vicegerent upon earth, but a god
himself, whose subjects both obey and adore him as such, although I
believe their adoration to arise rather from fear than love." The
king of Iddah told the English officers of the Niger Expedition,
"God made me after his own image; I am all the same as God; and he
appointed me a king."

A peculiarly bloodthirsty monarch of Burma, by name Badonsachen,
whose very countenance reflected the inbred ferocity of his nature,
and under whose reign more victims perished by the executioner than
by the common enemy, conceived the notion that he was something more
than mortal, and that this high distinction had been granted him as
a reward for his numerous good works. Accordingly he laid aside the
title of king and aimed at making himself a god. With this view, and
in imitation of Buddha, who, before being advanced to the rank of a
divinity, had quitted his royal palace and seraglio and retired from
the world, Badonsachen withdrew from his palace to an immense
pagoda, the largest in the empire, which he had been engaged in
constructing for many years. Here he held conferences with the most
learned monks, in which he sought to persuade them that the five
thousand years assigned for the observance of the law of Buddha were
now elapsed, and that he himself was the god who was destined to
appear after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting
his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook
to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with
his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an
ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and
drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is
venerated equally with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look
him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he
passes, and appear before him on their knees, their elbows resting
on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred
person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of
him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar
vocabulary. The hairs of the monarch's head, the soles of his feet,
the breath of his body, indeed every single detail of his person,
both outward and inward, have particular names. When he eats or
drinks, sleeps or walks, a special word indicates that these acts
are being performed by the sovereign, and such words cannot possibly
be applied to the acts of any other person whatever. There is no
word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or
greater dignity than a monarch can be described; and the
missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native
word for king.

But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of human
gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out in a
more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to
milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry
Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and the milkman
who attends to it has been described as a god. On being asked
whether the Todas salute the sun, one of these divine milkmen
replied, "Those poor fellows do so, but I," tapping his chest, "I, a
god! why should I salute the sun?" Every one, even his own father,
prostrates himself before the milkman, and no one would dare to
refuse him anything. No human being, except another milkman, may
touch him; and he gives oracles to all who consult him, speaking
with the voice of a god.

Further, in India "every king is regarded as little short of a
present god." The Hindoo law-book of Manu goes farther and says that
"even an infant king must not be despised from an idea that he is a
mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human form." There is said
to have been a sect in Orissa some years ago who worshipped the late
Queen Victoria in her lifetime as their chief divinity. And to this
day in India all living persons remarkable for great strength or
valour or for supposed miraculous powers run the risk of being
worshipped as gods. Thus, a sect in the Punjaub worshipped a deity
whom they called Nikkal Sen. This Nikkal Sen was no other than the
redoubted General Nicholson, and nothing that the general could do
or say damped the ardour of his adorers. The more he punished them,
the greater grew the religious awe with which they worshipped him.
At Benares not many years ago a celebrated deity was incarnate in
the person of a Hindoo gentleman who rejoiced in the euphonious name
of Swami Bhaskaranandaji Saraswati, and looked uncommonly like the
late Cardinal Manning, only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with
kindly human interest, and he took what is described as an innocent
pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his confiding
worshippers.

At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in Western
India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is
believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an incarnation
of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity was first
made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a Brahman of Poona,
by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out his salvation by
abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its reward. The
god himself appeared to him in a vision of the night and promised
that a portion of his, that is, of Gunputty's holy spirit should
abide with him and with his seed after him even to the seventh
generation. The divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive
incarnations, transmitted from father to son, manifested the light
of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of the direct line, a
heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810. But
the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church
property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate with
equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a world
which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly they sought and found a holy
vessel in whom the divine spirit of the master had revealed itself
anew, and the revelation has been happily continued in an unbroken
succession of vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law
of spiritual economy, whose operation in the history of religion we
may deplore though we cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles
wrought by the god-man in these degenerate days cannot compare with
those which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it
is even reported that the only sign vouchsafed by him to the present
generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom he
annually entertains to dinner at Chinchvad.

A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and Central
India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as they are
called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on earth of
the god Krishna. And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most
favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors and vicars
on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been instituted,
whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies, their
souls, and, what is perhaps still more important, their worldly
substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are taught to
believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their families is
to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces of those
beings in whom the divine nature mysteriously coexists with the form
and even the appetites of true humanity.

Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these
unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the
extravagances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even
surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus
the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his
single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single
ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present day
many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate
in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this
belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian
records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in
the second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as
an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of
Toledo spoke of Christ as "a god among gods," meaning that all
believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of
each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed
hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in
the early part of the fourteenth century.

In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren and
Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous
contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable
manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and
that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his
beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son
of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed
thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and
divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion, though
outwardly presenting in their aspect and manners a shocking air of
lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to place,
attired in the most fantastic apparel and begging their bread with
wild shouts and clamour, spurning indignantly every kind of honest
labour and industry as an obstacle to divine contemplation and to
the ascent of the soul towards the Father of spirits. In all their
excursions they were followed by women with whom they lived on terms
of the closest familiarity. Those of them who conceived they had
made the greatest proficiency in the higher spiritual life dispensed
with the use of clothes altogether in their assemblies, looking upon
decency and modesty as marks of inward corruption, characteristics
of a soul that still grovelled under the dominion of the flesh and
had not yet been elevated into communion with the divine spirit, its
centre and source. Sometimes their progress towards this mystic
communion was accelerated by the Inquisition, and they expired in
the flames, not merely with unclouded serenity, but with the most
triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy.

About the year 1830 there appeared, in one of the States of the
American Union bordering on Kentucky, an impostor who declared that
he was the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, and that he had
reappeared on earth to recall the impious, the unbelieving, and
sinners to their duty. He protested that if they did not mend their
ways within a certain time, he would give the signal, and in a
moment the world would crumble to ruins. These extravagant
pretensions were received with favour even by persons of wealth and
position in society. At last a German humbly besought the new
Messiah to announce the dreadful catastrophe to his
fellow-countrymen in the German language, as they did not understand
English, and it seemed a pity that they should be damned merely on
that account. The would-be Saviour in reply confessed with great
candour that he did not know German. "What!" retorted the German,
"you the Son of God, and don't speak all languages, and don't even
know German? Come, come, you are a knave, a hypocrite, and a madman.
Bedlam is the place for you." The spectators laughed, and went away
ashamed of their credulity.

Sometimes, at the death of the human incarnation, the divine spirit
transmigrates into another man. The Buddhist Tartars believe in a
great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the
head of the most important monasteries. When one of these Grand
Lamas dies his disciples do not sorrow, for they know that he will
soon reappear, being born in the form of an infant. Their only
anxiety is to discover the place of his birth. If at this time they
see a rainbow they take it as a sign sent them by the departed Lama
to guide them to his cradle. Sometimes the divine infant himself
reveals his identity. "I am the Grand Lama," he says, "the living
Buddha of such and such a temple. Take me to my old monastery. I am
its immortal head." In whatever way the birthplace of the Buddha is
revealed, whether by the Buddha's own avowal or by the sign in the
sky, tents are struck, and the joyful pilgrims, often headed by the
king or one of the most illustrious of the royal family, set forth
to find and bring home the infant god. Generally he is born in
Tibet, the holy land, and to reach him the caravan has often to
traverse the most frightful deserts. When at last they find the
child they fall down and worship him. Before, however, he is
acknowledged as the Grand Lama whom they seek he must satisfy them
of his identity. He is asked the name of the monastery of which he
claims to be the head, how far off it is, and how many monks live in
it; he must also describe the habits of the deceased Grand Lama and
the manner of his death. Then various articles, as prayer-books,
tea-pots, and cups, are placed before him, and he has to point out
those used by himself in his previous life. If he does so without a
mistake his claims are admitted, and he is conducted in triumph to
the monastery. At the head of all the Lamas is the Dalai Lama of
Lhasa, the Rome of Tibet. He is regarded as a living god, and at
death his divine and immortal spirit is born again in a child.
According to some accounts the mode of discovering the Dalai Lama is
similar to the method, already described, of discovering an ordinary
Grand Lama. Other accounts speak of an election by drawing lots from
a golden jar. Wherever he is born, the trees and plants put forth
green leaves; at his bidding flowers bloom and springs of water
rise; and his presence diffuses heavenly blessings.

But he is by no means the only man who poses as a god in these
regions. A register of all the incarnate gods in the Chinese empire
is kept in the _Li fan yiian_ or Colonial Office at Peking. The
number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred and
sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia
rejoices in nineteen, and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine of
no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government, with a paternal
solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the gods on the
register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet. They fear lest the
birth of a god in Mongolia should have serious political
consequences by stirring the dormant patriotism and warlike spirit
of the Mongols, who might rally round an ambitious native deity of
royal lineage and seek to win for him, at the point of the sword, a
temporal as well as a spiritual kingdom. But besides these public or
licensed gods there are a great many little private gods, or
unlicensed practitioners of divinity, who work miracles and bless
their people in holes and corners; and of late years the Chinese
government has winked at the rebirth of these pettifogging deities
outside of Tibet. However, once they are born, the government keeps
its eye on them as well as on the regular practitioners, and if any
of them misbehaves he is promptly degraded, banished to a distant
monastery, and strictly forbidden ever to be born again in the
flesh.

From our survey of the religious position occupied by the king in
rude societies we may infer that the claim to divine and
supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great historical
empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple
outcome of inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling
adulation; it was merely a survival and extension of the old savage
apotheosis of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the
Sun the Incas of Peru were revered like gods; they could do no
wrong, and no one dreamed of offending against the person, honour,
or property of the monarch or of any of the royal race. Hence, too,
the Incas did not, like most people, look on sickness as an evil.
They considered it a messenger sent from their father the Sun to
call them to come and rest with him in heaven. Therefore the usual
words in which an Inca announced his approaching end were these: "My
father calls me to come and rest with him." They would not oppose
their father's will by offering sacrifice for recovery, but openly
declared that he had called them to his rest. Issuing from the
sultry valleys upon the lofty tableland of the Colombian Andes, the
Spanish conquerors were astonished to find, in contrast to the
savage hordes they had left in the sweltering jungles below, a
people enjoying a fair degree of civilisation, practising
agriculture, and living under a government which Humboldt has
compared to the theocracies of Tibet and Japan. These were the
Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with
capitals at Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently in spiritual
allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long and
ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired
such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the
weather depended on his will. The Mexican kings at their accession,
as we have seen, took an oath that they would make the sun to shine,
the clouds to give rain, the rivers to flow, and the earth to bring
forth fruits in abundance. We are told that Montezuma, the last king
of Mexico, was worshipped by his people as a god.

The early Babylonian kings, from the time of Sargon I. till the
fourth dynasty of Ur or later, claimed to be gods in their lifetime.
The monarchs of the fourth dynasty of Ur in particular had temples
built in their honour; they set up their statues in various
sanctuaries and commanded the people to sacrifice to them; the
eighth month was especially dedicated to the kings, and sacrifices
were offered to them at the new moon and on the fifteenth of each
month. Again, the Parthian monarchs of the Arsacid house styled
themselves brothers of the sun and moon and were worshipped as
deities. It was esteemed sacrilege to strike even a private member
of the Arsacid family in a brawl.

The kings of Egypt were deified in their lifetime, sacrifices were
offered to them, and their worship was celebrated in special temples
and by special priests. Indeed the worship of the kings sometimes
cast that of the gods into the shade. Thus in the reign of Merenra a
high official declared that he had built many holy places in order
that the spirits of the king, the ever-living Merenra, might be
invoked "more than all the gods." "It has never been doubted that
the king claimed actual divinity; he was the 'great god,' the'golden
Horus,' and son of Ra. He claimed authority not only over Egypt, but
over'all lands and nations,''the whole world in its length and its
breadth, the east and the west,''the entire compass of the great
circuit of the sun,''the sky and what is in it, the earth and all
that is upon it,''every creature that walks upon two or upon four
legs, all that fly or flutter, the whole world offers her
productions to him.' Whatever in fact might be asserted of the
Sun-god, was dogmatically predicable of the king of Egypt. His
titles were directly derived from those of the Sun-god." "In the
course of his existence," we are told, "the king of Egypt exhausted
all the possible conceptions of divinity which the Egyptians had
framed for themselves. A superhuman god by his birth and by his
royal office, he became the deified man after his death. Thus all
that was known of the divine was summed up in him."

We have now completed our sketch, for it is no more than a sketch,
of the evolution of that sacred kingship which attained its highest
form, its most absolute expression, in the monarchies of Peru and
Egypt. Historically, the institution appears to have originated in
the order of public magicians or medicine-men; logically it rests on
a mistaken deduction from the association of ideas. Men mistook the
order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined
that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their
thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over
things. The men who for one reason or another, because of the
strength or the weakness of their natural parts, were supposed to
possess these magical powers in the highest degree, were gradually
marked off from their fellows and became a separate class, who were
destined to exercise a most far-reaching influence on the political,
religious, and intellectual evolution of mankind. Social progress,
as we know, consists mainly in a successive differentiation of
functions, or, in simpler language, a division of labour. The work
which in primitive society is done by all alike and by all equally
ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes
of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far as the
products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are
shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing
specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute
the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution of
society. For sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us;
and among the lowest savages, such as the Australian aborigines,
they are the only professional class that exists. As time goes on,
and the process of differentiation continues, the order of
medicine-men is itself subdivided into such classes as the healers
of disease, the makers of rain, and so forth; while the most
powerful member of the order wins for himself a position as chief
and gradually develops into a sacred king, his old magical functions
falling more and more into the background and being exchanged for
priestly or even divine duties, in proportion as magic is slowly
ousted by religion. Still later, a partition is effected between the
civil and the religious aspect of the kingship, the temporal power
being committed to one man and the spiritual to another. Meanwhile
the magicians, who may be repressed but cannot be extirpated by the
predominance of religion, still addict themselves to their old
occult arts in preference to the newer ritual of sacrifice and
prayer; and in time the more sagacious of their number perceive the
fallacy of magic and hit upon a more effectual mode of manipulating
the forces of nature for the good of man; in short, they abandon
sorcery for science. I am far from affirming that the course of
development has everywhere rigidly followed these lines: it has
doubtless varied greatly in different societies. I merely mean to
indicate in the broadest outline what I conceive to have been its
general trend. Regarded from the industrial point of view the
evolution has been from uniformity to diversity of function:
regarded from the political point of view, it has been from
democracy to despotism. With the later history of monarchy,
especially with the decay of despotism and its displacement by forms
of government better adapted to the higher needs of humanity, we are
not concerned in this enquiry: our theme is the growth, not the
decay, of a great and, in its time, beneficent institution.



VIII. Departmental Kings of Nature

THE PRECEDING investigation has proved that the same union of sacred
functions with a royal title which meets us in the King of the Wood
at Nemi, the Sacrificial King at Rome, and the magistrate called the
King at Athens, occurs frequently outside the limits of classical
antiquity and is a common feature of societies at all stages from
barbarism to civilisation. Further, it appears that the royal priest
is often a king, not only in name but in fact, swaying the sceptre
as well as the crosier. All this confirms the traditional view of
the origin of the titular and priestly kings in the republics of
ancient Greece and Italy. At least by showing that the combination
of spiritual and temporal power, of which Graeco-Italian tradition
preserved the memory, has actually existed in many places, we have
obviated any suspicion of improbability that might have attached to
the tradition. Therefore we may now fairly ask, May not the King of
the Wood have had an origin like that which a probable tradition
assigns to the Sacrificial King of Rome and the titular King of
Athens? In other words, may not his predecessors in office have been
a line of kings whom a republican revolution stripped of their
political power, leaving them only their religious functions and the
shadow of a crown? There are at least two reasons for answering this
question in the negative. One reason is drawn from the abode of the
priest of Nemi; the other from his title, the King of the Wood. If
his predecessors had been kings in the ordinary sense, he would
surely have been found residing, like the fallen kings of Rome and
Athens, in the city of which the sceptre had passed from him. This
city must have been Aricia, for there was none nearer. But Aricia
was three miles off from his forest sanctuary by the lake shore. If
he reigned, it was not in the city, but in the greenwood. Again his
title, King of the Wood, hardly allows us to suppose that he had
ever been a king in the common sense of the word. More likely he was
a king of nature, and of a special side of nature, namely, the woods
from which he took his title. If we could find instances of what we
may call departmental kings of nature, that is of persons supposed
to rule over particular elements or aspects of nature, they would
probably present a closer analogy to the King of the Wood than the
divine kings we have been hitherto considering, whose control of
nature is general rather than special. Instances of such
departmental kings are not wanting.

On a hill at Bomma near the mouth of the Congo dwells Namvulu Vumu,
King of the Rain and Storm. Of some of the tribes on the Upper Nile
we are told that they have no kings in the common sense; the only
persons whom they acknowledge as such are the Kings of the Rain,
_Mata Kodou,_ who are credited with the power of giving rain at the
proper time, that is, the rainy season. Before the rains begin to
fall at the end of March the country is a parched and arid desert;
and the cattle, which form the people's chief wealth, perish for
lack of grass. So, when the end of March draws on, each householder
betakes himself to the King of the Rain and offers him a cow that he
may make the blessed waters of heaven to drip on the brown and
withered pastures. If no shower falls, the people assemble and
demand that the king shall give them rain; and if the sky still
continues cloudless, they rip up his belly, in which he is believed
to keep the storms. Amongst the Bari tribe one of these Rain Kings
made rain by sprinkling water on the ground out of a handbell.

Among tribes on the outskirts of Abyssinia a similar office exists
and has been thus described by an observer: "The priesthood of the
Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a remarkable one;
he is believed to be able to make rain. This office formerly existed
among the Algeds and appears to be still common to the Nuba negroes.
The Alfai of the Barea, who is also consulted by the northern
Kunama, lives near Tembadere on a mountain alone with his family.
The people bring him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and
cultivate for him a large field of his own. He is a kind of king,
and his office passes by inheritance to his brother or sister's son.
He is supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts.
But if he disappoints the people's expectation and a great drought
arises in the land, the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest
relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him. When we passed
through the country, the office of Alfai was still held by an old
man; but I heard that rain-making had proved too dangerous for him
and that he had renounced his office."

In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as
the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread
all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a
faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no
European, so far as is known, had ever seen either of them; and
their very existence might have passed for a fable, were it not that
till lately communications were regularly maintained between them
and the King of Cambodia, who year by year exchanged presents with
them. Their royal functions are of a purely mystic or spiritual
order; they have no political authority; they are simple peasants,
living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of the faithful.
According to one account they live in absolute solitude, never
meeting each other and never seeing a human face. They inhabit
successively seven towers perched upon seven mountains, and every
year they pass from one tower to another. People come furtively and
cast within their reach what is needful for their subsistence. The
kingship lasts seven years, the time necessary to inhabit all the
towers successively; but many die before their time is out. The
offices are hereditary in one or (according to others) two royal
families, who enjoy high consideration, have revenues assigned to
them, and are exempt from the necessity of tilling the ground. But
naturally the dignity is not coveted, and when a vacancy occurs, all
eligible men (they must be strong and have children) flee and hide
themselves. Another account, admitting the reluctance of the
hereditary candidates to accept the crown, does not countenance the
report of their hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it
represents the people as prostrating themselves before the mystic
kings whenever they appear in public, it being thought that a
terrible hurricane would burst over the country if this mark of
homage were omitted. Like many other sacred kings, of whom we shall
read in the sequel, the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to
die a natural death, for that would lower their reputation.
Accordingly when one of them is seriously ill, the elders hold a
consultation and if they think he cannot recover they stab him to
death. His body is burned and the ashes are piously collected and
publicly honoured for five years. Part of them is given to the
widow, and she keeps them in an urn, which she must carry on her
back when she goes to weep on her husband's grave.

We are told that the Fire King, the more important of the two, whose
supernatural powers have never been questioned, officiates at
marriages, festivals, and sacrifices in honour of the _Yan_ or
spirit. On these occasions a special place is set apart for him; and
the path by which he approaches is spread with white cotton cloths.
A reason for confining the royal dignity to the same family is that
this family is in possession of certain famous talismans which would
lose their virtue or disappear if they passed out of the family.
These talismans are three: the fruit of a creeper called _Cui,_
gathered ages ago at the time of the last deluge, but still fresh
and green; a rattan, also very old but bearing flowers that never
fade; and lastly, a sword containing a _Yan_ or spirit, who guards
it constantly and works miracles with it. The spirit is said to be
that of a slave, whose blood chanced to fall upon the blade while it
was being forged, and who died a voluntary death to expiate his
involuntary offence. By means of the two former talismans the Water
King can raise a flood that would drown the whole earth. If the Fire
King draws the magic sword a few inches from its sheath, the sun is
hidden and men and beasts fall into a profound sleep; were he to
draw it quite out of the scabbard, the world would come to an end.
To this wondrous brand sacrifices of buffaloes, pigs, fowls, and
ducks are offered for rain. It is kept swathed in cotton and silk;
and amongst the annual presents sent by the King of Cambodia were
rich stuffs to wrap the sacred sword.

Contrary to the common usage of the country, which is to bury the
dead, the bodies of both these mystic monarchs are burnt, but their
nails and some of their teeth and bones are religiously preserved as
amulets. It is while the corpse is being consumed on the pyre that
the kinsmen of the deceased magician flee to the forest and hide
themselves, for fear of being elevated to the invidious dignity
which he has just vacated. The people go and search for them, and
the first whose lurking place they discover is made King of Fire or
Water.

These, then, are examples of what I have called departmental kings
of nature. But it is a far cry to Italy from the forests of Cambodia
and the sources of the Nile. And though Kings of Rain, Water, and
Fire have been found, we have still to discover a King of the Wood
to match the Arician priest who bore that title. Perhaps we shall
find him nearer home.



IX. The Worship of Trees



1. Tree-spirits

IN THE RELIGIOUS history of the Aryan race in Europe the worship of
trees has played an important part. Nothing could be more natural.
For at the dawn of history Europe was covered with immense primaeval
forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like
islets in an ocean of green. Down to the first century before our
era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a
distance at once vast and unknown; Germans whom Caesar questioned
had travelled for two months through it without reaching the end.
Four centuries later it was visited by the Emperor Julian, and the
solitude, the gloom, the silence of the forest appear to have made a
deep impression on his sensitive nature. He declared that he knew
nothing like it in the Roman empire. In our own country the wealds
of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are remnants of the great forest of
Anderida, which once clothed the whole of the south-eastern portion
of the island. Westward it seems to have stretched till it joined
another forest that extended from Hampshire to Devon. In the reign
of Henry II. the citizens of London still hunted the wild bull and
the boar in the woods of Hampstead. Even under the later
Plantagenets the royal forests were sixty-eight in number. In the
forest of Arden it was said that down to modern times a squirrel
might leap from tree to tree for nearly the whole length of
Warwickshire. The excavation of ancient pile-villages in the valley
of the Po has shown that long before the rise and probably the
foundation of Rome the north of Italy was covered with dense woods
of elms, chestnuts, and especially of oaks. Archaeology is here
confirmed by history; for classical writers contain many references
to Italian forests which have now disappeared. As late as the fourth
century before our era Rome was divided from central Etruria by the
dreaded Ciminian forest, which Livy compares to the woods of
Germany. No merchant, if we may trust the Roman historian, had ever
penetrated its pathless solitudes; and it was deemed a most daring
feat when a Roman general, after sending two scouts to explore its
intricacies, led his army into the forest and, making his way to a
ridge of the wooded mountains, looked down on the rich Etrurian
fields spread out below. In Greece beautiful woods of pine, oak, and
other trees still linger on the slopes of the high Arcadian
mountains, still adorn with their verdure the deep gorge through
which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus, and were still,
down to a few years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the
lonely lake of Pheneus; but they are mere fragments of the forests
which clothed great tracts in antiquity, and which at a more remote
epoch may have spanned the Greek peninsula from sea to sea.

From an examination of the Teutonic words for "temple" Grimm has
made it probable that amongst the Germans the oldest sanctuaries
were natural woods. However that may be, tree-worship is well
attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock.
Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every
one, and their old word for sanctuary seems to be identical in
origin and meaning with the Latin _nemus,_ a grove or woodland
glade, which still survives in the name of Nemi. Sacred groves were
common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct
amongst their descendants at the present day. How serious that
worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious
penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel
the bark of a standing tree. The culprit's navel was to be cut out
and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was
to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound
about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to
replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit;
it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.
At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred
grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The heathen Slavs
worshipped trees and groves. The Lithuanians were not converted to
Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and
amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees
was prominent. Some of them revered remarkable oaks and other great
shady trees, from which they received oracular responses. Some
maintained holy groves about their villages or houses, where even to
break a twig would have been a sin. They thought that he who cut a
bough in such a grove either died suddenly or was crippled in one of
his limbs. Proofs of the prevalence of tree-worship in ancient
Greece and Italy are abundant. In the sanctuary of Aesculapius at
Cos, for example, it was forbidden to cut down the cypress-trees
under a penalty of a thousand drachms. But nowhere, perhaps, in the
ancient world was this antique form of religion better preserved
than in the heart of the great metropolis itself. In the Forum, the
busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was
worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its
trunk was enough to spread consternation through the city. Again, on
the slope of the Palatine Hill grew a cornel-tree which was esteemed
one of the most sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared
to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was
echoed by the people in the street, and soon a crowd might be seen
running helter-skelter from all sides with buckets of water, as if
(says Plutarch) they were hastening to put out a fire.

Among the tribes of the Finnish-Ugrian stock in Europe the heathen
worship was performed for the most part in sacred groves, which were
always enclosed with a fence. Such a grove often consisted merely of
a glade or clearing with a few trees dotted about, upon which in
former times the skins of the sacrificial victims were hung. The
central point of the grove, at least among the tribes of the Volga,
was the sacred tree, beside which everything else sank into
insignificance. Before it the worshippers assembled and the priest
offered his prayers, at its roots the victim was sacrificed, and its
boughs sometimes served as a pulpit. No wood might be hewn and no
branch broken in the grove, and women were generally forbidden to
enter it.

But it is necessary to examine in some detail the notions on which
the worship of trees and plants is based. To the savage the world in
general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the
rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he treats
them accordingly. "They say," writes the ancient vegetarian
Porphyry, "that primitive men led an unhappy life, for their
superstition did not stop at animals but extended even to plants.
For why should the slaughter of an ox or a sheep be a greater wrong
than the felling of a fir or an oak, seeing that a soul is implanted
in these trees also?" Similarly, the Hidatsa Indians of North
America believe that every natural object has its spirit, or to
speak more properly, its shade. To these shades some consideration
or respect is due, but not equally to all. For example, the shade of
the cottonwood, the greatest tree in the valley of the Upper
Missouri, is supposed to possess an intelligence which, if properly
approached, may help the Indians in certain undertakings; but the
shades of shrubs and grasses are of little account. When the
Missouri, swollen by a freshet in spring, carries away part of its
banks and sweeps some tall tree into its current, it is said that
the spirit of the tree cries, while the roots still cling to the
land and until the trunk falls with a splash into the stream.
Formerly the Indians considered it wrong to fell one of these
giants, and when large logs were needed they made use only of trees
which had fallen of themselves. Till lately some of the more
credulous old men declared that many of the misfortunes of their
people were caused by this modern disregard for the rights of the
living cottonwood. The Iroquois believed that each species of tree,
shrub, plant, and herb had its own spirit, and to these spirits it
was their custom to return thanks. The Wanika of Eastern Africa
fancy that every tree, and especially every coco-nut tree, has its
spirit; "the destruction of a cocoa-nut tree is regarded as
equivalent to matricide, because that tree gives them life and
nourishment, as a mother does her child." Siamese monks, believing
that there are souls everywhere, and that to destroy anything
whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, will not break a branch
of a tree, "as they will not break the arm of an innocent person."
These monks, of course, are Buddhists. But Buddhist animism is not a
philosophical theory. It is simply a common savage dogma
incorporated in the system of an historical religion. To suppose,
with Benfey and others, that the theories of animism and
transmigration current among rude peoples of Asia are derived from
Buddhism, is to reverse the facts.

Sometimes it is only particular sorts of trees that are supposed to
be tenanted by spirits. At Grbalj in Dalmatia it is said that among
great beeches, oaks, and other trees there are some that are endowed
with shades or souls, and whoever fells one of them must die on the
spot, or at least live an invalid for the rest of his days. If a
woodman fears that a tree which he has felled is one of this sort,
he must cut off the head of a live hen on the stump of the tree with
the very same axe with which he cut down the tree. This will protect
him from all harm, even if the tree be one of the animated kind. The
silk-cotton trees, which rear their enormous trunks to a stupendous
height, far out-topping all the other trees of the forest, are
regarded with reverence throughout West Africa, from the Senegal to
the Niger, and are believed to be the abode of a god or spirit.
Among the Ewespeaking peoples of the Slave Coast the indwelling god
of this giant of the forest goes by the name of Huntin. Trees in
which he specially dwells--for it is not every silk-cotton tree that
he thus honours--are surrounded by a girdle of palm-leaves; and
sacrifices of fowls, and occasionally of human beings, are fastened
to the trunk or laid against the foot of the tree. A tree
distinguished by a girdle of palm-leaves may not be cut down or
injured in any way; and even silk-cotton trees which are not
supposed to be animated by Huntin may not be felled unless the
woodman first offers a sacrifice of fowls and palm-oil to purge
himself of the proposed sacrilege. To omit the sacrifice is an
offence which may be punished with death. Among the Kangra mountains
of the Punjaub a girl used to be annually sacrificed to an old
cedar-tree, the families of the village taking it in turn to supply
the victim. The tree was cut down not very many years ago.

If trees are animate, they are necessarily sensitive and the cutting
of them down becomes a delicate surgical operation, which must be
performed with as tender a regard as possible for the feelings of
the sufferers, who otherwise may turn and rend the careless or
bungling operator. When an oak is being felled "it gives a kind of
shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the
genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heard it severall
times." The Ojebways "very seldom cut down green or living trees,
from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their
medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under
the axe." Trees that bleed and utter cries of pain or indignation
when they are hacked or burned occur very often in Chinese books,
even in Standard Histories. Old peasants in some parts of Austria
still believe that forest-trees are animate, and will not allow an
incision to be made in the bark without special cause; they have
heard from their fathers that the tree feels the cut not less than a
wounded man his hurt. In felling a tree they beg its pardon. It is
said that in the Upper Palatinate also old woodmen still secretly
ask a fine, sound tree to forgive them before they cut it down. So
in Jarkino the woodman craves pardon of the tree he fells. Before
the Ilocanes of Luzon cut down trees in the virgin forest or on the
mountains, they recite some verses to the following effect: "Be not
uneasy, my friend, though we fell what we have been ordered to
fell." This they do in order not to draw down on themselves the
hatred of the spirits who live in the trees, and who are apt to
avenge themselves by visiting with grievous sickness such as injure
them wantonly. The Basoga of Central Africa think that, when a tree
is cut down, the angry spirit which inhabits it may cause the death
of the chief and his family. To prevent this disaster they consult a
medicine-man before they fell a tree. If the man of skill gives
leave to proceed, the woodman first offers a fowl and a goat to the
tree; then as soon as he has given the first blow with the axe, he
applies his mouth to the cut and sucks some of the sap. In this way
he forms a brotherhood with the tree, just as two men become
blood-brothers by sucking each other's blood. After that he can cut
down his tree-brother with impunity.

But the spirits of vegetation are not always treated with deference
and respect. If fair words and kind treatment do not move them,
stronger measures are sometimes resorted to. The durian-tree of the
East Indies, whose smooth stem often shoots up to a height of eighty
or ninety feet without sending out a branch, bears a fruit of the
most delicious flavour and the most disgusting stench. The Malays
cultivate the tree for the sake of its fruit, and have been known to
resort to a peculiar ceremony for the purpose of stimulating its
fertility. Near Jugra in Selangor there is a small grove of
durian-trees, and on a specially chosen day the villagers used to
assemble in it. Thereupon one of the local sorcerers would take a
hatchet and deliver several shrewd blows on the trunk of the most
barren of the trees, saying, "Will you now bear fruit or not? If you
do not, I shall fell you." To this the tree replied through the
mouth of another man who had climbed a mangostin-tree hard by (the
durian-tree being unclimbable), "Yes, I will now bear fruit; I beg
of you not to fell me." So in Japan to make trees bear fruit two men
go into an orchard. One of them climbs up a tree and the other
stands at the foot with an axe. The man with the axe asks the tree
whether it will yield a good crop next year and threatens to cut it
down if it does not. To this the man among the branches replies on
behalf of the tree that it will bear abundantly. Odd as this mode of
horticulture may seem to us, it has its exact parallels in Europe.
On Christmas Eve many a South Slavonian and Bulgarian peasant swings
an axe threateningly against a barren fruit-tree, while another man
standing by intercedes for the menaced tree, saying, "Do not cut it
down; it will soon bear fruit." Thrice the axe is swung, and thrice
the impending blow is arrested at the entreaty of the intercessor.
After that the frightened tree will certainly bear fruit next year.

The conception of trees and plants as animated beings naturally
results in treating them as male and female, who can be married to
each other in a real, and not merely a figurative or poetical, sense
of the word. The notion is not purely fanciful, for plants like
animals have their sexes and reproduce their kind by the union of
the male and female elements. But whereas in all the higher animals
the organs of the two sexes are regularly separated between
different individuals, in most plants they exist together in every
individual of the species. This rule, however, is by no means
universal, and in many species the male plant is distinct from the
female. The distinction appears to have been observed by some
savages, for we are told that the Maoris "are acquainted with the
sex of trees, etc., and have distinct names for the male and female
of some trees." The ancients knew the difference between the male
and the female date-palm, and fertilised them artificially by
shaking the pollen of the male tree over the flowers of the female.
The fertilisation took place in spring. Among the heathen of Harran
the month during which the palms were fertilised bore the name of
the Date Month, and at this time they celebrated the marriage
festival of all the gods and goddesses. Different from this true and
fruitful marriage of the palm are the false and barren marriages of
plants which play a part in Hindoo superstition. For example, if a
Hindoo has planted a grove of mangos, neither he nor his wife may
taste of the fruit until he has formally married one of the trees,
as a bridegroom, to a tree of a different sort, commonly a
tamarind-tree, which grows near it in the grove. If there is no
tamarind to act as bride, a jasmine will serve the turn. The
expenses of such a marriage are often considerable, for the more
Brahmans are feasted at it, the greater the glory of the owner of
the grove. A family has been known to sell its golden and silver
trinkets, and to borrow all the money they could in order to marry a
mango-tree to a jasmine with due pomp and ceremony. On Christmas Eve
German peasants used to tie fruit-trees together with straw ropes to
make them bear fruit, saying that the trees were thus married.

In the Moluccas, when the clove-trees are in blossom, they are
treated like pregnant women. No noise may be made near them; no
light or fire may be carried past them at night; no one may approach
them with his hat on, all must uncover in their presence. These
precautions are observed lest the tree should be alarmed and bear no
fruit, or should drop its fruit too soon, like the untimely delivery
of a woman who has been frightened in her pregnancy. So in the East
the growing rice-crop is often treated with the same considerate
regard as a breeding woman. Thus in Amboyna, when the rice is in
bloom, the people say that it is pregnant and fire no guns and make
no other noises near the field, for fear lest, if the rice were thus
disturbed, it would miscarry, and the crop would be all straw and no
grain.

Sometimes it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate
trees. The Dieri tribe of Central Australia regard as very sacred
certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed;
hence they speak with reverence of these trees, and are careful that
they shall not be cut down or burned. If the settlers require them
to hew down the trees, they earnestly protest against it, asserting
that were they to do so they would have no luck, and might be
punished for not protecting their ancestors. Some of the Philippine
Islanders believe that the souls of their ancestors are in certain
trees, which they therefore spare. If they are obliged to fell one
of these trees, they excuse themselves to it by saying that it was
the priest who made them do it. The spirits take up their abode, by
preference, in tall and stately trees with great spreading branches.
When the wind rustles the leaves, the natives fancy it is the voice
of the spirit; and they never pass near one of these trees without
bowing respectfully, and asking pardon of the spirit for disturbing
his repose. Among the Ignorrotes, every village has its sacred tree,
in which the souls of the dead forefathers of the hamlet reside.
Offerings are made to the tree, and any injury done to it is
believed to entail some misfortune on the village. Were the tree cut
down, the village and all its inhabitants would inevitably perish.

In Corea the souls of people who die of the plague or by the
roadside, and of women who expire in childbirth, invariably take up
their abode in trees. To such spirits offerings of cake, wine, and
pork are made on heaps of stones piled under the trees. In China it
has been customary from time immemorial to plant trees on graves in
order thereby to strengthen the soul of the deceased and thus to
save his body from corruption; and as the evergreen cypress and pine
are deemed to be fuller of vitality than other trees, they have been
chosen by preference for this purpose. Hence the trees that grow on
graves are sometimes identified with the souls of the departed.
Among the Miao-Kia, an aboriginal race of Southern and Western
China, a sacred tree stands at the entrance of every village, and
the inhabitants believe that it is tenanted by the soul of their
first ancestor and that it rules their destiny. Sometimes there is a
sacred grove near a village, where the trees are suffered to rot and
die on the spot. Their fallen branches cumber the ground, and no one
may remove them unless he has first asked leave of the spirit of the
tree and offered him a sacrifice. Among the Maraves of Southern
Africa the burial-ground is always regarded as a holy place where
neither a tree may be felled nor a beast killed, because everything
there is supposed to be tenanted by the souls of the dead.

In most, if not all, of these cases the spirit is viewed as
incorporate in the tree; it animates the tree and must suffer and
die with it. But, according to another and probably later opinion,
the tree is not the body, but merely the abode of the tree-spirit,
which can quit it and return to it at pleasure. The inhabitants of
Siaoo, an East Indian island, believe in certain sylvan spirits who
dwell in forests or in great solitary trees. At full moon the spirit
comes forth from his lurking-place and roams about. He has a big
head, very long arms and legs, and a ponderous body. In order to
propitiate the wood-spirits people bring offerings of food, fowls,
goats, and so forth to the places which they are supposed to haunt.
The people of Nias think that, when a tree dies, its liberated
spirit becomes a demon, which can kill a coco-nut palm by merely
lighting on its branches, and can cause the death of all the
children in a house by perching on one of the posts that support it.
Further, they are of opinion that certain trees are at all times
inhabited by roving demons who, if the trees were damaged, would be
set free to go about on errands of mischief. Hence the people
respect these trees, and are careful not to cut them down.

Not a few ceremonies observed at cutting down haunted trees are
based on the belief that the spirits have it in their power to quit
the trees at pleasure or in case of need. Thus when the Pelew
Islanders are felling a tree, they conjure the spirit of the tree to
leave it and settle on another. The wily negro of the Slave Coast,
who wishes to fell an _ashorin_ tree, but knows that he cannot do it
so long as the spirit remains in the tree, places a little palm-oil
on the ground as a bait, and then, when the unsuspecting spirit has
quitted the tree to partake of this dainty, hastens to cut down its
late abode. When the Toboongkoos of Celebes are about to clear a
piece of forest in order to plant rice, they build a tiny house and
furnish it with tiny clothes and some food and gold. Then they call
together all the spirits of the wood, offer them the little house
with its contents, and beseech them to quit the spot. After that
they may safely cut down the wood without fearing to wound
themselves in so doing. Before the Tomori, another tribe of Celebes,
fell a tall tree they lay a quid of betel at its foot, and invite
the spirit who dwells in the tree to change his lodging; moreover,
they set a little ladder against the trunk to enable him to descend
with safety and comfort. The Mandelings of Sumatra endeavour to lay
the blame of all such misdeeds at the door of the Dutch authorities.
Thus when a man is cutting a road through a forest and has to fell a
tall tree which blocks the way, he will not begin to ply his axe
until he has said: "Spirit who lodgest in this tree, take it not ill
that I cut down thy dwelling, for it is done at no wish of mine but
by order of the Controller." And when he wishes to clear a piece of
forest-land for cultivation, it is necessary that he should come to
a satisfactory understanding with the woodland spirits who live
there before he lays low their leafy dwellings. For this purpose he
goes to the middle of the plot of ground, stoops down, and pretends
to pick up a letter. Then unfolding a bit of paper he reads aloud an
imaginary letter from the Dutch Government, in which he is strictly
enjoined to set about clearing the land without delay. Having done
so, he says: "You hear that, spirits. I must begin clearing at once,
or I shall be hanged."

Even when a tree has been felled, sawn into planks, and used to
build a house, it is possible that the woodland spirit may still be
lurking in the timber, and accordingly some people seek to
propitiate him before or after they occupy the new house. Hence,
when a new dwelling is ready the Toradjas of Celebes kill a goat, a
pig, or a buffalo, and smear all the woodwork with its blood. If the
building is a _lobo_ or spirit-house, a fowl or a dog is killed on
the ridge of the roof, and its blood allowed to flow down on both
sides. The ruder Tonapoo in such a case sacrifice a human being on
the roof. This sacrifice on the roof of a _lobo_ or temple serves
the same purpose as the smearing of blood on the woodwork of an
ordinary house. The intention is to propitiate the forest-spirits
who may still be in the timber; they are thus put in good humour and
will do the inmates of the house no harm. For a like reason people
in Celebes and the Moluccas are much afraid of planting a post
upside down at the building of a house; for the forest-spirit, who
might still be in the timber, would very naturally resent the
indignity and visit the inmates with sickness. The Kayans of Borneo
are of opinion that tree-spirits stand very stiffly on the point of
honour and visit men with their displeasure for any injury done to
them. Hence after building a house, whereby they have been forced to
ill-treat many trees, these people observe a period of penance for a
year during which they must abstain from many things, such as the
killing of bears, tiger-cats, and serpents.



2. Beneficent Powers of Tree-Spirits

WHEN a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the
tree-spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure,
an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is
passing into polytheism. In other words, instead of regarding each
tree as a living and conscious being, man now sees in it merely a
lifeless, inert mass, tenanted for a longer or shorter time by a
supernatural being who, as he can pass freely from tree to tree,
thereby enjoys a certain right of possession or lordship over the
trees, and, ceasing to be a tree-soul, becomes a forest god. As soon
as the tree-spirit is thus in a measure disengaged from each
particular tree, he begins to change his shape and assume the body
of a man, in virtue of a general tendency of early thought to clothe
all abstract spiritual beings in concrete human form. Hence in
classical art the sylvan deities are depicted in human shape, their
woodland character being denoted by a branch or some equally obvious
symbol. But this change of shape does not affect the essential
character of the tree-spirit. The powers which he exercised as a
tree-soul incorporate in a tree, he still continues to wield as a
god of trees. This I shall now attempt to prove in detail. I shall
show, first, that trees considered as animate beings are credited
with the power of making the rain to fall, the sun to shine, flocks
and herds to multiply, and women to bring forth easily; and, second,
that the very same powers are attributed to tree-gods conceived as
anthropomorphic beings or as actually incarnate in living men.

First, then, trees or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and
sunshine. When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the
heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of
women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with
the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they had
been wont to get rain and sunshine. The Mundaris in Assam think that
if a tree in the sacred grove is felled the sylvan gods evince their
displeasure by withholding rain. In order to procure rain the
inhabitants of Monyo, a village in the Sagaing district of Upper
Burma, chose the largest tamarind-tree near the village and named it
the haunt of the spirit (_nat_) who controls the rain. Then they
offered bread, coco-nuts, plantains, and fowls to the guardian
spirit of the village and to the spirit who gives rain, and they
prayed, "O Lord _nat_ have pity on us poor mortals, and stay not the
rain. Inasmuch as our offering is given ungrudgingly, let the rain
fall day and night." Afterwards libations were made in honour of the
spirit of the tamarind-tree; and still later three elderly women,
dressed in fine clothes and wearing necklaces and earrings, sang the
Rain Song.

Again, tree-spirits make the crops to grow. Amongst the Mundaris
every village has its sacred grove, and "the grove deities are held
responsible for the crops, and are especially honoured at all the
great agricultural festivals." The negroes of the Gold Coast are in
the habit of sacrificing at the foot of certain tall trees, and they
think that if one of these were felled all the fruits of the earth
would perish. The Gallas dance in couples round sacred trees,
praying for a good harvest. Every couple consists of a man and
woman, who are linked together by a stick, of which each holds one
end. Under their arms they carry green corn or grass. Swedish
peasants stick a leafy branch in each furrow of their corn-fields,
believing that this will ensure an abundant crop. The same idea
comes out in the German and French custom of the Harvest-May. This
is a large branch or a whole tree, which is decked with ears of
corn, brought home on the last waggon from the harvest-field, and
fastened on the roof of the farmhouse or of the barn, where it
remains for a year. Mannhardt has proved that this branch or tree
embodies the tree-spirit conceived as the spirit of vegetation in
general, whose vivifying and fructifying influence is thus brought
to bear upon the corn in particular. Hence in Swabia the Harvest-May
is fastened amongst the last stalks of corn left standing on the
field; in other places it is planted on the corn-field and the last
sheaf cut is attached to its trunk.

Again, the tree-spirit makes the herds to multiply and blesses women
with offspring. In Northern India the _Emblica officinalis_ is a
sacred tree. On the eleventh of the month Phalgun (February)
libations are poured at the foot of the tree, a red or yellow string
is bound about the trunk, and prayers are offered to it for the
fruitfulness of women, animals, and crops. Again, in Northern India
the coco-nut is esteemed one of the most sacred fruits, and is
called Sriphala, or the fruit of Sri, the goddess of prosperity. It
is the symbol of fertility, and all through Upper India is kept in
shrines and presented by the priests to women who desire to become
mothers. In the town of Qua, near Old Calabar, there used to grow a
palm-tree which ensured conception to any barren woman who ate a nut
from its branches. In Europe the May-tree or May-pole is apparently
supposed to possess similar powers over both women and cattle. Thus
in some parts of Germany on the first of May the peasants set up
May-trees or May-bushes at the doors of stables and byres, one for
each horse and cow; this is thought to make the cows yield much
milk. Of the Irish we are told that "they fancy a green bough of a
tree, fastened on May-day against the house, will produce plenty of
milk that summer."

On the second of July some of the Wends used to set up an oak-tree
in the middle of the village with an iron cock fastened to its top;
then they danced round it, and drove the cattle round it to make
them thrive. The Circassians regard the pear-tree as the protector
of cattle. So they cut down a young pear-tree in the forest, branch
it, and carry it home, where it is adored as a divinity. Almost
every house has one such pear-tree. In autumn, on the day of the
festival, the tree is carried into the house with great ceremony to
the sound of music and amid the joyous cries of all the inmates, who
compliment it on its fortunate arrival. It is covered with candles,
and a cheese is fastened to its top. Round about it they eat, drink,
and sing. Then they bid the tree good-bye and take it back to the
courtyard, where it remains for the rest of the year, set up against
the wall, without receiving any mark of respect.

In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris "the power of making women fruitful is
ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the navel-strings
of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the navel-strings of all
children used to be hung upon them down to quite recent times. A
barren woman had to embrace such a tree with her arms, and she
received a male or a female child according as she embraced the east
or the west side." The common European custom of placing a green
bush on May Day before or on the house of a beloved maiden probably
originated in the belief of the fertilising power of the
tree-spirit. In some parts of Bavaria such bushes are set up also at
the houses of newly-married pairs, and the practice is only omitted
if the wife is near her confinement; for in that case they say that
the husband has "set up a May-bush for himself." Among the South
Slavonians a barren woman, who desires to have a child, places a new
chemise upon a fruitful tree on the eve of St. George's Day. Next
morning before sunrise she examines the garment, and if she finds
that some living creature has crept on it, she hopes that her wish
will be fulfilled within the year. Then she puts on the chemise,
confident that she will be as fruitful as the tree on which the
garment has passed the night. Among the Kara-Kirghiz barren women
roll themselves on the ground under a solitary apple-tree, in order
to obtain offspring. Lastly, the power of granting to women an easy
delivery at child-birth is ascribed to trees both in Sweden and
Africa. In some districts of Sweden there was formerly a _bardträd_
or guardian-tree (lime, ash, or elm) in the neighbourhood of every
farm. No one would pluck a single leaf of the sacred tree, any
injury to which was punished by ill-luck or sickness. Pregnant women
used to clasp the tree in their arms in order to ensure an easy
delivery. In some negro tribes of the Congo region pregnant women
make themselves garments out of the bark of a certain sacred tree,
because they believe that this tree delivers them from the dangers
that attend child-bearing. The story that Leto clasped a palm-tree
and an olive-tree or two laurel-trees, when she was about to give
birth to the divine twins Apollo and Artemis, perhaps points to a
similar Greek belief in the efficacy of certain trees to facilitate
delivery.




X. Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe

FROM THE FOREGOING review of the beneficent qualities commonly
ascribed to tree-spirits, it is easy to understand why customs like
the May-tree or May-pole have prevailed so widely and figured so
prominently in the popular festivals of European peasants. In spring
or early summer or even on Midsummer Day, it was and still is in
many parts of Europe the custom to go out to the woods, cut down a
tree and bring it into the village, where it is set up amid general
rejoicings; or the people cut branches in the woods, and fasten them
on every house. The intention of these customs is to bring home to
the village, and to each house, the blessings which the tree-spirit
has in its power to bestow. Hence the custom in some places of
planting a May-tree before every house, or of carrying the village
May-tree from door to door, that every household may receive its
share of the blessing. Out of the mass of evidence on this subject a
few examples may be selected.

Sir Henry Piers, in his _Description of Westmeath,_ writing in 1682
says: "On May-eve, every family sets up before their door a green
bush, strewed over with yellow flowers, which the meadows yield
plentifully. In countries where timber is plentiful, they erect tall
slender trees, which stand high, and they continue almost the whole
year; so as a stranger would go nigh to imagine that they were all
signs of ale-sellers, and that all houses were ale-houses." In
Northamptonshire a young tree ten or twelve feet high used to be
planted before each house on May Day so as to appear growing;
flowers were thrown over it and strewn about the door. "Among
ancient customs still retained by the Cornish, may be reckoned that
of decking their doors and porches on the first of May with green
boughs of sycamore and hawthorn, and of planting trees, or rather
stumps of trees, before their houses." In the north of England it
was formerly the custom for young people to rise a little after
midnight on the morning of the first of May, and go out with music
and the blowing of horns into the woods, where they broke branches
and adorned them with nosegays and crowns of flowers. This done,
they returned about sunrise and fastened the flower-decked branches
over the doors and windows of their houses. At Abingdon in Berkshire
young people formerly went about in groups on May morning, singing a
carol of which the following are two of the verses:


   "We've been rambling all the night,
    And sometime of this day;
    And now returning back again,
    We bring a garland gay.
    A garland gay we bring you here;
    And at your door we stand;
    It is a sprout well budded out,
    The work of our Lord's hand."


At the towns of Saffron Walden and Debden in Essex on the first of
May little girls go about in parties from door to door singing a
song almost identical with the above and carrying garlands; a doll
dressed in white is usually placed in the middle of each garland.
Similar customs have been and indeed are still observed in various
parts of England. The garlands are generally in the form of hoops
intersecting each other at right angles. It appears that a hoop
wreathed with rowan and marsh marigold, and bearing suspended within
it two balls, is still carried on May Day by villagers in some parts
of Ireland. The balls, which are sometimes covered with gold and
silver paper, are said to have originally represented the sun and
moon.

In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May
young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in
praise of May, in which mention is made of the "bread and meal that
come in May." If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to
the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and
no bread to feed them. In the French department of Mayenne, boys who
bore the name of _Maillotins_ used to go about from farm to farm on
the first of May singing carols, for which they received money or a
drink; they planted a small tree or a branch of a tree. Near Saverne
in Alsace bands of people go about carrying May-trees. Amongst them
is a man dressed in a white shirt with his face blackened; in front
of him is carried a large May-tree, but each member of the band also
carries a smaller one. One of the company bears a huge basket, in
which he collects eggs, bacon, and so forth.

On the Thursday before Whitsunday the Russian villagers "go out into
the woods, sing songs, weave garlands, and cut down a young
birch-tree, which they dress up in woman's clothes, or adorn with
many-coloured shreds and ribbons. After that comes a feast, at the
end of which they take the dressed-up birch-tree, carry it home to
their village with joyful dance and song, and set it up in one of
the houses, where it remains as an honoured guest till Whitsunday.
On the two intervening days they pay visits to the house where their
'guest' is; but on the third day, Whitsunday, they take her to a
stream and fling her into its waters," throwing their garlands after
her. In this Russian custom the dressing of the birch in woman's
clothes shows how clearly the tree is personified; and the throwing
it into a stream is most probably a raincharm.

In some parts of Sweden on the eve of May Day lads go about carrying
each a bunch of fresh birch twigs wholly or partly in leaf. With the
village fiddler at their head, they make the round of the houses
singing May songs; the burden of their songs is a prayer for fine
weather, a plentiful harvest, and worldly and spiritual blessings.
One of them carries a basket in which he collects gifts of eggs and
the like. If they are well received, they stick a leafy twig in the
roof over the cottage door. But in Sweden midsummer is the season
when these ceremonies are chiefly observed. On the Eve of St. John
(the twenty-third of June) the houses are thoroughly cleansed and
garnished with green boughs and flowers. Young fir-trees are raised
at the doorway and elsewhere about the homestead; and very often
small umbrageous arbours are constructed in the garden. In Stockholm
on this day a leaf-market is held at which thousands of May-poles
(_Maj Stanger_), from six inches to twelve feet high, decorated with
leaves, flowers, slips of coloured paper, gilt egg-shells strung on
reeds, and so on, are exposed for sale. Bonfires are lit on the
hills, and the people dance round them and jump over them. But the
chief event of the day is setting up the May-pole. This consists of
a straight and tall sprucepine tree, stripped of its branches. "At
times hoops and at others pieces of wood, placed crosswise, are
attached to it at intervals; whilst at others it is provided with
bows, representing, so to say, a man with his arms akimbo. From top
to bottom not only the 'Maj Stang' (May-pole) itself, but the hoops,
bows, etc., are ornamented with leaves, flowers, slips of various
cloth, gilt egg-shells, etc.; and on the top of it is a large vane,
or it may be a flag." The raising of the May-pole, the decoration of
which is done by the village maidens, is an affair of much ceremony;
the people flock to it from all quarters, and dance round it in a
great ring. Midsummer customs of the same sort used to be observed
in some parts of Germany. Thus in the towns of the Upper Harz
Mountains tall fir-trees, with the bark peeled off their lower
trunks, were set up in open places and decked with flowers and eggs,
which were painted yellow and red. Round these trees the young folk
danced by day and the old folk in the evening. In some parts of
Bohemia also a May-pole or midsummer-tree is erected on St. John's
Eve. The lads fetch a tall fir or pine from the wood and set it up
on a height, where the girls deck it with nosegays, garlands, and
red ribbons. It is afterwards burned.

It would be needless to illustrate at length the custom, which has
prevailed in various parts of Europe, such as England, France, and
Germany, of setting up a village May-tree or May-pole on May Day. A
few examples will suffice. The puritanical writer Phillip Stubbes in
his _Anatomie of Abuses,_ first published at London in 1583, has
described with manifest disgust how they used to bring in the
May-pole in the days of good Queen Bess. His description affords us
a vivid glimpse of merry England in the olden time. "Against May,
Whitsonday, or other time, all the yung men and maides, olde men and
wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hils, and
mountains, where they spend all the night in plesant pastimes; and
in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of
trees, to deck their assemblies withall. And no mervaile, for there
is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord
over their pastimes and sportes, namely, Sathan, prince of hel. But
the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which
they bring home with great veneration, as thus. They have twentie or
fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flouers
placed on the tip of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this
May-pole (this stinkyng ydol, rather), which is covered all over
with floures and hearbs, bound round about with strings, from the
top to the bottome, and sometime painted with variable colours, with
two or three hundred men, women and children following it with great
devotion. And thus beeing reared up, with handkercheefs and flags
hovering on the top, they straw the ground rounde about, binde green
boughes about it, set up sommer haules, bowers, and arbors hard by
it. And then fall they to daunce about it, like as the heathen
people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect
pattern, or rather the thing itself. I have heard it credibly
reported (and that _viva voce_) by men of great gravitie and
reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to
the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them
returned home againe undefiled."

In Swabia on the first of May a tall fir-tree used to be fetched
into the village, where it was decked with ribbons and set up; then
the people danced round it merrily to music. The tree stood on the
village green the whole year through, until a fresh tree was brought
in next May Day. In Saxony "people were not content with bringing
the summer symbolically (as king or queen) into the village; they
brought the fresh green itself from the woods even into the houses:
that is the May or Whitsuntide trees, which are mentioned in
documents from the thirteenth century onwards. The fetching in of
the May-tree was also a festival. The people went out into the woods
to seek the May (_majum quaerere_), brought young trees, especially
firs and birches, to the village and set them up before the doors of
the houses or of the cattle-stalls or in the rooms. Young fellows
erected such May-trees, as we have already said, before the chambers
of their sweethearts. Besides these household Mays, a great May-tree
or May-pole, which had also been brought in solemn procession to the
village, was set up in the middle of the village or in the
market-place of the town. It had been chosen by the whole community,
who watched over it most carefully. Generally the tree was stripped
of its branches and leaves, nothing but the crown being left, on
which were displayed, in addition to many-coloured ribbons and
cloths, a variety of victuals such as sausages, cakes, and eggs. The
young folk exerted themselves to obtain these prizes. In the greasy
poles which are still to be seen at our fairs we have a relic of
these old May-poles. Not uncommonly there was a race on foot or on
horseback to the May-tree--a Whitsunday pastime which in course of
time has been divested of its goal and survives as a popular custom
to this day in many parts of Germany." At Bordeaux on the first of
May the boys of each street used to erect in it a May-pole, which
they adorned with garlands and a great crown; and every evening
during the whole of the month the young people of both sexes danced
singing about the pole. Down to the present day May-trees decked
with flowers and ribbons are set up on May Day in every village and
hamlet of gay Provence. Under them the young folk make merry and the
old folk rest.

In all these cases, apparently, the custom is or was to bring in a
new May-tree each year. However, in England the village May-pole
seems as a rule, at least in later times, to have been permanent,
not renewed annually. Villages of Upper Bavaria renew their May-pole
once every three, four, or five years. It is a fir-tree fetched from
the forest, and amid all the wreaths, flags, and inscriptions with
which it is bedecked, an essential part is the bunch of dark green
foliage left at the top "as a memento that in it we have to do, not
with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood." We can
hardly doubt that originally the practice everywhere was to set up a
new May-tree every year. As the object of the custom was to bring in
the fructifying spirit of vegetation, newly awakened in spring, the
end would have been defeated if, instead of a living tree, green and
sappy, an old withered one had been erected year after year or
allowed to stand permanently. When, however, the meaning of the
custom had been forgotten, and the May-tree was regarded simply as a
centre for holiday merry-making, people saw no reason for felling a
fresh tree every year, and preferred to let the same tree stand
permanently, only decking it with fresh flowers on May Day. But even
when the May-pole had thus become a fixture, the need of giving it
the appearance of being a green tree, not a dead pole, was sometimes
felt. Thus at Weverham in Cheshire "are two May-poles, which are
decorated on this day (May Day) with all due attention to the
ancient solemnity; the sides are hung with garlands, and the top
terminated by a birch or other tall slender tree with its leaves on;
the bark being peeled, and the stem spliced to the pole, so as to
give the appearance of one tree from the summit." Thus the renewal
of the May-tree is like the renewal of the Harvest-May; each is
intended to secure a fresh portion of the fertilising spirit of
vegetation, and to preserve it throughout the year. But whereas the
efficacy of the Harvest-May is restricted to promoting the growth of
the crops, that of the May-tree or May-branch extends also, as we
have seen, to women and cattle. Lastly, it is worth noting that the
old May-tree is sometimes burned at the end of the year. Thus in the
district of Prague young people break pieces of the public May-tree
and place them behind the holy pictures in their rooms, where they
remain till next May Day, and are then burned on the hearth. In
Würtemberg the bushes which are set up on the houses on Palm Sunday
are sometimes left there for a year and then burnt.

So much for the tree-spirit conceived as incorporate or immanent in
the tree. We have now to show that the tree-spirit is often
conceived and represented as detached from the tree and clothed in
human form, and even as embodied in living men or women. The
evidence for this anthropomorphic representation of the tree-spirit
is largely to be found in the popular customs of European peasantry.

There is an instructive class of cases in which the tree-spirit is
represented simultaneously in vegetable form and in human form,
which are set side by side as if for the express purpose of
explaining each other. In these cases the human representative of
the tree-spirit is sometimes a doll or puppet, sometimes a living
person, but whether a puppet or a person, it is placed beside a tree
or bough; so that together the person or puppet, and the tree or
bough, form a sort of bilingual inscription, the one being, so to
speak, a translation of the other. Here, therefore, there is no room
left for doubt that the spirit of the tree is actually represented
in human form. Thus in Bohemia, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, young
people throw a puppet called Death into the water; then the girls go
into the wood, cut down a young tree, and fasten to it a puppet
dressed in white clothes to look like a woman; with this tree and
puppet they go from house to house collecting gratuities and singing
songs with the refrain:


    "We carry Death out of the village,
     We bring Summer into the village."


Here, as we shall see later on, the "Summer" is the spirit of
vegetation returning or reviving in spring. In some parts of our own
country children go about asking for pence with some small
imitations of May-poles, and with a finely-dressed doll which they
call the Lady of the May. In these cases the tree and the puppet are
obviously regarded as equivalent.

At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called the Little May Rose, dressed in
white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and
ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a
song:


   "Little May Rose turn round three times,
    Let us look at you round and round!
    Rose of the May, come to the greenwood away,
    We will be merry all.
    So we go from the May to the roses."


In the course of the song a wish is expressed that those who give
nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear
no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn; the produce of
the year is supposed to depend on the gifts offered to these May
singers. Here and in the cases mentioned above, where children go
about with green boughs or garlands on May Day singing and
collecting money, the meaning is that with the spirit of vegetation
they bring plenty and good luck to the house, and they expect to be
paid for the service. In Russian Lithuania, on the first of May,
they used to set up a green tree before the village. Then the rustic
swains chose the prettiest girl, crowned her, swathed her in birch
branches and set her beside the May-tree, where they danced, sang,
and shouted "O May! O May!" In Brie (Isle de France) a May-tree is
erected in the midst of the village; its top is crowned with
flowers; lower down it is twined with leaves and twigs, still lower
with huge green branches. The girls dance round it, and at the same
time a lad wrapt in leaves and called Father May is led about. In
the small towns of the Franken Wald mountains in Northern Bavaria,
on the second of May, a _Walber_ tree is erected before a tavern,
and a man dances round it, enveloped in straw from head to foot in
such a way that the ears of corn unite above his head to form a
crown. He is called the _Walber,_ and used to be led in procession
through the streets, which were adorned with sprigs of birch.

Amongst the Slavs of Carinthia, on St. George's Day (the twentythird
of April), the young people deck with flowers and garlands a tree
which has been felled on the eve of the festival. The tree is then
carried in procession, accompanied with music and joyful
acclamations, the chief figure in the procession being the Green
George, a young fellow clad from head to foot in green birch
branches. At the close of the ceremonies the Green George, that is
an effigy of him, is thrown into the water. It is the aim of the lad
who acts Green George to step out of his leafy envelope and
substitute the effigy so adroitly that no one shall perceive the
change. In many places, however, the lad himself who plays the part
of Green George is ducked in a river or pond, with the express
intention of thus ensuring rain to make the fields and meadows green
in summer. In some places the cattle are crowned and driven from
their stalls to the accompaniment of a song:


   "Green George we bring,
    Green George we accompany,
    May he feed our herds well.
    If not, to the water with him."


Here we see that the same powers of making rain and fostering the
cattle, which are ascribed to the tree-spirit regarded as
incorporate in the tree, are also attributed to the tree-spirit
represented by a living man.

Among the gypsies of Transylvania and Roumania the festival of Green
George is the chief celebration of spring. Some of them keep it on
Easter Monday, others on St. George's Day (the twentythird of
April). On the eve of the festival a young willow tree is cut down,
adorned with garlands and leaves, and set up in the ground. Women
with child place one of their garments under the tree, and leave it
there over night; if next morning they find a leaf of the tree lying
on the garment, they know that their delivery will be easy. Sick and
old people go to the tree in the evening, spit on it thrice, and
say, "You will soon die, but let us live." Next morning the gypsies
gather about the willow. The chief figure of the festival is Green
George, a lad who is concealed from top to toe in green leaves and
blossoms. He throws a few handfuls of grass to the beasts of the
tribe, in order that they may have no lack of fodder throughout the
year. Then he takes three iron nails, which have lain for three days
and nights in water, and knocks them into the willow; after which he
pulls them out and flings them into a running stream to propitiate
the water-spirits. Finally, a pretence is made of throwing Green
George into the water, but in fact it is only a puppet made of
branches and leaves which is ducked in the stream. In this version
of the custom the powers of granting an easy delivery to women and
of communicating vital energy to the sick and old are clearly
ascribed to the willow; while Green George, the human double of the
tree, bestows food on the cattle, and further ensures the favour of
the water-spirits by putting them in indirect communication with the
tree.

Without citing more examples to the same effect, we may sum up the
results of the preceding pages in the words of Mannhardt: "The
customs quoted suffice to establish with certainty the conclusion
that in these spring processions the spirit of vegetation is often
represented both by the May-tree and in addition by a man dressed in
green leaves or flowers or by a girl similarly adorned. It is the
same spirit which animates the tree and is active in the inferior
plants and which we have recognised in the May-tree and the
Harvest-May. Quite consistently the spirit is also supposed to
manifest his presence in the first flower of spring and reveals
himself both in a girl representing a May-rose, and also, as giver
of harvest, in the person of the _Walber._ The procession with this
representative of the divinity was supposed to produce the same
beneficial effects on the fowls, the fruit-trees, and the crops as
the presence of the deity himself. In other words the mummer was
regarded not as an image but as an actual representative of the
spirit of vegetation; hence the wish expressed by the attendants on
the May-rose and the May-tree that those who refuse them gifts of
eggs, bacon, and so forth, may have no share in the blessings which
it is in the power of the itinerant spirit to bestow. We may
conclude that these begging processions with May-trees or May-boughs
from door to door ('bringing the May or the summer') had everywhere
originally a serious and, so to speak, sacramental significance;
people really believed that the god of growth was present unseen in
the bough; by the procession he was brought to each house to bestow
his blessing. The names May, Father May, May Lady, Queen of the May,
by which the anthropomorphic spirit of vegetation is often denoted,
show that the idea of the spirit of vegetation is blent with a
personification of the season at which his powers are most
strikingly manifested."

So far we have seen that the tree-spirit or the spirit of vegetation
in general is represented either in vegetable form alone, as by a
tree, bough, or flower; or in vegetable and human form
simultaneously, as by a tree, bough, or flower in combination with a
puppet or a living person. It remains to show that the
representation of him by a tree, bough, or flower is sometimes
entirely dropped, while the representation of him by a living person
remains. In this case the representative character of the person is
generally marked by dressing him or her in leaves or flowers;
sometimes, too, it is indicated by the name he or she bears.

Thus in some parts of Russia on St. George's Day (the twenty-third
of April) a youth is dressed out, like our Jack-in-the-Green, with
leaves and flowers. The Slovenes call him the Green George. Holding
a lighted torch in one hand and a pie in the other, he goes out to
the corn-fields, followed by girls singing appropriate songs. A
circle of brushwood is next lighted, in the middle of which is set
the pie. All who take part in the ceremony then sit down around the
fire and divide the pie among them. In this custom the Green George
dressed in leaves and flowers is plainly identical with the
similarly disguised Green George who is associated with a tree in
the Carinthian, Transylvanian, and Roumanian customs observed on the
same day. Again, we saw that in Russia at Whitsuntide a birch-tree
is dressed in woman's clothes and set up in the house. Clearly
equivalent to this is the custom observed on Whit-Monday by Russian
girls in the district of Pinsk. They choose the prettiest of their
number, envelop her in a mass of foliage taken from the birch-trees
and maples, and carry her about through the village.

In Ruhla as soon as the trees begin to grow green in spring, the
children assemble on a Sunday and go out into the woods, where they
choose one of their playmates to be the Little Leaf Man. They break
branches from the trees and twine them about the child till only his
shoes peep out from the leafy mantle. Holes are made in it for him
to see through, and two of the children lead the Little Leaf Man
that he may not stumble or fall. Singing and dancing they take him
from house to house, asking for gifts of food such as eggs, cream,
sausages, and cakes. Lastly, they sprinkle the Leaf Man with water
and feast on the food they have collected. In the Fricktal,
Switzerland, at Whitsuntide boys go out into a wood and swathe one
of their number in leafy boughs. He is called the Whitsuntide-lout,
and being mounted on horseback with a green branch in his hand he is
led back into the village. At the village-well a halt is called and
the leaf-clad lout is dismounted and ducked in the trough. Thereby
he acquires the right of sprinkling water on everybody, and he
exercises the right specially on girls and street urchins. The
urchins march before him in bands begging him to give them a
Whitsuntide wetting.

In England the best-known example of these leaf-clad mummers is the
Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who walks encased in a
pyramidal framework of wickerwork, which is covered with holly and
ivy, and surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. Thus arrayed
he dances on May Day at the head of a troop of chimney-sweeps, who
collect pence. In Fricktal a similar frame of basketwork is called
the Whitsuntide Basket. As soon as the trees begin to bud, a spot is
chosen in the wood, and here the village lads make the frame with
all secrecy, lest others should forestall them. Leafy branches are
twined round two hoops, one of which rests on the shoulders of the
wearer, the other encircles his claves; holes are made for his eyes
and mouth; and a large nosegay crowns the whole. In this guise he
appears suddenly in the village at the hour of vespers, preceded by
three boys blowing on horns made of willow bark. The great object of
his supporters is to set up the Whitsuntide Basket on the village
well, and to keep it and him there, despite the efforts of the lads
from neighbouring villages, who seek to carry off the Whitsuntide
Basket and set it up on their own well.

In the class of cases of which the foregoing are specimens it is
obvious that the leaf-clad person who is led about is equivalent to
the May-tree, May-bough, or May-doll, which is carried from house to
house by children begging. Both are representatives of the
beneficent spirit of vegetation, whose visit to the house is
recompensed by a present of money or food.

Often the leaf-clad person who represents the spirit of vegetation
is known as the king or the queen; thus, for example, he or she is
called the May King, Whitsuntide King, Queen of May, and so on.
These titles, as Mannhardt observes, imply that the spirit
incorporate in vegetation is a ruler, whose creative power extends
far and wide.

In a village near Salzwedel a May-tree is set up at Whitsuntide and
the boys race to it; he who reaches it first is king; a garland of
flowers is put round his neck and in his hand he carries a May-bush,
with which, as the procession moves along, he sweeps away the dew.
At each house they sing a song, wishing the inmates good luck,
referring to the "black cow in the stall milking white milk, black
hen on the nest laying white eggs," and begging a gift of eggs,
bacon, and so on. At the village of Ellgoth in Silesia a ceremony
called the King's Race is observed at Whitsuntide. A pole with a
cloth tied to it is set up in a meadow, and the young men ride past
it on horseback, each trying to snatch away the cloth as he gallops
by. The one who succeeds in carrying it off and dipping it in the
neighbouring Oder is proclaimed King. Here the pole is clearly a
substitute for a May-tree. In some villages of Brunswick at
Whitsuntide a May King is completely enveloped in a May-bush. In
some parts of Thüringen also they have a May King at Whitsuntide,
but he is dressed up rather differently. A frame of wood is made in
which a man can stand; it is completely covered with birch boughs
and is surmounted by a crown of birch and flowers, in which a bell
is fastened. This frame is placed in the wood and the May King gets
into it. The rest go out and look for him, and when they have found
him they lead him back into the village to the magistrate, the
clergyman, and others, who have to guess who is in the verdurous
frame. If they guess wrong, the May King rings his bell by shaking
his head, and a forfeit of beer or the like must be paid by the
unsuccessful guesser. At Wahrstedt the boys at Whitsuntide choose by
lot a king and a high-steward. The latter is completely concealed in
a May-bush, wears a wooden crown wreathen with flowers, and carries
a wooden sword. The king, on the other hand, is only distinguished
by a nosegay in his cap, and a reed, with a red ribbon tied to it,
in his hand. They beg for eggs from house to house, threatening
that, where none are given, none will be laid by the hens throughout
the year. In this custom the high-steward appears, for some reason,
to have usurped the insignia of the king. At Hildesheim five or six
young fellows go about on the afternoon of Whit-Monday cracking long
whips in measured time and collecting eggs from the houses. The
chief person of the band is the Leaf King, a lad swathed so
completely in birchen twigs that nothing of him can be seen but his
feet. A huge head-dress of birchen twigs adds to his apparent
stature. In his hand he carries a long crook, with which he tries to
catch stray dogs and children. In some parts of Bohemia on
Whit-Monday the young fellows disguise themselves in tall caps of
birch bark adorned with flowers. One of them is dressed as a king
and dragged on a sledge to the village green, and if on the way they
pass a pool the sledge is always overturned into it. Arrived at the
green they gather round the king; the crier jumps on a stone or
climbs up a tree and recites lampoons about each house and its
inmates. Afterwards the disguises of bark are stripped off and they
go about the village in holiday attire, carrying a May-tree and
begging. Cakes, eggs, and corn are sometimes given them. At
Grossvargula, near Langensalza, in the eighteenth century a Grass
King used to be led about in procession at Whitsuntide. He was
encased in a pyramid of poplar branches, the top of which was
adorned with a royal crown of branches and flowers. He rode on
horseback with the leafy pyramid over him, so that its lower end
touched the ground, and an opening was left in it only for his face.
Surrounded by a cavalcade of young fellows, he rode in procession to
the town hall, the parsonage, and so on, where they all got a drink
of beer. Then under the seven lindens of the neighbouring
Sommerberg, the Grass King was stripped of his green casing; the
crown was handed to the Mayor, and the branches were stuck in the
flax fields in order to make the flax grow tall. In this last trait
the fertilising influence ascribed to the representative of the
tree-spirit comes out clearly. In the neighbourhood of Pilsen
(Bohemia) a conical hut of green branches, without any door, is
erected at Whitsuntide in the midst of the village. To this hut
rides a troop of village lads with a king at their head. He wears a
sword at his side and a sugar-loaf hat of rushes on his head. In his
train are a judge, a crier, and a personage called the Frog-flayer
or Hangman. This last is a sort of ragged merryandrew, wearing a
rusty old sword and bestriding a sorry hack. On reaching the hut the
crier dismounts and goes round it looking for a door. Finding none,
he says, "Ah, this is perhaps an enchanted castle; the witches creep
through the leaves and need no door." At last he draws his sword and
hews his way into the hut, where there is a chair, on which he seats
himself and proceeds to criticise in rhyme the girls, farmers, and
farm-servants of the neighbourhood. When this is over, the
Frog-flayer steps forward and, after exhibiting a cage with frogs in
it, sets up a gallows on which he hangs the frogs in a row. In the
neighbourhood of Plas the ceremony differs in some points. The king
and his soldiers are completely clad in bark, adorned with flowers
and ribbons; they all carry swords and ride horses, which are gay
with green branches and flowers. While the village dames and girls
are being criticised at the arbour, a frog is secretly pinched and
poked by the crier till it quacks. Sentence of death is passed on
the frog by the king; the hangman beheads it and flings the bleeding
body among the spectators. Lastly, the king is driven from the hut
and pursued by the soldiers. The pinching and beheading of the frog
are doubtless, as Mannhardt observes, a rain-charm. We have seen
that some Indians of the Orinoco beat frogs for the express purpose
of producing rain, and that killing a frog is a European rain-charm.

Often the spirit of vegetation in spring is represented by a queen
instead of a king. In the neighbourhood of Libchowic (Bohemia), on
the fourth Sunday in Lent, girls dressed in white and wearing the
first spring flowers, as violets and daisies, in their hair, lead
about the village a girl who is called the Queen and is crowned with
flowers. During the procession, which is conducted with great
solemnity, none of the girls may stand still, but must keep whirling
round continually and singing. In every house the Queen announces
the arrival of spring and wishes the inmates good luck and
blessings, for which she receives presents. In German Hungary the
girls choose the prettiest girl to be their Whitsuntide Queen,
fasten a towering wreath on her brow, and carry her singing through
the streets. At every house they stop, sing old ballads, and receive
presents. In the south-east of Ireland on May Day the prettiest girl
used to be chosen Queen of the district for twelve months. She was
crowned with wild flowers; feasting, dancing, and rustic sports
followed, and were closed by a grand procession in the evening.
During her year of office she presided over rural gatherings of
young people at dances and merry-makings. If she married before next
May Day, her authority was at an end, but her successor was not
elected till that day came round. The May Queen is common In France
and familiar in England.

Again the spirit of vegetation is sometimes represented by a king
and queen, a lord and lady, or a bridegroom and bride. Here again
the parallelism holds between the anthropomorphic and the vegetable
representation of the tree-spirit, for we have seen above that trees
are sometimes married to each other. At Halford in South
Warwickshire the children go from house to house on May Day, walking
two and two in procession and headed by a King and Queen. Two boys
carry a May-pole some six or seven feet high, which is covered with
flowers and greenery. Fastened to it near the top are two cross-bars
at right angles to each other. These are also decked with flowers,
and from the ends of the bars hang hoops similarly adorned. At the
houses the children sing May songs and receive money, which is used
to provide tea for them at the schoolhouse in the afternoon. In a
Bohemian village near Königgrätz on Whit-Monday the children play
the king's game, at which a king and queen march about under a
canopy, the queen wearing a garland, and the youngest girl carrying
two wreaths on a plate behind them. They are attended by boys and
girls called groomsmen and bridesmaids, and they go from house to
house collecting gifts. A regular feature in the popular celebration
of Whitsuntide in Silesia used to be, and to some extent still is,
the contest for the kingship. This contest took various forms, but
the mark or goal was generally the May-tree or May-pole. Sometimes
the youth who succeeded in climbing the smooth pole and bringing
down the prize was proclaimed the Whitsuntide King and his
sweetheart the Whitsuntide Bride. Afterwards the king, carrying the
May-bush, repaired with the rest of the company to the alehouse,
where a dance and a feast ended the merry-making. Often the young
farmers and labourers raced on horseback to the May-pole, which was
adorned with flowers, ribbons, and a crown. He who first reached the
pole was the Whitsuntide King, and the rest had to obey his orders
for that day. The worst rider became the clown. At the May-tree all
dismounted and hoisted the king on their shoulders. He nimbly
swarmed up the pole and brought down the May-bush and the crown,
which had been fastened to the top. Meanwhile the clown hurried to
the alehouse and proceeded to bolt thirty rolls of bread and to swig
four quart bottles of brandy with the utmost possible despatch. He
was followed by the king, who bore the May-bush and crown at the
head of the company. If on their arrival the clown had already
disposed of the rolls and the brandy, and greeted the king with a
speech and a glass of beer, his score was paid by the king;
otherwise he had to settle it himself. After church time the stately
procession wound through the village. At the head of it rode the
king, decked with flowers and carrying the May-bush. Next came the
clown with his clothes turned inside out, a great flaxen beard on
his chain, and the Whitsuntide crown on his head. Two riders
disguised as guards followed. The procession drew up before every
farmyard; the two guards dismounted, shut the clown into the house,
and claimed a contribution from the housewife to buy soap with which
to wash the clown's beard. Custom allowed them to carry off any
victuals which were not under lock and key. Last of all they came to
the house in which the king's sweetheart lived. She was greeted as
Whitsuntide Queen and received suitable presents--to wit, a
many-coloured sash, a cloth, and an apron. The king got as a prize,
a vest, a neck-cloth, and so forth, and had the right of setting up
the May-bush or Whitsuntide-tree before his master's yard, where it
remained as an honourable token till the same day next year. Finally
the procession took its way to the tavern, where the king and queen
opened the dance. Sometimes the Whitsuntide King and Queen succeeded
to office in a different way. A man of straw, as large as life and
crowned with a red cap, was conveyed in a cart, between two men
armed and disguised as guards, to a place where a mock court was
waiting to try him. A great crowd followed the cart. After a formal
trial the straw man was condemned to death and fastened to a stake
on the execution ground. The young men with bandaged eyes tried to
stab him with a spear. He who succeeded became king and his
sweetheart queen. The straw man was known as the Goliath.

In a parish of Denmark it used to be the custom at Whitsuntide to
dress up a little girl as the Whitsun-bride and a little boy as her
groom. She was decked in all the finery of a grown-up bride, and
wore a crown of the freshest flowers of spring on her head. Her
groom was as gay as flowers, ribbons, and knots could make him. The
other children adorned themselves as best they could with the yellow
flowers of the trollius and caltha. Then they went in great state
from farmhouse to farmhouse, two little girls walking at the head of
the procession as bridesmaids, and six or eight outriders galloping
ahead on hobby-horses to announce their coming. Contributions of
eggs, butter, loaves, cream, coffee, sugar, and tallow-candles were
received and conveyed away in baskets. When they had made the round
of the farms, some of the farmers' wives helped to arrange the
wedding feast, and the children danced merrily in clogs on the
stamped clay floor till the sun rose and the birds began to sing.
All this is now a thing of the past. Only the old folks still
remember the little Whitsun-bride and her mimic pomp.

We have seen that in Sweden the ceremonies associated elsewhere with
May Day or Whitsuntide commonly take place at Midsummer. Accordingly
we find that in some parts of the Swedish province of Blekinge they
still choose a Midsummer's Bride, to whom the "church coronet" is
occasionally lent. The girl selects for herself a Bridegroom, and a
collection is made for the pair, who for the time being are looked
on as man and wife. The other youths also choose each his bride. A
similar ceremony seems to be still kept up in Norway.

In the neighbourhood of Briançon (Dauphiné) on May Day the lads wrap
up in green leaves a young fellow whose sweetheart has deserted him
or married another. He lies down on the ground and feigns to be
asleep. Then a girl who likes him, and would marry him, comes and
wakes him, and raising him up offers him her arm and a flag. So they
go to the alehouse, where the pair lead off the dancing. But they
must marry within the year, or they are treated as old bachelor and
old maid, and are debarred the company of the young folks. The lad
is called the Bridegroom of the month of May. In the alehouse he
puts off his garment of leaves, out of which, mixed with flowers,
his partner in the dance makes a nosegay, and wears it at her breast
next day, when he leads her again to the alehouse. Like this is a
Russian custom observed in the district of Nerechta on the Thursday
before Whitsunday. The girls go out into a birch-wood, wind a girdle
or band round a stately birch, twist its lower branches into a
wreath, and kiss each other in pairs through the wreath. The girls
who kiss through the wreath call each other gossips. Then one of the
girls steps forward, and mimicking a drunken man, flings herself on
the ground, rolls on the grass, and feigns to fall fast asleep.
Another girl wakens the pretended sleeper and kisses him; then the
whole bevy trips singing through the wood to twine garlands, which
they throw into the water. In the fate of the garlands floating on
the stream they read their own. Here the part of the sleeper was
probably at one time played by a lad. In these French and Russian
customs we have a forsaken bridegroom, in the following a forsaken
bride. On Shrove Tuesday the Slovenes of Oberkrain drag a straw
puppet with joyous cries up and down the village; then they throw it
into the water or burn it, and from the height of the flames they
judge of the abundance of the next harvest. The noisy crew is
followed by a female masker, who drags a great board by a string and
gives out that she is a forsaken bride.

Viewed in the light of what has gone before, the awakening of the
forsaken sleeper in these ceremonies probably represents the revival
of vegetation in spring. But it is not easy to assign their
respective parts to the forsaken bridegroom and to the girl who
wakes him from his slumber. Is the sleeper the leafless forest or
the bare earth of winter? Is the girl who awakens him the fresh
verdure or the genial sunshine of spring? It is hardly possible, on
the evidence before us, to answer these questions.

In the Highlands of Scotland the revival of vegetation in spring
used to be graphically represented on St. Bride's Day, the first of
February. Thus in the Hebrides "the mistress and servants of each
family take a sheaf of oats, and dress it up in women's apparel, put
it in a large basket and lay a wooden club by it, and this they call
Briid's bed; and then the mistress and servants cry three times,
'Briid is come, Briid is welcome.' This they do just before going to
bed, and when they rise in the morning they look among the ashes,
expecting to see the impression of Briid's club there; which if they
do, they reckon it a true presage of a good crop and prosperous
year, and the contrary they take as an ill omen." The same custom is
described by another witness thus: "Upon the night before Candlemas
it is usual to make a bed with corn and hay, over which some
blankets are laid, in a part of the house, near the door. When it is
ready, a person goes out and repeats three times, . . . 'Bridget,
Bridget, come in; thy bed is ready.' One or more candles are left
burning near it all night." Similarly in the Isle of Man "on the eve
of the first of February, a festival was formerly kept, called, in
the Manks language, _Laa'l Breeshey,_ in honour of the Irish lady
who went over to the Isle of Man to receive the veil from St.
Maughold. The custom was to gather a bundle of green rushes, and
standing with them in the hand on the threshold of the door, to
invite the holy Saint Bridget to come and lodge with them that
night. In the Manks language, the invitation ran thus: _'Brede,
Brede, tar gys my thie tar dyn thie ayms noght Foshil jee yn dorrys
da Brede, as lhig da Brede e heet staigh.'_ In English: 'Bridget,
Bridget, come to my house, come to my house to-night. Open the door
for Bridget, and let Bridget come in.' After these words were
repeated, the rushes were strewn on the floor by way of a carpet or
bed for St. Bridget. A custom very similar to this was also observed
in some of the Out-Isles of the ancient Kingdom of Man." In these
Manx and Highland ceremonies it is obvious that St. Bride, or St.
Bridget, is an old heathen goddess of fertility, disguised in a
threadbare Christian cloak. Probably she is no other than Brigit,
the Celtic goddess of fire and apparently of the crops.

Often the marriage of the spirit of vegetation in spring, though not
directly represented, is implied by naming the human representative
of the spirit, "the Bride," and dressing her in wedding attire. Thus
in some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide, while the boys go about
carrying a May-tree or leading a boy enveloped in leaves and
flowers, the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a
bride with a great nosegay in her hair. They go from house to house,
the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present and
tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they
will themselves have something the whole year through; but if they
give her nothing they will themselves have nothing. In some parts of
Westphalia two girls lead a flower-crowned girl called the
Whitsuntide Bride from door to door, singing a song in which they
ask for eggs.



XI. The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation

FROM THE PRECEDING examination of the spring and summer festivals of
Europe we may infer that our rude forefathers personified the powers
of vegetation as male and female, and attempted, on the principle of
homoeopathic or imitative magic, to quicken the growth of trees and
plants by representing the marriage of the sylvan deities in the
persons of a King and Queen of May, a Whitsun Bridegroom and Bride,
and so forth. Such representations were accordingly no mere symbolic
or allegorical dramas, pastoral plays designed to amuse or instruct
a rustic audience. They were charms intended to make the woods to
grow green, the fresh grass to sprout, the corn to shoot, and the
flowers to blow. And it was natural to suppose that the more closely
the mock marriage of the leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the
real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be
the charm. Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of
probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these
ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential
part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed
them the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without
the real union of the human sexes. At the present day it might
perhaps be vain to look in civilised Europe for customs of this sort
observed for the explicit purpose of promoting the growth of
vegetation. But ruder races in other parts of the world have
consciously employed the intercourse of the sexes as a means to
ensure the fruitfulness of the earth; and some rites which are
still, or were till lately, kept up in Europe can be reasonably
explained only as stunted relics of a similar practice. The
following facts will make this plain.

For four days before they committed the seed to the earth the
Pipiles of Central America kept apart from their wives "in order
that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions
to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been
appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment when the
first seeds were deposited in the ground." The use of their wives at
that time was indeed enjoined upon the people by the priests as a
religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the
seed. The only possible explanation of this custom seems to be that
the Indians confused the process by which human beings reproduce
their kind with the process by which plants discharge the same
function, and fancied that by resorting to the former they were
simultaneously forwarding the latter. In some parts of Java, at the
season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and
his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual
intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. In
the Leti, Sarmata, and some other groups of islands which lie
between the western end of New Guinea and the northern part of
Australia, the heathen population regard the sun as the male
principle by whom the earth or female prínciple is fertilised. They
call him Upu-lera or Mr. Sun, and represent him under the form of a
lamp made of coco-nut leaves, which may be seen hanging everywhere
in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a
large flat stone, which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the
heads of slain foes were and are still placed in some of the
islands. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Mr. Sun
comes down into the holy fig-tree to fertilise the earth, and to
facilitate his descent a ladder with seven rungs is considerately
placed at his disposal. It is set up under the tree and is adorned
with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarion heralds the
approach of the sun in the east. On this occasion pigs and dogs are
sacrificed in profusion; men and women alike indulge in a
saturnalia; and the mystic union of the sun and the earth is
dramatically represented in public, amid song and dance, by the real
union of the sexes under the tree. The object of the festival, we
are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of
cattle and children and riches from Grandfather Sun. They pray that
he may make every she-goat to cast two or three young, the people to
multiply, the dead pigs to be replaced by living pigs, the empty
rice-baskets to be filled, and so on. And to induce him to grant
their requests they offer him pork and rice and liquor, and invite
him to fall to. In the Babar Islands a special flag is hoisted at
this festival as a symbol of the creative energy of the sun; it is
of white cotton, about nine feet high, and consists of the figure of
a man in an appropriate attitude. It would be unjust to treat these
orgies as a mere outburst of unbridled passion; no doubt they are
deliberately and solemnly organised as essential to the fertility of
the earth and the welfare of man.

The same means which are thus adopted to stimulate the growth of the
crops are naturally employed to ensure the fruitfulness of trees. In
some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation
indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to
the plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise the trees
precisely as they would impregnate women, while at the same time
they call out for "More cloves!" This is supposed to make the trees
bear fruit more abundantly.

The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate
relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of
the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away,
because she is supposed to prevent her husband's garden from bearing
fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of
extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are
believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of
increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish
them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the
twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is to
transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains.
The mother lies down on her back in the thick grass near the house
and places a flower of the plantain between her legs; then her
husband comes and knocks the flower away with his genital member.
Further, the parents go through the country performing dances in the
gardens of favoured friends, apparently for the purpose of causing
the plantain-trees to bear fruit more abundantly.

In various parts of Europe customs have prevailed both at spring and
harvest which are clearly based on the same crude notion that the
relation of the human sexes to each other can be so used as to
quicken the growth of plants. For example, in the Ukraine on St.
George's Day (the twenty-third of April) the priest in his robes,
attended by his acolytes, goes out to the fields of the village,
where the crops are beginning to show green above the ground, and
blesses them. After that the young married people lie down in
couples on the sown fields and roll several times over on them, in
the belief that this will promote the growth of the crops. In some
parts of Russia the priest himself is rolled by women over the
sprouting crop, and that without regard to the mud and holes which
he may encounter in his beneficent progress. If the shepherd resists
or remonstrates, his flock murmurs, "Little Father, you do not
really wish us well, you do not wish us to have corn, although you
do wish to live on our corn." In some parts of Germany at harvest
the men and women, who have reaped the corn, roll together on the
field. This again is probably a mitigation of an older and ruder
custom designed to impart fertility to the fields by methods like
those resorted to by the Pipiles of Central America long ago and by
the cultivators of rice in Java at the present time.

To the student who cares to track the devious course of the human
mind in its gropings after truth, it is of some interest to observe
that the same theoretical belief in the sympathetic influence of the
sexes on vegetation, which has led some peoples to indulge their
passions as a means of fertilising the earth, has led others to seek
the same end by directly opposite means. From the moment that they
sowed the maize till the time that they reaped it, the Indians of
Nicaragua lived chastely, keeping apart from their wives and
sleeping in a separate place. They ate no salt, and drank neither
cocoa nor _chicha,_ the fermented liquor made from maize; in short
the season was for them, as the Spanish historian observes, a time
of abstinence. To this day some of the Indian tribes of Central
America practise continence for the purpose of thereby promoting the
growth of the crops. Thus we are told that before sowing the maize
the Kekchi Indians sleep apart from their wives, and eat no flesh
for five days, while among the Lanquineros and Cajaboneros the
period of abstinence from these carnal pleasures extends to thirteen
days. So amongst some of the Germans of Transylvania it is a rule
that no man may sleep with his wife during the whole of the time
that he is engaged in sowing his fields. The same rule is observed
at Kalotaszeg in Hungary; the people think that if the custom were
not observed the corn would be mildewed. Similarly a Central
Australian headman of the Kaitish tribe strictly abstains from
marital relations with his wife all the time that he is performing
magical ceremonies to make the grass grow; for he believes that a
breach of this rule would prevent the grass seed from sprouting
properly. In some of the Melanesian islands, when the yam vines are
being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never approach
their wives; should they enter the garden after breaking this rule
of continence the fruits of the garden would be spoilt.

If we ask why it is that similar beliefs should logically lead,
among different peoples, to such opposite modes of conduct as strict
chastity and more or less open debauchery, the reason, as it
presents itself to the primitive mind, is perhaps not very far to
seek. If rude man identifies himself, in a manner, with nature; if
he fails to distinguish the impulses and processes in himself from
the methods which nature adopts to ensure the reproduction of plants
and animals, he may leap to one of two conclusions. Either he may
infer that by yielding to his appetites he will thereby assist in
the multiplication of plants and animals; or he may imagine that the
vigour which he refuses to expend in reproducing his own kind, will
form as it were a store of energy whereby other creatures, whether
vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in propagating their
species. Thus from the same crude philosophy, the same primitive
notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different
channels a rule either of profligacy or of asceticism.

To readers bred in religion which is saturated with the ascetic
idealism of the East, the explanation which I have given of the rule
of continence observed under certain circumstances by rude or savage
peoples may seem far-fetched and improbable. They may think that
moral purity, which is so intimately associated in their minds with
the observance of such a rule, furnishes a sufficient explanation of
it; they may hold with Milton that chastity in itself is a noble
virtue, and that the restraint which it imposes on one of the
strongest impulses of our animal nature marks out those who can
submit to it as men raised above the common herd, and therefore
worthy to receive the seal of the divine approbation. However
natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign
and indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on occasion
the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no ethereal
aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some ulterior yet
perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared
to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is
or may be so, the examples I have cited are amply sufficient to
prove. They show that where the instinct of self-preservation, which
manifests itself chiefly in the search for food, conflicts or
appears to conflict with the instinct which conduces to the
propagation of the species, the former instinct, as the primary and
more fundamental, is capable of overmastering the latter. In short,
the savage is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake
of food. Another object for the sake of which he consents to
exercise the same self-restraint is victory in war. Not only the
warrior in the field but his friends at home will often bridle their
sensual appetites from a belief that by so doing they will the more
easily overcome their enemies. The fallacy of such a belief, like
the belief that the chastity of the sower conduces to the growth of
the seed, is plain enough to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint
which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have
imposed on mankind, has not been without its utility in bracing and
strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in
the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the
present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of
ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of
satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and
stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is
reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life
itself for the sake of keeping or winning for others, perhaps in
distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth.



XII. The Sacred Marriage



1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility

WE have seen that according to a widespread belief, which is not
without a foundation in fact, plants reproduce their kinds through
the sexual union of male and female elements, and that on the
principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic this reproduction is
supposed to be stimulated by the real or mock marriage of men and
women, who masquerade for the time being as spirits of vegetation.
Such magical dramas have played a great part in the popular
festivals of Europe, and based as they are on a very crude
conception of natural law, it is clear that they must have been
handed down from a remote antiquity. We shall hardly, therefore, err
in assuming that they date from a time when the forefathers of the
civilised nations of Europe were still barbarians, herding their
cattle and cultivating patches of corn in the clearings of the vast
forests, which then covered the greater part of the continent, from
the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean. But if these old spells and
enchantments for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and
flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape
of pastoral plays and popular merry-makings, is it not reasonable to
suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two
thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of antiquity? Or, to
put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the
ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day,
Whitsuntide, and Midsummer celebrations, with this difference, that
in those days the ceremonies had not yet dwindled into mere shows
and pageants, but were still religious or magical rites, in which
the actors consciously supported the high parts of gods and
goddesses? Now in the first chapter of this book we found reason to
believe that the priest who bore the title of King of the Wood at
Nemi had for his mate the goddess of the grove, Diana herself. May
not he and she, as King and Queen of the Wood, have been serious
counterparts of the merry mummers who play the King and Queen of
May, the Whitsuntide Bridegroom and Bride in modern Europe? and may
not their union have been yearly celebrated in a _theogamy_ or
divine marriage? Such dramatic weddings of gods and goddesses, as we
shall see presently, were carried out as solemn religious rites in
many parts of the ancient world; hence there is no intrinsic
improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may
have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this sort. Direct
evidence that it was so there is none, but analogy pleads in favour
of the view, as I shall now endeavour to show.

Diana was essentially a goddess of the woodlands, as Ceres was a
goddess of the corn and Bacchus a god of the vine. Her sanctuaries
were commonly in groves, indeed every grove was sacred to her, and
she is often associated with the forest god Silvanus in dedications.
But whatever her origin may have been, Diana was not always a mere
goddess of trees. Like her Greek sister Artemis, she appears to have
developed into a personification of the teeming life of nature, both
animal and vegetable. As mistress of the greenwood she would
naturally be thought to own the beasts, whether wild or tame, that
ranged through it, lurking for their prey in its gloomy depths,
munching the fresh leaves and shoots among the boughs, or cropping
the herbage in the open glades and dells. Thus she might come to be
the patron goddess both of hunters and herdsmen, just as Silvanus
was the god not only of woods, but of cattle. Similarly in Finland
the wild beasts of the forest were regarded as the herds of the
woodland god Tapio and of his stately and beautiful wife. No man
might slay one of these animals without the gracious permission of
their divine owners. Hence the hunter prayed to the sylvan deities,
and vowed rich offerings to them if they would drive the game across
his path. And cattle also seem to have enjoyed the protection of
those spirits of the woods, both when they were in their stalls and
while they strayed in the forest. Before the Gayos of Sumatra hunt
deer, wild goats, or wild pigs with hounds in the woods, they deem
it necessary to obtain the leave of the unseen Lord of the forest.
This is done according to a prescribed form by a man who has special
skill in woodcraft. He lays down a quid of betel before a stake
which is cut in a particular way to represent the Lord of the Wood,
and having done so he prays to the spirit to signify his consent or
refusal. In his treatise on hunting, Arrian tells us that the Celts
used to offer an annual sacrifice to Artemis on her birthday,
purchasing the sacrificial victim with the fines which they had paid
into her treasury for every fox, hare, and roe that they had killed
in the course of the year. The custom clearly implied that the wild
beasts belonged to the goddess, and that she must be compensated for
their slaughter.

But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress of
woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers; conceived as
the moon, and especially, it would seem, as the yellow harvest moon,
she filled the farmer's grange with goodly fruits, and heard the
prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have
seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of childbirth, who
bestowed offspring on men and women. Thus Diana, like the Greek
Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified, may be described
as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular. We
need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine
she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol
of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant
fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law,
attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest
had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the
pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest
is commonly supposed to cause a dearth; hence it would be meet that
atonement for the offence should be made to the goddess of
fertility.

Now on the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself be
fertile, it behoved Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if the
testimony of Servius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had his
representative, or perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King of the
Wood at Nemi. The aim of their union would be to promote the
fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; and it might
naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained
if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts of the
divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or
by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in
the grove at Nemi; but our knowledge of the Arician ritual is so
scanty that the want of information on this head can hardly count as
a fatal objection to the theory. That theory, in the absence of
direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar
customs practised elsewhere. Some modern examples of such customs,
more or less degenerate, were described in the last chapter. Here we
shall consider their ancient counterparts.



2. The Marriage of the Gods

AT BABYLON the imposing sanctuary of Bel rose like a pyramid above
the city in a series of eight towers or stories, planted one on the
top of the other. On the highest tower, reached by an ascent which
wound about all the rest, there stood a spacious temple, and in the
temple a great bed, magnificently draped and cushioned, with a
golden table beside it. In the temple no image was to be seen, and
no human being passed the night there, save a single woman, whom,
according to the Chaldean priests, the god chose from among all the
women of Babylon. They said that the deity himself came into the
temple at night and slept in the great bed; and the woman, as a
consort of the god, might have no intercourse with mortal man.

At Thebes in Egypt a woman slept in the temple of Ammon as the
consort of the god, and, like the human wife of Bel at Babylon, she
was said to have no commerce with a man. In Egyptian texts she is
often mentioned as "the divine consort," and usually she was no less
a personage than the Queen of Egypt herself. For, according to the
Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten by the god Ammon,
who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king, and in
that disguise had intercourse with the queen. The divine procreation
is carved and painted in great detail on the walls of two of the
oldest temples in Egypt, those of Deir el Bahari and Luxor; and the
inscriptions attached to the paintings leave no doubt as to the
meaning of the scenes.

At Athens the god of the vine, Dionysus, was annually married to the
Queen, and it appears that the consummation of the divine union, as
well as the espousals, was enacted at the ceremony; but whether the
part of the god was played by a man or an image we do not know. We
learn from Aristotle that the ceremony took place in the old
official residence of the King, known as the Cattle-stall, which
stood near the Prytaneum or Town-hall on the north-eastern slope of
the Acropolis. The object of the marriage can hardly have been any
other than that of ensuring the fertility of the vines and other
fruit-trees of which Dionysus was the god. Thus both in form and in
meaning the ceremony would answer to the nuptials of the King and
Queen of May.

In the great mysteries solemnised at Eleusis in the month of
September the union of the sky-god Zeus with the corn-goddess
Demeter appears to have been represented by the union of the
hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of god
and goddess. But their intercourse was only dramatic or symbolical,
for the hierophant had temporarily deprived himself of his virility
by an application of hemlock. The torches having been extinguished,
the pair descended into a murky place, while the throng of
worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic
congress, on which they believed their own salvation to depend.
After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of light
silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the fruit
of the divine marriage. Then in a loud voice he proclaimed, "Queen
Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos," by which he meant,
"The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty." The corn-mother in
fact had given birth to her child, the corn, and her travail-pangs
were enacted in the sacred drama. This revelation of the reaped corn
appears to have been the crowning act of the mysteries. Thus through
the glamour shed round these rites by the poetry and philosophy of
later ages there still looms, like a distant landscape through a
sunlit haze, a simple rustic festival designed to cover the wide
Eleusinian plain with a plenteous harvest by wedding the goddess of
the corn to the sky-god, who fertilised the bare earth with genial
showers. Every few years the people of Plataea, in Boeotia, held a
festival called the Little Daedala, at which they felled an oak-tree
in an ancient oak forest. Out of the tree they carved an image, and
having dressed it as a bride, they set it on a bullock-cart with a
bridesmaid beside it. The image seems then to have been drawn to the
bank of the river Asopus and back to the town, attended by a piping
and dancing crowd. Every sixty years the festival of the Great
Daedala was celebrated by all the people of Boeotia; and at it all
the images, fourteen in number, which had accumulated at the lesser
festivals, were dragged on wains in procession to the river Asopus
and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron, where they were burnt on a
great pyre. The story told to explain the festivals suggests that
they celebrated the marriage of Zeus to Hera, represented by the
oaken image in bridal array. In Sweden every year a life-size image
of Frey, the god of fertility, both animal and vegetable, was drawn
about the country in a waggon attended by a beautiful girl who was
called the god's wife. She acted also as his priestess in his great
temple at Upsala. Wherever the waggon came with the image of the god
and his blooming young bride, the people crowded to meet them and
offered sacrifices for a fruitful year.

Thus the custom of marrying gods either to images or to human beings
was widespread among the nations of antiquity. The ideas on which
such a custom is based are too crude to allow us to doubt that the
civilised Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks inherited it from their
barbarous or savage forefathers. This presumption is strengthened
when we find rites of a similar kind in vogue among the lower races.
Thus, for example, we are told that once upon a time the Wotyaks of
the Malmyz district in Russia were distressed by a series of bad
harvests. They did not know what to do, but at last concluded that
their powerful but mischievious god Keremet must be angry at being
unmarried. So a deputation of elders visited the Wotyaks of Cura and
came to an understanding with them on the subject. Then they
returned home, laid in a large stock of brandy, and having made
ready a gaily decked waggon and horses, they drove in procession
with bells ringing, as they do when they are fetching home a bride,
to the sacred grove at Cura. There they ate and drank merrily all
night, and next morning they cut a square piece of turf in the grove
and took it home with them. After that, though it fared well with
the people of Malmyz, it fared ill with the people of Cura; for in
Malmyz the bread was good, but in Cura it was bad. Hence the men of
Cura who had consented to the marriage were blamed and roughly
handled by their indignant fellow-villagers. "What they meant by
this marriage ceremony," says the writer who reports it, "it is not
easy to imagine. Perhaps, as Bechterew thinks, they meant to marry
Keremet to the kindly and fruitful Mukylcin, the Earth-wife, in
order that she might influence him for good." When wells are dug in
Bengal, a wooden image of a god is made and married to the goddess
of water.

Often the bride destined for the god is not a log or a cloud, but a
living woman of flesh and blood. The Indians of a village in Peru
have been known to marry a beautiful girl, about fourteen years of
age, to a stone shaped like a human being, which they regarded as a
god (_huaca_). All the villagers took part in the marriage ceremony,
which lasted three days, and was attended with much revelry. The
girl thereafter remained a virgin and sacrificed to the idol for the
people. They showed her the utmost reverence and deemed her divine.
Every year about the middle of March, when the season for fishing
with the dragnet began, the Algonquins and Hurons married their nets
to two young girls, aged six or seven. At the wedding feast the net
was placed between the two maidens, and was exhorted to take courage
and catch many fish. The reason for choosing the brides so young was
to make sure that they were virgins. The origin of the custom is
said to have been this. One year, when the fishing season came
round, the Algonquins cast their nets as usual, but took nothing.
Surprised at their want of success, they did not know what to make
of it, till the soul or genius (_oki_) of the net appeared to them
in the likeness of a tall well-built man, who said to them in a
great passion, "I have lost my wife and I cannot find one who has
known no other man but me; that is why you do not succeed, and why
you never will succeed till you give me satisfaction on this head."
So the Algonquins held a council and resolved to appease the spirit
of the net by marrying him to two such very young girls that he
could have no ground of complaint on that score for the future. They
did so, and the fishing turned out all that could be wished. The
thing got wind among their neighbours the Hurons, and they adopted
the custom. A share of the catch was always given to the families of
the two girls who acted as brides of the net for the year.

The Oraons of Bengal worship the Earth as a goddess, and annually
celebrate her marriage with the Sun-god Dharme¯ at the time when the
_sa¯l_ tree is in blossom. The ceremony is as follows. All bathe,
then the men repair to the sacred grove (_sarna_), while the women
assemble at the house of the village priest. After sacrificing some
fowls to the Sun-god and the demon of the grove, the men eat and
drink. "The priest is then carried back to the village on the
shoulders of a strong man. Near the village the women meet the men
and wash their feet. With beating of drums and singing, dancing, and
jumping, all proceed to the priest's house, which has been decorated
with leaves and flowers. Then the usual form of marriage is
performed between the priest and his wife, symbolising the supposed
union between Sun and Earth. After the ceremony all eat and drink
and make merry; they dance and sing obscene songs, and finally
indulge in the vilest orgies. The object is to move the mother earth
to become fruitful." Thus the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth,
personated by the priest and his wife, is celebrated as a charm to
ensure the fertility of the ground; and for the same purpose, on the
principle of homoeopathic magic, the people indulge in licentious
orgy.

It deserves to be remarked that the supernatural being to whom women
are married is often a god or spirit of water. Thus Mukasa, the god
of the Victoria Nyanza lake, who was propitiated by the Baganda
every time they undertook a long voyage, had virgins provided for
him to serve as his wives. Like the Vestals they were bound to
chastity, but unlike the Vestals they seem to have been often
unfaithful. The custom lasted until Mwanga was converted to
Christianity. The Akikuyu of British East Africa worship the snake
of a certain river, and at intervals of several years they marry the
snake-god to women, but especially to young girls. For this purpose
huts are built by order of the medicine-men, who there consummate
the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees. If the girls
do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers,
they are seized and dragged thither to the embraces of the deity.
The offspring of these mystic unions appears to be fathered on God
(_ngai_); certainly there are children among the Akikuyu who pass
for children of God. It is said that once, when the inhabitants of
Cayeli in Buru--an East Indian island--were threatened with
destruction by a swarm of crocodiles, they ascribed the misfortune
to a passion which the prince of the crocodiles had conceived for a
certain girl. Accordingly, they compelled the damsel's father to
dress her in bridal array and deliver her over to the clutches of
her crocodile lover.

A usage of the same sort is reported to have prevailed in the
Maldive Islands before the conversion of the inhabitants to Islam.
The famous Arab traveller Ibn Batutah has described the custom and
the manner in which it came to an end. He was assured by several
trustworthy natives, whose names he gives, that when the people of
the islands were idolaters there appeared to them every month an
evil spirit among the jinn, who came from across the sea in the
likeness of a ship full of burning lamps. The wont of the
inhabitants, as soon as they perceived him, was to take a young
virgin, and, having adorned her, to lead her to a heathen temple
that stood on the shore, with a window looking out to sea. There
they left the damsel for the night, and when they came back in the
morning they found her a maid no more, and dead. Every month they
drew lots, and he upon whom the lot fell gave up his daughter to the
jinnee of the sea. The last of the maidens thus offered to the demon
was rescued by a pious Berber, who by reciting the Koran succeeded
in driving the jinnee back into the sea.

Ibn Batutah's narrative of the demon lover and his mortal brides
closely resembles a well-known type of folk-tale, of which versions
have been found from Japan and Annam in the East to Senegambia,
Scandinavia, and Scotland in the West. The story varies in details
from people to people, but as commonly told it runs thus. A certain
country is infested by a many-headed serpent, dragon, or other
monster, which would destroy the whole people if a human victim,
generally a virgin, were not delivered up to him periodically. Many
victims have perished, and at last it has fallen to the lot of the
king's own daughter to be sacrificed. She is exposed to the monster,
but the hero of the tale, generally a young man of humble birth,
interposes in her behalf, slays the monster, and receives the hand
of the princess as his reward. In many of the tales the monster, who
is sometimes described as a serpent, inhabits the water of a sea, a
lake, or a fountain. In other versions he is a serpent or dragon who
takes possession of the springs of water, and only allows the water
to flow or the people to make use of it on condition of receiving a
human victim.

It would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as pure
inventions of the story-teller. Rather we may suppose that they
reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women to be the wives
of waterspirits, who are very often conceived as great serpents or
dragons.




XIII. The Kings of Rome and Alba



1. Numa and Egeria

FROM THE FOREGOING survey of custom and legend we may infer that the
sacred marriage of the powers both of vegetation and of water has
been celebrated by many peoples for the sake of promoting the
fertility of the earth, on which the life of animals and men
ultimately depends, and that in such rites the part of the divine
bridegroom or bride is often sustained by a man or woman. The
evidence may, therefore, lend some countenance to the conjecture
that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers of vegetation and
of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods,
tumbling cascades, and glassy lake, a marriage like that of our King
and Queen of May was annually celebrated between the mortal King of
the Wood and the immortal Queen of the Wood, Diana. In this
connexion an important figure in the grove was the water-nymph
Egeria, who was worshipped by pregnant women because she, like
Diana, could grant them an easy delivery. From this it seems fairly
safe to conclude that, like many other springs, the water of Egeria
was credited with a power of facilitating conception as well as
delivery. The votive offerings found on the spot, which clearly
refer to the begetting of children, may possibly have been dedicated
to Egeria rather than to Diana, or perhaps we should rather say that
the water-nymph Egeria is only another form of the great
nature-goddess Diana herself, the mistress of sounding rivers as
well as of umbrageous woods, who had her home by the lake and her
mirror in its calm waters, and whose Greek counterpart Artemis loved
to haunt meres and springs. The identification of Egeria with Diana
is confirmed by a statement of Plutarch that Egeria was one of the
oak-nymphs whom the Romans believed to preside over every green
oak-grove; for, while Diana was a goddess of the woodlands in
general, she appears to have been intimately associated with oaks in
particular, especially at her sacred grove of Nemi. Perhaps, then,
Egeria was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a
sacred oak. Such a spring is said to have gushed from the foot of
the great oak at Dodona, and from its murmurous flow the priestess
drew oracles. Among the Greeks a draught of water from certain
sacred springs or wells was supposed to confer prophetic powers.
This would explain the more than mortal wisdom with which, according
to tradition, Egeria inspired her royal husband or lover Numa. When
we remember how very often in early society the king is held
responsible for the fall of rain and the fruitfulness of the earth,
it seems hardly rash to conjecture that in the legend of the
nuptials of Numa and Egeria we have a reminiscence of a sacred
marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a
goddess of vegetation and water for the purpose of enabling him to
discharge his divine or magical functions. In such a rite the part
of the goddess might be played either by an image or a woman, and if
by a woman, probably by the Queen. If there is any truth in this
conjecture, we may suppose that the King and Queen of Rome
masqueraded as god and goddess at their marriage, exactly as the
King and Queen of Egypt appear to have done. The legend of Numa and
Egeria points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene
of the nuptial union, which, like the marriage of the King and Queen
of May, or of the vine-god and the Queen of Athens, may have been
annually celebrated as a charm to ensure the fertility not only of
the earth but of man and beast. Now, according to some accounts, the
scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi,
and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in
that same grove the King of the Wood was wedded to Diana. The
convergence of the two distinct lines of enquiry suggests that the
legendary union of the Roman king with Egeria may have been a
reflection or duplicate of the union of the King of the Wood with
Egeria or her double Diana. This does not imply that the Roman kings
ever served as Kings of the Wood in the Arician grove, but only that
they may originally have been invested with a sacred character of
the same general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To
be more explicit, it is possible that they reigned, not by right of
birth, but in virtue of their supposed divinity as representatives
or embodiments of a god, and that as such they mated with a goddess,
and had to prove their fitness from time to time to discharge their
divine functions by engaging in a severe bodily struggle, which may
often have proved fatal to them, leaving the crown to their
victorious adversary. Our knowledge of the Roman kingship is far too
scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these propositions with
confidence; but at least there are some scattered hints or
indications of a similarity in all these respects between the
priests of Nemi and the kings of Rome, or perhaps rather between
their remote predecessors in the dark ages which preceded the dawn
of legend.



2. The King as Jupiter

IN THE FIRST place, then, it would seem that the Roman king
personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. For down to
imperial times victorious generals celebrating a triumph, and
magistrates presiding at the games in the Circus, wore the costume
of Jupiter, which was borrowed for the occasion from his great
temple on the Capitol; and it has been held with a high degree of
probability both by ancients and moderns that in so doing they
copied the traditionary attire and insignia of the Roman kings. They
rode a chariot drawn by four laurel-crowned horses through the city,
where every one else went on foot: they wore purple robes
embroidered or spangled with gold: in the right hand they bore a
branch of laurel, and in the left hand an ivory sceptre topped with
an eagle: a wreath of laurel crowned their brows: their face was
reddened with vermilion; and over their head a slave held a heavy
crown of massy gold fashioned in the likeness of oak leaves. In this
attire the assimilation of the man to the god comes out above all in
the eagle-topped sceptre, the oaken crown, and the reddened face.
For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree, and
the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the
Capitol was in like manner regularly dyed red on festivals; indeed,
so important was it deemed to keep the divine features properly
rouged that one of the first duties of the censors was to contract
for having this done. As the triumphal procession always ended in
the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, it was peculiarly appropriate
that the head of the victor should be graced by a crown of oak
leaves, for not only was every oak consecrated to Jupiter, but the
Capitoline temple of the god was said to have been built by Romulus
beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which the king
attached the spoils won by him from the enemy's general in battle.
We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to Capitoline
Jupiter; a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god's
special emblem.

According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome was
founded by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on the slope of
the Alban hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna. Hence if the
Roman kings claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter,
the god of the sky, of the thunder, and of the oak, it is natural to
suppose that the kings of Alba, from whom the founder of Rome traced
his descent, may have set up the same claim before them. Now the
Alban dynasty bore the name of Silvii or Wood, and it can hardly be
without significance that in the vision of the historic glories of
Rome revealed to Aeneas in the underworld, Virgil, an antiquary as
well as a poet, should represent all the line of Silvii as crowned
with oak. A chaplet of oak leaves would thus seem to have been part
of the insignia of the old kings of Alba Longa as of their
successors the kings of Rome; in both cases it marked the monarch as
the human representative of the oak-god. The Roman annals record
that one of the kings of Alba, Romulus, Remulus, or Amulius Silvius
by name, set up for being a god in his own person, the equal or
superior of Jupiter. To support his pretensions and overawe his
subjects, he constructed machines whereby he mimicked the clap of
thunder and the flash of lightning. Diodorus relates that in the
season of fruitage, when thunder is loud and frequent, the king
commanded his soldiers to drown the roar of heaven's artillery by
clashing their swords against their shields. But he paid the penalty
of his impiety, for he perished, he and his house, struck by a
thunderbolt in the midst of a dreadful storm. Swollen by the rain,
the Alban lake rose in flood and drowned his palace. But still, says
an ancient historian, when the water is low and the surface
unruffled by a breeze, you may see the ruins of the palace at the
bottom of the clear lake. Taken along with the similar story of
Salmoneus, king of Elis, this legend points to a real custom
observed by the early kings of Greece and Italy, who, like their
fellows in Africa down to modern times, may have been expected to
produce rain and thunder for the good of the crops. The priestly
king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning
from the sky. Mock thunder, we know, has been made by various
peoples as a rain-charm in modern times; why should it not have been
made by kings in antiquity?

Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the
oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have copied
him in his character of a weather-god by pretending to make thunder
and lightning. And if they did so, it is probable that, like Jupiter
in heaven and many kings on earth, they also acted as public
rain-makers, wringing showers from the dark sky by their
enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the refreshing
moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by means of a
sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed part of the
ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the clouds the
flashing lightning and the dripping rain. And who so well fitted to
perform the ceremony as the king, the living representative of the
sky-god?

If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors the
kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great Latian
Jupiter, who had his seat above the city on the summit of the Alban
Mountain. Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty, was said
to have been changed into Latian Jupiter after vanishing from the
world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old Latin
kings. The sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain was the
religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba was its political
capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient rival.
Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever erected to
Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and thunder he
appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in the open
air. The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose the old
garden of the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part of the
sacred precinct which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome,
marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin League. The
god's oldest sanctuary on this airy mountain-top was a grove; and
bearing in mind not merely the special consecration of the oak to
Jupiter, but also the traditional oak crown of the Alban kings and
the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter at Rome, we may suppose that
the trees in the grove were oaks. We know that in antiquity Mount
Algidus, an outlying group of the Alban hills, was covered with dark
forests of oak; and among the tribes who belonged to the Latin
League in the earliest days, and were entitled to share the flesh of
the white bull sacrificed on the Alban Mount, there was one whose
members styled themselves the Men of the Oak, doubtless on account
of the woods among which they dwelt.

But we should err if we pictured to ourselves the country as covered
in historical times with an unbroken forest of oaks. Theophrastus
has left us a description of the woods of Latium as they were in the
fourth century before Christ. He says: "The land of the Latins is
all moist. The plains produce laurels, myrtles, and wonderful
beeches; for they fell trees of such a size that a single stem
suffices for the keel of a Tyrrhenian ship. Pines and firs grow in
the mountains. What they call the land of Circe is a lofty headland
thickly wooded with oak, myrtle, and luxuriant laurels. The natives
say that Circe dwelt there, and they show the grave of Elpenor, from
which grow myrtles such as wreaths are made of, whereas the other
myrtle-trees are tall." Thus the prospect from the top of the Alban
Mount in the early days of Rome must have been very different in
some respects from what it is to-day. The purple Apennines, indeed,
in their eternal calm on the one hand, and the shining Mediterranean
in its eternal unrest on the other, no doubt looked then much as
they look now, whether bathed in sunshine, or chequered by the
fleeting shadows of clouds; but instead of the desolate brown
expanse of the fever-stricken Campagna, spanned by its long lines of
ruined aqueducts, like the broken arches of the bridge in the vision
of Mirza, the eye must have ranged over woodlands that stretched
away, mile after mile, on all sides, till their varied hues of green
or autumnal scarlet and gold melted insensibly into the blue of the
distant mountains and sea.

But Jupiter did not reign alone on the top of his holy mountain. He
had his consort with him, the goddess Juno, who was worshipped here
under the same title, Moneta, as on the Capitol at Rome. As the oak
crown was sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol, so we may
suppose it was on the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline worship
was derived. Thus the oak-god would have his oak-goddess in the
sacred oak grove. So at Dodona the oak-god Zeus was coupled with
Dione, whose very name is only a dialectically different form of
Juno; and so on the top of Mount Cithaeron, as we have seen, he
appears to have been periodically wedded to an oaken image of Hera.
It is probable, though it cannot be positively proved, that the
sacred marriage of Jupiter and Juno was annually celebrated by all
the peoples of the Latin stock in the month which they named after
the goddess, the midsummer month of June.

If at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred marriage
of Jupiter and Juno, as the Greeks commonly celebrated the
corresponding marriage of Zeus and Hera, we may suppose that under
the Republic the ceremony was either performed over images of the
divine pair or acted by the Flamen Dialis and his wife the
Flaminica. For the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Jove; indeed,
ancient and modern writers have regarded him, with much probability,
as a living image of Jupiter, a human embodiment of the sky-god. In
earlier times the Roman king, as representative of Jupiter, would
naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom at the sacred
marriage, while his queen would figure as the heavenly bride, just
as in Egypt the king and queen masqueraded in the character of
deities, and as at Athens the queen annually wedded the vine-god
Dionysus. That the Roman king and queen should act the parts of
Jupiter and Juno would seem all the more natural because these
deities themselves bore the title of King and Queen.

Whether that was so or not, the legend of Numa and Egeria appears to
embody a reminiscence of a time when the priestly king himself
played the part of the divine bridegroom; and as we have seen reason
to suppose that the Roman kings personated the oak-god, while Egeria
is expressly said to have been an oak-nymph, the story of their
union in the sacred grove raises a presumption that at Rome in the
regal period a ceremony was periodically performed exactly analogous
to that which was annually celebrated at Athens down to the time of
Aristotle. The marriage of the King of Rome to the oak-goddess, like
the wedding of the vine-god to the Queen of Athens, must have been
intended to quicken the growth of vegetation by homoeopathic magic.
Of the two forms of the rite we can hardly doubt that the Roman was
the older, and that long before the northern invaders met with the
vine on the shores of the Mediterranean their forefathers had
married the tree-god to the tree-goddess in the vast oak forests of
Central and Northern Europe. In the England of our day the forests
have mostly disappeared, yet still on many a village green and in
many a country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers in
the rustic pageantry of May Day.




XIV. The Succession to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium

IN REGARD to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited
by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the foregoing
discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented
and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the sky, the
thunder, and the oak, and in that character made rain, thunder, and
lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more kings of the
weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only mimicked
the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity,
but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been
merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods,
of waters, and of child-birth. All these conclusions, which we have
reached mainly by a consideration of the Roman evidence, may with
great probability be applied to the other Latin communities. They
too probably had of old their divine or priestly kings, who
transmitted their religious functions, without their civil powers,
to their successors the Kings of the Sacred Rites.

But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the
kingdom among the old Latin tribes? According to tradition, there
were in all eight kings of Rome, and with regard to the five last of
them, at all events, we can hardly doubt that they actually sat on
the throne, and that the traditional history of their reigns is, in
its main outlines, correct. Now it is very remarkable that though
the first king of Rome, Romulus, is said to have been descended from
the royal house of Alba, in which the kingship is represented as
hereditary in the male line, not one of the Roman kings was
immediately succeeded by his son on the throne. Yet several left
sons or grandsons behind them. On the other hand, one of them was
descended from a former king through his mother, not through his
father, and three of the kings, namely Tatius, the elder Tarquin,
and Servius Tullius, were succeeded by their sons-in-law, who were
all either foreigners or of foreign descent. This suggests that the
right to the kingship was transmitted in the female line, and was
actually exercised by foreigners who married the royal princesses.
To put it in technical language, the succession to the kingship at
Rome and probably in Latium generally would seem to have been
determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many
parts of the world, namely exogamy, _beena_ marriage, and female
kinship or mother-kin. Exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to
marry a woman of a different clan from his own: _beena_ marriage is
the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his
wife's people; and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of
tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women
instead of through men. If these principles regulated descent of the
kingship among the ancient Latins, the state of things in this
respect would be somewhat as follows. The political and religious
centre of each community would be the perpetual fire on the king's
hearth tended by Vestal Virgins of the royal clan. The king would be
a man of another clan, perhaps of another town or even of another
race, who had married a daughter of his predecessor and received the
kingdom with her. The children whom he had by her would inherit
their mother's name, not his; the daughters would remain at home;
the sons, when they grew up, would go away into the world, marry,
and settle in their wives' country, whether as kings or commoners.
Of the daughters who stayed at home, some or all would be dedicated
as Vestal Virgins for a longer or shorter time to the service of the
fire on the hearth, and one of them would in time become the consort
of her father's successor.

This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining in a simple and
natural way some obscure features in the traditional history of the
Latin kingship. Thus the legends which tell how Latin kings were
born of virgin mothers and divine fathers become at least more
intelligible. For, stripped of their fabulous element, tales of this
sort mean no more than that a woman has been gotten with child by a
man unknown; and this uncertainty as to fatherhood is more easily
compatible with a system of kinship which ignores paternity than
with one which makes it all-important. If at the birth of the Latin
kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a
general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special
relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women
reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such
Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution. In
our own country traces of them long survived in the practices of May
Day and Whitsuntide, if not of Christmas. Children born of more or
less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this
kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular
festival was dedicated.

In this connexion it may be significant that a festival of jollity
and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome
on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially associated
with the fireborn King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of
Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The
popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and
boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which
young folk sat quaffing wine. The festival appears to have been a
sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which
fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the
great Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and
of fire; one of its principal features is the pairing of
sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw
flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of love and
marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic
season. It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence
and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us
to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser
features, which were probably of the essence of the rites. Indeed,
among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to have
lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present day. One
other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves to be
specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on
the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water
festival; and water has always, down to modern times, played a
conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day, which explains why
the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old heathen festival,
chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.

The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an
annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though the
traditional birth of Numa at the festival of the Parilia, when
shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires, as lovers leap across
the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint
colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty
as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of
the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland
of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they
passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants,
strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be
natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and
forgetting it should provide them with another, which made up in
lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis, which
represented the kings not merely as sprung from gods but as
themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their
lifetime, as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid
claim to divinity.

If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home
and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of
another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage
with a native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners
wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list
of the Alban kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned
only through women--in other words, where descent through the mother
is everything, and descent through the father is nothing--no
objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men
of humble birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in
themselves the men appear to be suitable mates. What really matters
is that the royal stock, on which the prosperity and even the
existence of the people is supposed to depend, should be perpetuated
in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it is
necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to
men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the standard
of early society, to discharge the important duty of procreation.
Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of social
evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their
consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but
it is not essential that they should be so.

At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by
marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of
Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the
daughters of their predecessors. This tradition is to a certain
extent confirmed by evidence, pointing to the conclusion that at
Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship.

Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal
families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to
marry princesses and reign among their wives' people, it will follow
that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over
different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient
Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we may legitimately infer
that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan
stock in Europe. Many Greek traditions relate how a prince left his
native land, and going to a far country married the king's daughter
and succeeded to the kingdom. Various reasons are assigned by
ancient Greek writers for these migrations of the princes. A common
one is that the king's son had been banished for murder. This would
explain very well why he fled his own land, but it is no reason at
all why he should become king of another. We may suspect that such
reasons are afterthoughts devised by writers, who, accustomed to the
rule that a son should succeed to his father's property and kingdom,
were hard put to it to account for so many traditions of kings' sons
who quitted the land of their birth to reign over a foreign kingdom.
In Scandinavian tradition we meet with traces of similar customs.
For we read of daughters' husbands who received a share of the
kingdoms of their royal fathers-in-law, even when these
fathers-in-law had sons of their own; in particular, during the five
generations which preceded Harold the Fair-haired, male members of
the Ynglingar family, which is said to have come from Sweden, are
reported in the _Heimskringla_ or _Sagas of the Norwegian Kings_ to
have obtained at least six provinces in Norway by marriage with the
daughters of the local kings.

Thus it would seem that among some Aryan peoples, at a certain stage
of their social evolution, it has been customary to regard women and
not men as the channels in which royal blood flows, and to bestow
the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another
family, and often of another country, who marries one of the
princesses and reigns over his wife's people. A common type of
popular tale, which relates how an adventurer, coming to a strange
land, wins the hand of the king's daughter and with her the half or
the whole of the kingdom, may well be a reminiscence of a real
custom.

Where usages and ideas of this sort prevail, it is obvious that the
kingship is merely an appanage of marriage with a woman of the blood
royal. The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of
the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary
queen of Scotland. "Indeed she was a queen," says Hermutrude, "and
but that her sex gainsaid it, might be deemed a king; nay (and this
is yet truer), whomsoever she thought worthy of her bed was at once
a king, and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her sceptre
and her hand went together." The statement is all the more
significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the
Pictish kings. We know from the testimony of Bede that, whenever a
doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose their kings from
the female rather than the male line.

The personal qualities which recommended a man for a royal alliance
and succession to the throne would naturally vary according to the
popular ideas of the time and the character of the king or his
substitute, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them in early
society physical strength and beauty would hold a prominent place.

Sometimes apparently the right to the hand of the princess and to
the throne has been determined by a race. The Alitemnian Libyans
awarded the kingdom to the fleetest runner. Amongst the old
Prussians, candidates for nobility raced on horseback to the king,
and the one who reached him first was ennobled. According to
tradition the earliest games at Olympia were held by Endymion, who
set his sons to run a race for the kingdom. His tomb was said to be
at the point of the racecourse from which the runners started. The
famous story of Pelops and Hippodamia is perhaps only another
version of the legend that the first races at Olympia were run for
no less a prize than a kingdom.

These traditions may very well reflect a real custom of racing for a
bride, for such a custom appears to have prevailed among various
peoples, though in practice it has degenerated into a mere form or
pretence. Thus "there is one race, called the 'Love Chase,' which
may be considered a part of the form of marriage among the Kirghiz.
In this the bride, armed with a formidable whip, mounts a fleet
horse, and is pursued by all the young men who make any pretensions
to her hand. She will be given as a prize to the one who catches
her, but she has the right, besides urging on her horse to the
utmost, to use her whip, often with no mean force, to keep off those
lovers who are unwelcome to her, and she will probably favour the
one whom she has already chosen in her heart." The race for the
bride is found also among the Koryaks of North-eastern Asia. It
takes place in a large tent, round which many separate compartments
called _pologs_ are arranged in a continuous circle. The girl gets a
start and is clear of the marriage if she can run through all the
compartments without being caught by the bridegroom. The women of
the encampment place every obstacle in the man's way, tripping him
up, belabouring him with switches, and so forth, so that he has
little chance of succeeding unless the girl wishes it and waits for
him. Similar customs appear to have been practised by all the
Teutonic peoples; for the German, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse languages
possess in common a word for marriage which means simply bride-race.
Moreover, traces of the custom survived into modern times.

Thus it appears that the right to marry a girl, and especially a
princess, has often been conferred as a prize in an athletic
contest. There would be no reason, therefore, for surprise if the
Roman kings, before bestowing their daughters in marriage, should
have resorted to this ancient mode of testing the personal qualities
of their future sons-in-law and successors. If my theory is correct,
the Roman king and queen personated Jupiter and his divine consort,
and in the character of these divinities went through the annual
ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops
to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they
did what in more northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of
May were believed to do in days of old. Now we have seen that the
right to play the part of the King of May and to wed the Queen of
May has sometimes been determined by an athletic contest,
particularly by a race. This may have been a relic of an old
marriage custom of the sort we have examined, a custom designed to
test the fitness of a candidate for matrimony. Such a test might
reasonably be applied with peculiar rigour to the king in order to
ensure that no personal defect should incapacitate him for the
performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which, even more
than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety
and prosperity of the community were believed to depend. And it
would be natural to require of him that from time to time he should
submit himself afresh to the same ordeal for the sake of publicly
demonstrating that he was still equal to the discharge of his high
calling. A relic of that test perhaps survived in the ceremony known
as the Flight of the King (_regifugium_), which continued to be
annually observed at Rome down to imperial times. On the
twenty-fourth day of February a sacrifice used to be offered in the
Comitium, and when it was over the King of the Sacred Rites fled
from the Forum. We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was
originally a race for an annual kingship, which may have been
awarded as a prize to the fleetest runner. At the end of the year
the king might run again for a second term of office; and so on,
until he was defeated and deposed or perhaps slain. In this way what
had once been a race would tend to assume the character of a flight
and a pursuit. The king would be given a start; he ran and his
competitors ran after him, and if he were overtaken he had to yield
the crown and perhaps his life to the lightest of foot among them.
In time a man of masterful character might succeed in seating
himself permanently on the throne and reducing the annual race or
flight to the empty form which it seems always to have been within
historical times. The rite was sometimes interpreted as a
commemoration of the expulsion of the kings from Rome; but this
appears to have been a mere afterthought devised to explain a
ceremony of which the old meaning was forgotten. It is far more
likely that in acting thus the King of the Sacred Rites was merely
keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been
annually observed by his predecessors the kings. What the original
intention of the rite may have been must probably always remain more
or less a matter of conjecture. The present explanation is suggested
with a full sense of the difficulty and obscurity in which the
subject is involved.

Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king
was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office
awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious
athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as
a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the
fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in
supposing that in very early times the old Latin kings personated a
god and were regularly put to death in that character, we can better
understand the mysterious or violent ends to which so many of them
are said to have come. We have seen that, according to tradition,
one of the kings of Alba was killed by a thunderbolt for impiously
mimicking the thunder of Jupiter. Romulus is said to have vanished
mysteriously like Aeneas, or to have been cut to pieces by the
patricians whom he had offended, and the seventh of July, the day on
which he perished, was a festival which bore some resemblance to the
Saturnalia. For on that day the female slaves were allowed to take
certain remarkable liberties. They dressed up as free women in the
attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from
the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among
themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each other.
Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine
colleague of Romulus. It is said that he was at Lavinium offering a
public sacrifice to the ancestral gods, when some men, to whom he
had given umbrage, despatched him with the sacrificial knives and
spits which they had snatched from the altar. The occasion and the
manner of his death suggest that the slaughter may have been a
sacrifice rather than an assassination. Again, Tullus Hostilius, the
successor of Numa, was commonly said to have been killed by
lightning, but many held that he was murdered at the instigation of
Ancus Marcius, who reigned after him. Speaking of the more or less
mythical Numa, the type of the priestly king, Plutarch observes that
"his fame was enhanced by the fortunes of the later kings. For of
the five who reigned after him the last was deposed and ended his
life in exile, and of the remaining four not one died a natural
death; for three of them were assassinated and Tullus Hostilius was
consumed by thunderbolts."

These legends of the violent ends of the Roman kings suggest that
the contest by which they gained the throne may sometimes have been
a mortal combat rather than a race. If that were so, the analogy
which we have traced between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At
both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the
godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the
hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the
holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be
surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should
often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical
times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes to the
ordeal of battle, and he who cut his adversary's throat was thought
thereby to have proved the justice of his cause beyond the reach of
cavil.



XV. The Worship of the Oak

THE WORSHIP of the oak tree or of the oak god appears to have been
shared by all the branches of the Aryan stock in Europe. Both Greeks
and Italians associated the tree with their highest god, Zeus or
Jupiter, the divinity of the sky, the rain, and the thunder. Perhaps
the oldest and certainly one of the most famous sanctuaries in
Greece was that of Dodona, where Zeus was revered in the oracular
oak. The thunder-storms which are said to rage at Dodona more
frequently than anywhere else in Europe, would render the spot a
fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in the rustling
of the oak leaves and in the crash of thunder. Perhaps the bronze
gongs which kept up a humming in the wind round the sanctuary were
meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be heard rolling and
rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren mountains which shut
in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have seen, the sacred
marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak goddess, appears
to have been celebrated with much pomp by a religious federation of
states. And on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the character of Zeus as god
both of the oak and of the rain comes out clearly in the rain charm
practised by the priest of Zeus, who dipped an oak branch in a
sacred spring. In his latter capacity Zeus was the god to whom the
Greeks regularly prayed for rain. Nothing could be more natural; for
often, though not always, he had his seat on the mountains where the
clouds gather and the oaks grow. On the Acropolis at Athens there
was an image of Earth praying to Zeus for rain. And in time of
drought the Athenians themselves prayed, "Rain, rain, O dear Zeus,
on the cornland of the Athenians and on the plains."

Again, Zeus wielded the thunder and lightning as well as the rain.
At Olympia and elsewhere he was worshipped under the surname of
Thunderbolt; and at Athens there was a sacrificial hearth of
Lightning Zeus on the city wall, where some priestly officials
watched for lightning over Mount Parnes at certain seasons of the
year. Further, spots which had been struck by lightning were
regularly fenced in by the Greeks and consecrated to Zeus the
Descender, that is, to the god who came down in the flash from
heaven. Altars were set up within these enclosures and sacrifices
offered on them. Several such places are known from inscriptions to
have existed in Athens.

Thus when ancient Greek kings claimed to be descended from Zeus, and
even to bear his name, we may reasonably suppose that they also
attempted to exercise his divine functions by making thunder and
rain for the good of their people or the terror and confusion of
their foes. In this respect the legend of Salmoneus probably
reflects the pretensions of a whole class of petty sovereigns who
reigned of old, each over his little canton, in the oak-clad
highlands of Greece. Like their kinsmen the Irish kings, they were
expected to be a source of fertility to the land and of fecundity to
the cattle; and how could they fulfil these expectations better than
by acting the part of their kinsman Zeus, the great god of the oak,
the thunder, and the rain? They personified him, apparently, just as
the Italian kings personified Jupiter.

In ancient Italy every oak was sacred to Jupiter, the Italian
counterpart of Zeus; and on the Capitol at Rome the god was
worshipped as the deity not merely of the oak, but of the rain and
the thunder. Contrasting the piety of the good old times with the
scepticism of an age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven, or
cared a fig for Jupiter, a Roman writer tells us that in former days
noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and pure
minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for rain.
And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or never,
and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats. "But nowadays,"
says he, "we are no longer religious, so the fields lie baking."

When we pass from Southern to Central Europe we still meet with the
great god of the oak and the thunder among the barbarous Aryans who
dwelt in the vast primaeval forests. Thus among the Celts of Gaul
the Druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the
oak on which it grew; they chose groves of oaks for the scene of
their solemn service, and they performed none of their rites without
oak leaves. "The Celts," says a Greek writer, "worship Zeus, and the
Celtic image of Zeus is a tall oak." The Celtic conquerors, who
settled in Asia in the third century before our era, appear to have
carried the worship of the oak with them to their new home; for in
the heart of Asia Minor the Galatian senate met in a place which
bore the pure Celtic name of Drynemetum, "the sacred oak grove" or
"the temple of the oak." Indeed the very name of Druids is believed
by good authorities to mean no more than "oak men."

In the religion of the ancient Germans the veneration for sacred
groves seems to have held the foremost place, and according to Grimm
the chief of their holy trees was the oak. It appears to have been
especially dedicated to the god of thunder, Donar or Thunar, the
equivalent of the Norse Thor; for a sacred oak near Geismar, in
Hesse, which Boniface cut down in the eighth century, went among the
heathen by the name of Jupiter's oak (_robur Jovis_), which in old
German would be _Donares eih,_ "the oak of Donar." That the Teutonic
thunder god Donar, Thunar, Thor was identified with the Italian
thunder god Jupiter appears from our word Thursday, Thunar's day,
which is merely a rendering of the Latin _dies Jovis._ Thus among
the ancient Teutons, as among the Greeks and Italians, the god of
the oak was also the god of the thunder. Moreover, he was regarded
as the great fertilising power, who sent rain and caused the earth
to bear fruit; for Adam of Bremen tells us that "Thor presides in
the air; he it is who rules thunder and lightning, wind and rains,
fine weather and crops." In these respects, therefore, the Teutonic
thunder god again resembled his southern counterparts Zeus and
Jupiter.

Amongst the Slavs also the oak appears to have been the sacred tree
of the thunder god Perun, the counterpart of Zeus and Jupiter. It is
said that at Novgorod there used to stand an image of Perun in the
likeness of a man with a thunder-stone in his hand. A fire of oak
wood burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went out the
attendants paid for their negligence with their lives. Perun seems,
like Zeus and Jupiter, to have been the chief god of his people; for
Procopius tells us that the Slavs "believe that one god, the maker
of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him
oxen and every victim."

The chief deity of the Lithuanians was Perkunas or Perkuns, the god
of thunder and lightning, whose resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter has
often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they were
cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly complained
that their sylvan deities were destroyed. Perpetual fires, kindled
with the wood of certain oak-trees, were kept up in honour of
Perkunas; if such a fire went out, it was lighted again by friction
of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak-trees for good crops,
while women did the same to lime-trees; from which we may infer that
they regarded oaks as male and lime-trees as female. And in time of
drought, when they wanted rain, they used to sacrifice a black
heifer, a black he-goat, and a black cock to the thunder god in the
depths of the woods. On such occasions the people assembled in great
numbers from the country round about, ate and drank, and called upon
Perkunas. They carried a bowl of beer thrice round the fire, then
poured the liquor on the flames, while they prayed to the god to
send showers. Thus the chief Lithuanian deity presents a close
resemblance to Zeus and Jupiter, since he was the god of the oak,
the thunder, and the rain.

From the foregoing survey it appears that a god of the oak, the
thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main branches
of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief deity of
their pantheon.



XVI. Dianus and Diana

IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which
the enquiry has thus far led us, and drawing together the scattered
rays of light, to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of
Nemi.

We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of the
secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it
is in our power to control and direct them, have commonly arrogated
to themselves functions which in the present state of knowledge we
should deem superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and
maintained by the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous
order and uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the
wheels of her great machine revolving with a smoothness and
precision which enable the patient observer to anticipate in general
the season, if not the very hour, when they will bring round the
fulfilment of his hopes or the accomplishment of his fears. The
regularly recurring events of this great cycle, or rather series of
cycles, soon stamp themselves even on the dull mind of the savage.
He foresees them, and foreseeing them mistakes the desired
recurrence for an effect of his own will, and the dreaded recurrence
for an effect of the will of his enemies. Thus the springs which set
the vast machine in motion, though they lie far beyond our ken,
shrouded in a mystery which we can never hope to penetrate, appear
to ignorant man to lie within his reach: he fancies he can touch
them and so work by magic art all manner of good to himself and evil
to his foes. In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to
him: he discovers that there are things he cannot do, pleasures
which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most
potent magician is powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the
inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible
powers, whose favour is joy and life, whose anger is misery and
death. Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the
sorcerer by the priest. At this stage of thought the ultimate causes
of things are conceived to be personal beings, many in number and
often discordant in character, who partake of the nature and even of
the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and
their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence. Their
sharply-marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not
yet begun, under the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and
coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena which,
according to the qualities with which our imagination invests it,
goes by one or other of the high-sounding names which the wit of man
has devised to hide his ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look
on their gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an
unapproachable height above them, they believe it to be possible for
those of their own number who surpass their fellows to attain to the
divine rank after death or even in life. Incarnate human deities of
this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the age of magic
and the age of religion. If they bear the names and display the pomp
of deities, the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly
those of their predecessor the magician. Like him, they are expected
to guard their people against hostile enchantments, to heal them in
sickness, to bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an
abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the
other ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility
of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited
with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest
place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the
temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in
civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as
well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots
deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are
sapped by a profounder view of nature and man.

In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of
kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories of
their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to prove that they
too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman
powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that the King of
the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his glory and
fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who had
once received not only the homage but the adoration of their
subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were
supposed to dispense. What little we know of the functions of Diana
in the Arician grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as a
goddess of fertility, and particularly as a divinity of childbirth.
It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that in the discharge of
these important duties she was assisted by her priest, the two
figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn marriage, which
was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of spring and
the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the hearts of men and women
with healthful offspring.

If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king, but as a god of
the grove, we have still to ask, What deity in particular did he
personate? The answer of antiquity is that he represented Virbius,
the consort or lover of Diana. But this does not help us much, for
of Virbius we know little more than the name. A clue to the mystery
is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which burned in the grove.
For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in Europe appear to have
been commonly kindled and fed with oak-wood, and in Rome itself, not
many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal fire consisted of oaken
sticks or logs, as has been proved by a microscopic analysis of the
charred embers of the Vestal fire, which were discovered by
Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the memorable excavations
which he conducted in the Roman forum at the end of the nineteenth
century. But the ritual of the various Latin towns seems to have
been marked by great uniformity; hence it is reasonable to conclude
that wherever in Latium a Vestal fire was maintained, it was fed, as
at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If this was so at Nemi, it
becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a
natural oak-wood, and that therefore the tree which the King of the
Wood had to guard at the peril of his life was itself an oak;
indeed, it was from an evergreen oak, according to Virgil, that
Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the sacred tree of
Jupiter, the supreme god of the Latins. Hence it follows that the
King of the Wood, whose life was bound up in a fashion with an oak,
personated no less a deity than Jupiter himself. At least the
evidence, slight as it is, seems to point to this conclusion. The
old Alban dynasty of the Silvii or Woods, with their crown of oak
leaves, apparently aped the style and emulated the powers of Latian
Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount. It is not
impossible that the King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred oak a
little lower down the mountain, was the lawful successor and
representative of this ancient line of the Silvii or Woods. At all
events, if I am right in supposing that he passed for a human
Jupiter, it would appear that Virbius, with whom legend identified
him, was nothing but a local form of Jupiter, considered perhaps in
his original aspect as a god of the greenwood.

The hypothesis that in later times at all events the King of the
Wood played the part of the oak god Jupiter, is confirmed by an
examination of his divine partner Diana. For two distinct lines of
argument converge to show that if Diana was a queen of the woods in
general, she was at Nemi a goddess of the oak in particular. In the
first place, she bore the title of Vesta, and as such presided over
a perpetual fire, which we have seen reason to believe was fed with
oak wood. But a goddess of fire is not far removed from a goddess of
the fuel which burns in the fire; primitive thought perhaps drew no
sharp line of distinction between the blaze and the wood that
blazes. In the second place, the nymph Egeria at Nemi appears to
have been merely a form of Diana, and Egeria is definitely said to
have been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak. Elsewhere in Italy the
goddess had her home on oak-clad mountains. Thus Mount Algidus, a
spur of the Alban hills, was covered in antiquity with dark forests
of oak, both of the evergreen and the deciduous sort. In winter the
snow lay long on these cold hills, and their gloomy oak-woods were
believed to be a favourite haunt of Diana, as they have been of
brigands in modern times. Again, Mount Tifata, the long abrupt ridge
of the Apennines which looks down on the Campanian plain behind
Capua, was wooded of old with evergreen oaks, among which Diana had
a temple. Here Sulla thanked the goddess for his victory over the
Marians in the plain below, attesting his gratitude by inscriptions
which were long afterwards to be seen in the temple. On the whole,
then, we conclude that at Nemi the King of the Wood personated the
oak-god Jupiter and mated with the oak-goddess Diana in the sacred
grove. An echo of their mystic union has come down to us in the
legend of the loves of Numa and Egeria, who according to some had
their trysting-place in these holy woods.

To this theory it may naturally be objected that the divine consort
of Jupiter was not Diana but Juno, and that if Diana had a mate at
all he might be expected to bear the name not of Jupiter, but of
Dianus or Janus, the latter of these forms being merely a corruption
of the former. All this is true, but the objection may be parried by
observing that the two pairs of deities, Jupiter and Juno on the one
side, and Dianus and Diana, or Janus and Jana, on the other side,
are merely duplicates of each other, their names and their functions
being in substance and origin identical. With regard to their names,
all four of them come from the same Aryan root _DI,_ meaning
"bright," which occurs in the names of the corresponding Greek
deities, Zeus and his old female consort Dione. In regard to their
functions, Juno and Diana were both goddesses of fecundity and
childbirth, and both were sooner or later identified with the moon.
As to the true nature and functions of Janus the ancients themselves
were puzzled; and where they hesitated, it is not for us confidently
to decide. But the view mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of
the sky is supported not only by the etymological identity of his
name with that of the sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation in
which he appears to have stood to Jupiter's two mates, Juno and
Juturna. For the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a
marriage union between the two deities; and according to one account
Janus was the husband of the water-nymph Juturna, who according to
others was beloved by Jupiter. Moreover, Janus, like Jove, was
regularly invoked, and commonly spoken of under the title of Father.
Indeed, he was identified with Jupiter not merely by the logic of
the learned St. Augustine, but by the piety of a pagan worshipper
who dedicated an offering to Jupiter Dianus. A trace of his relation
to the oak may be found in the oakwoods of the Janiculum, the hill
on the right bank of the Tiber, where Janus is said to have reigned
as a king in the remotest ages of Italian history.

Thus, if I am right, the same ancient pair of deities was variously
known among the Greek and Italian peoples as Zeus and Dione, Jupiter
and Juno, or Dianus (Janus) and Diana (Jana), the names of the
divinities being identical in substance, though varying in form with
the dialect of the particular tribe which worshipped them. At first,
when the peoples dwelt near each other, the difference between the
deities would be hardly more than one of name; in other words, it
would be almost purely dialectical. But the gradual dispersion of
the tribes, and their consequent isolation from each other, would
favour the growth of divergent modes of conceiving and worshipping
the gods whom they had carried with them from their old home, so
that in time discrepancies of myth and ritual would tend to spring
up and thereby to convert a nominal into a real distinction between
the divinities. Accordingly when, with the slow progress of culture,
the long period of barbarism and separation was passing away, and
the rising political power of a single strong community had begun to
draw or hammer its weaker neighbours into a nation, the confluent
peoples would throw their gods, like their dialects, into a common
stock; and thus it might come about that the same ancient deities,
which their forefathers had worshipped together before the
dispersion, would now be so disguised by the accumulated effect of
dialectical and religious divergencies that their original identity
might fail to be recognised, and they would take their places side
by side as independent divinities in the national pantheon.

This duplication of deities, the result of the final fusion of
kindred tribes who had long lived apart, would account for the
appearance of Janus beside Jupiter, and of Diana or Jana beside Juno
in the Roman religion. At least this appears to be a more probable
theory than the opinion, which has found favour with some modern
scholars, that Janus was originally nothing but the god of doors.
That a deity of his dignity and importance, whom the Romans revered
as a god of gods and the father of his people, should have started
in life as a humble, though doubtless respectable, doorkeeper
appears very unlikely. So lofty an end hardly consorts with so lowly
a beginning. It is more probable that the door (_janua_) got its
name from Janus than that he got his name from it. This view is
strengthened by a consideration of the word _janua_ itself. The
regular word for door is the same in all the languages of the Aryan
family from India to Ireland. It is _dur_ in Sanscrit, _thura_ in
Greek, _tür_ in German, _door_ in English, _dorus_ in old Irish, and
_foris_ in Latin. Yet besides this ordinary name for door, which the
Latins shared with all their Aryan brethren, they had also the name
_janua,_ to which there is no corresponding term in any
Indo-European speech. The word has the appearance of being an
adjectival form derived from the noun _Janus._ I conjecture that it
may have been customary to set up an image or symbol of Janus at the
principal door of the house in order to place the entrance under the
protection of the great god. A door thus guarded might be known as a
_janua foris,_ that is, a Januan door, and the phrase might in time
be abridged into _janua,_ the noun _foris_ being understood but not
expressed. From this to the use of _janua_ to designate a door in
general, whether guarded by an image of Janus or not, would be an
easy and natural transition.

If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may explain very simply
the origin of the double head of Janus, which has so long exercised
the ingenuity of mythologists. When it had become customary to guard
the entrance of houses and towns by an image of Janus, it might well
be deemed necessary to make the sentinel god look both ways, before
and behind, at the same time, in order that nothing should escape
his vigilant eye. For if the divine watchman always faced in one
direction, it is easy to imagine what mischief might have been
wrought with impunity behind his back. This explanation of the
double-headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the double-headed idol
which the Bush negroes in the interior of Surinam regularly set up
as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The idol consists of a
block of wood with a human face rudely carved on each side; it
stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a cross-bar.
Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to keep off the
devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems to represent
a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the cross-bar hangs
a small log which serves the useful purpose of knocking on the head
any evil spirit who might attempt to pass through the gateway.
Clearly this double-headed fetish at the gateway of the negro
villages in Surinam bears a close resemblance to the double-headed
images of Janus which, grasping a stick in one hand and a key in the
other, stood sentinel at Roman gates and doorways; and we can hardly
doubt that in both cases the heads facing two ways are to be
similarly explained as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian
god, who kept his eye on spiritual foes behind and before, and stood
ready to bludgeon them on the spot. We may, therefore, dispense with
the tedious and unsatisfactory explanations which, if we may trust
Ovid, the wily Janus himself fobbed off an anxious Roman enquirer.

To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi, we may suppose
that as the mate of Diana he represented originally Dianus or Janus
rather than Jupiter, but that the difference between these deities
was of old merely superficial, going little deeper than the names,
and leaving practically unaffected the essential functions of the
god as a power of the sky, the thunder, and the oak. It was fitting,
therefore, that his human representative at Nemi should dwell, as we
have seen reason to believe he did, in an oak grove. His title of
King of the Wood clearly indicates the sylvan character of the deity
whom he served; and since he could only be assailed by him who had
plucked the bough of a certain tree in the grove, his own life might
be said to be bound up with that of the sacred tree. Thus he not
only served but embodied the great Aryan god of the oak; and as an
oak-god he would mate with the oak-goddess, whether she went by the
name of Egeria or Diana. Their union, however consummated, would be
deemed essential to the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of
man and beast. Further, as the oak-god was also a god of the sky,
the thunder, and the rain, so his human representative would be
required, like many other divine kings, to cause the clouds to
gather, the thunder to peal, and the rain to descend in due season,
that the fields and orchards might bear fruit and the pastures be
covered with luxuriant herbage. The reputed possessor of powers so
exalted must have been a very important personage; and the remains
of buildings and of votive offerings which have been found on the
site of the sanctuary combine with the testimony of classical
writers to prove that in later times it was one of the greatest and
most popular shrines in Italy. Even in the old days, when the
champaign country around was still parcelled out among the petty
tribes who composed the Latin League, the sacred grove is known to
have been an object of their common reverence and care. And just as
the kings of Cambodia used to send offerings to the mystic kings of
Fire and Water far in the dim depths of the tropical forest, so, we
may well believe, from all sides of the broad Latian plain the eyes
and footsteps of Italian pilgrims turned to the quarter where,
standing sharply out against the faint blue line of the Apennines or
the deeper blue of the distant sea, the Alban Mountain rose before
them, the home of the mysterious priest of Nemi, the King of the
Wood. There, among the green woods and beside the still waters of
the lonely hills, the ancient Aryan worship of the god of the oak,
the thunder, and the dripping sky lingered in its early, almost
Druidical form, long after a great political and intellectual
revolution had shifted the capital of Latin religion from the forest
to the city, from Nemi to Rome.



XVII. The Burden of Royalty



1. Royal and Priestly Taboos

AT A CERTAIN stage of early society the king or priest is often
thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an
incarnation of a deity, and consistently with this belief the course
of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control, and he
is held responsible for bad weather, failure of the crops, and
similar calamities. To some extent it appears to be assumed that the
king's power over nature, like that over his subjects and slaves, is
exerted through definite acts of will; and therefore if drought,
famine, pestilence, or storms arise, the people attribute the
misfortune to the negligence or guilt of their king, and punish him
accordingly with stripes and bonds, or, if he remains obdurate, with
deposition and death. Sometimes, however, the course of nature,
while regarded as dependent on the king, is supposed to be partly
independent of his will. His person is considered, if we may express
it so, as the dynamical centre of the universe, from which lines of
force radiate to all quarters of the heaven; so that any motion of
his--the turning of his head, the lifting of his
hand--instantaneously affects and may seriously disturb some part of
nature. He is the point of support on which hangs the balance of the
world, and the slightest irregularity on his part may overthrow the
delicate equipoise. The greatest care must, therefore, be taken both
by and of him; and his whole life, down to its minutest details,
must be so regulated that no act of his, voluntary or involuntary,
may disarrange or upset the established order of nature. Of this
class of monarchs the Mikado or Dairi, the spiritual emperor of
Japan, is or rather used to be a typical example. He is an
incarnation of the sun goddess, the deity who rules the universe,
gods and men included; once a year all the gods wait upon him and
spend a month at his court. During that month, the name of which
means "without gods," no one frequents the temples, for they are
believed to be deserted. The Mikado receives from his people and
assumes in his official proclamations and decrees the title of
"manifest or incarnate deity," and he claims a general authority
over the gods of Japan. For example, in an official decree of the
year 646 the emperor is described as "the incarnate god who governs
the universe."

The following description of the Mikado's mode of life was written
about two hundred years ago:

"Even to this day the princes descended of this family, more
particularly those who sit on the throne, are looked upon as persons
most holy in themselves, and as Popes by birth. And, in order to
preserve these advantageous notions in the minds of their subjects,
they are obliged to take an uncommon care of their sacred persons,
and to do such things, which, examined according to the customs of
other nations, would be thought ridiculous and impertinent. It will
not be improper to give a few instances of it. He thinks that it
would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the
ground with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go
anywhere, he must be carried thither on men's shoulders. Much less
will they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open
air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There
is such a holiness ascribed to all the parts of his body that he
dares to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails.
However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the
night when he is asleep; because, they say, that which is taken from
his body at that time, hath been stolen from him, and that such a
theft doth not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times,
he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning,
with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a
statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor
indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought
that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if,
unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he
looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was
apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune
was near at hand to desolate the country. But it having been
afterwards discovered, that the imperial crown was the palladium,
which by its immobility could preserve peace in the empire, it was
thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only
to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and therefore
the crown is at present placed on the throne for some hours every
morning. His victuals must be dressed every time in new pots, and
served at table in new dishes: both are very clean and neat, but
made only of common clay; that without any considerable expense they
may be laid aside, or broke, after they have served once. They are
generally broke, for fear they should come into the hands of laymen,
for they believe religiously, that if any layman should presume to
eat his food out of these sacred dishes, it would swell and inflame
his mouth and throat. The like ill effect is dreaded from the
Dairi's sacred habits; for they believe that if a layman should wear
them, without the Emperor's express leave or command, they would
occasion swellings and pains in all parts of his body." To the same
effect an earlier account of the Mikado says: "It was considered as
a shameful degradation for him even to touch the ground with his
foot. The sun and moon were not even permitted to shine upon his
head. None of the superfluities of the body were ever taken from
him, neither his hair, his beard, nor his nails were cut. Whatever
he eat was dressed in new vessels."

Similar priestly or rather divine kings are found, at a lower level
of barbarism, on the west coast of Africa. At Shark Point near Cape
Padron, in Lower Guinea, lives the priestly king Kukulu, alone in a
wood. He may not touch a woman nor leave his house; indeed he may
not even quit his chair, in which he is obliged to sleep sitting,
for if he lay down no wind would arise and navigation would be
stopped. He regulates storms, and in general maintains a wholesome
and equable state of the atmosphere. On Mount Agu in Togo there
lives a fetish or spirit called Bagba, who is of great importance
for the whole of the surrounding country. The power of giving or
withholding rain is ascribed to him, and he is lord of the winds,
including the Harmattan, the dry, hot wind which blows from the
interior. His priest dwells in a house on the highest peak of the
mountain, where he keeps the winds bottled up in huge jars.
Applications for rain, too, are made to him, and he does a good
business in amulets, which consist of the teeth and claws of
leopards. Yet though his power is great and he is indeed the real
chief of the land, the rule of the fetish forbids him ever to leave
the mountain, and he must spend the whole of his life on its summit.
Only once a year may he come down to make purchases in the market;
but even then he may not set foot in the hut of any mortal man, and
must return to his place of exile the same day. The business of
government in the villages is conducted by subordinate chiefs, who
are appointed by him. In the West African kingdom of Congo there was
a supreme pontiff called Chitomé or Chitombé, whom the negroes
regarded as a god on earth and all-powerful in heaven. Hence before
they would taste the new crops they offered him the first-fruits,
fearing that manifold misfortunes would befall them if they broke
this rule. When he left his residence to visit other places within
his jurisdiction, all married people had to observe strict
continence the whole time he was out; for it was supposed that any
act of incontinence would prove fatal to him. And if he were to die
a natural death, they thought that the world would perish, and the
earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would
immediately be annihilated. Amongst the semi-barbarous nations of
the New World, at the date of the Spanish conquest, there were found
hierarchies or theocracies like those of Japan; in particular, the
high pontiff of the Zapotecs appears to have presented a close
parallel to the Mikado. A powerful rival to the king himself, this
spiritual lord governed Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the
kingdom, with absolute dominion. It is impossible, we are told, to
overrate the reverence in which he was held. He was looked on as a
god whom the earth was not worthy to hold nor the sun to shine upon.
He profaned his sanctity if he even touched the ground with his
foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their shoulders were
members of the highest families: he hardly deigned to look on
anything around him; and all who met him fell with their faces to
the earth, fearing that death would overtake them if they saw even
his shadow. A rule of continence was regularly imposed on the
Zapotec priests, especially upon the high pontiff; but "on certain
days in each year, which were generally celebrated with feasts and
dances, it was customary for the high priest to become drunk. While
in this state, seeming to belong neither to heaven nor to earth, one
of the most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of
the gods was brought to him." If the child she bore him was a son,
he was brought up as a prince of the blood, and the eldest son
succeeded his father on the pontifical throne. The supernatural
powers attributed to this pontiff are not specified, but probably
they resembled those of the Mikado and Chitomé.

Wherever, as in Japan and West Africa, it is supposed that the order
of nature, and even the existence of the world, is bound up with the
life of the king or priest, it is clear that he must be regarded by
his subjects as a source both of infinite blessing and of infinite
danger. On the one hand, the people have to thank him for the rain
and sunshine which foster the fruits of the earth, for the wind
which brings ships to their coasts, and even for the solid ground
beneath their feet. But what he gives he can refuse; and so close is
the dependence of nature on his person, so delicate the balance of
the system of forces whereof he is the centre, that the least
irregularity on his part may set up a tremor which shall shake the
earth to its foundations. And if nature may be disturbed by the
slightest involuntary act of the king, it is easy to conceive the
convulsion which his death might provoke. The natural death of the
Chitomé, as we have seen, was thought to entail the destruction of
all things. Clearly, therefore, out of a regard for their own
safety, which might be imperilled by any rash act of the king, and
still more by his death, the people will exact of their king or
priest a strict conformity to those rules, the observance of which
is deemed necessary for his own preservation, and consequently for
the preservation of his people and the world. The idea that early
kingdoms are despotisms in which the people exist only for the
sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are
considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for
his subjects; his life is only valuable so long as he discharges the
duties of his position by ordering the course of nature for his
people's benefit. So soon as he fails to do so, the care, the
devotion, the religious homage which they had hitherto lavished on
him cease and are changed into hatred and contempt; he is dismissed
ignominiously, and may be thankful if he escapes with his life.
Worshipped as a god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next.
But in this changed behaviour of the people there is nothing
capricious or inconsistent. On the contrary, their conduct is
entirely of a piece. If their king is their god, he is or should be
also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make
room for another who will. So long, however, as he answers their
expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him,
and which they compel him to take of himself. A king of this sort
lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of
prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to
contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain
him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature, might
involve himself, his people, and the universe in one common
catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by
trammelling his every act, annihilate his freedom and often render
the very life, which it is their object to preserve, a burden and
sorrow to him.

Of the supernaturally endowed kings of Loango it is said that the
more powerful a king is, the more taboos is he bound to observe;
they regulate all his actions, his walking and his standing, his
eating and drinking, his sleeping and waking. To these restraints
the heir to the throne is subject from infancy; but as he advances
in life the number of abstinences and ceremonies which he must
observe increases, "until at the moment that he ascends the throne
he is lost in the ocean of rites and taboos." In the crater of an
extinct volcano, enclosed on all sides by grassy slopes, lie the
scattered huts and yam-fields of Riabba, the capital of the native
king of Fernando Po. This mysterious being lives in the lowest
depths of the crater, surrounded by a harem of forty women, and
covered, it is said, with old silver coins. Naked savage as he is,
he yet exercises far more influence in the island than the Spanish
governor at Santa Isabel. In him the conservative spirit of the
Boobies or aboriginal inhabitants of the island is, as it were,
incorporate. He has never seen a white man and, according to the
firm conviction of all the Boobies, the sight of a pale face would
cause his instant death. He cannot bear to look upon the sea; indeed
it is said that he may never see it even in the distance, and that
therefore he wears away his life with shackles on his legs in the
dim twilight of his hut. Certain it is that he has never set foot on
the beach. With the exception of his musket and knife, he uses
nothing that comes from the whites; European cloth never touches his
person, and he scorns tobacco, rum, and even salt.

Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast "the king is at
the same time high priest. In this quality he was, particularly in
former times, unapproachable by his subjects. Only by night was he
allowed to quit his dwelling in order to bathe and so forth. None
but his representative, the so-called 'visible king,' with three
chosen elders might converse with him, and even they had to sit on
an ox-hide with their backs turned to him. He might not see any
European nor any horse, nor might he look upon the sea, for which
reason he was not allowed to quit his capital even for a few
moments. These rules have been disregarded in recent times." The
king of Dahomey himself is subject to the prohibition of beholding
the sea, and so are the kings of Loango and Great Ardra in Guinea.
The sea is the fetish of the Eyeos, to the north-west of Dahomey,
and they and their king are threatened with death by their priests
if ever they dare to look on it. It is believed that the king of
Cayor in Senegal would infallibly die within the year if he were to
cross a river or an arm of the sea. In Mashonaland down to recent
times the chiefs would not cross certain rivers, particularly the
Rurikwi and the Nyadiri; and the custom was still strictly observed
by at least one chief within recent years. "On no account will the
chief cross the river. If it is absolutely necessary for him to do
so, he is blindfolded and carried across with shouting and singing.
Should he walk across, he will go blind or die and certainly lose
the chieftainship." So among the Mahafalys and Sakalavas in the
south of Madagascar some kings are forbidden to sail on the sea or
to cross certain rivers. Among the Sakalavas the chief is regarded
as a sacred being, but "he is held in leash by a crowd of
restrictions, which regulate his behaviour like that of the emperor
of China. He can undertake nothing whatever unless the sorcerers
have declared the omens favourable; he may not eat warm food: on
certain days he may not quit his hut; and so on." Among some of the
hill tribes of Assam both the headman and his wife have to observe
many taboos in respect of food; thus they may not eat buffalo, pork,
dog, fowl, or tomatoes. The headman must be chaste, the husband of
one wife, and he must separate himself from her on the eve of a
general or public observance of taboo. In one group of tribes the
headman is forbidden to eat in a strange village, and under no
provocation whatever may he utter a word of abuse. Apparently the
people imagine that the violation of any of these taboos by a
headman would bring down misfortune on the whole village.

The ancient kings of Ireland, as well as the kings of the four
provinces of Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and Ulster, were subject
to certain quaint prohibitions or taboos, on the due observance of
which the prosperity of the people of the country, as well as their
own, was supposed to depend. Thus, for example, the sun might not
rise on the king of Ireland in his bed at Tara, the old capital of
Erin; he was forbidden to alight on Wednesday at Magh Breagh, to
traverse Magh Cuillinn after sunset, to incite his horse at
Fan-Chomair, to go in a ship upon the water the Monday after
Bealltaine (May day), and to leave the track of his army upon Ath
Maighne the Tuesday after All-Hallows. The king of Leinster might
not go round Tuath Laighean left-hand-wise on Wednesday, nor sleep
between the Dothair (Dodder) and the Duibhlinn with his head
inclining to one side, nor encamp for nine days on the plains of
Cualann, nor travel the road of Duibhlinn on Monday, nor ride a
dirty black-heeled horse across Magh Maistean. The king of Munster
was prohibited from enjoying the feast of Loch Lein from one Monday
to another; from banqueting by night in the beginning of harvest
before Geim at Leitreacha; from encamping for nine days upon the
Siuir; and from holding a border meeting at Gabhran. The king of
Connaught might not conclude a treaty respecting his ancient palace
of Cruachan after making peace on All-Hallows Day, nor go in a
speckled garment on a grey speckled steed to the heath of Dal Chais,
nor repair to an assembly of women at Seaghais, nor sit in autumn on
the sepulchral mounds of the wife of Maine, nor contend in running
with the rider of a grey one-eyed horse at Ath Gallta between two
posts. The king of Ulster was forbidden to attend the horse fair at
Rath Line among the youths of Dal Araidhe, to listen to the
fluttering of the flocks of birds of Linn Saileach after sunset, to
celebrate the feast of the bull of Daire-mic-Daire, to go into Magh
Cobha in the month of March, and to drink of the water of Bo
Neimhidh between two darknesses. If the kings of Ireland strictly
observed these and many other customs, which were enjoined by
immemorial usage, it was believed that they would never meet with
mischance or misfortune, and would live for ninety years without
experiencing the decay of old age; that no epidemic or mortality
would occur during their reigns; and that the seasons would be
favourable and the earth yield its fruit in abundance; whereas, if
they set the ancient usages at naught, the country would be visited
with plague, famine, and bad weather.

The kings of Egypt were worshipped as gods, and the routine of their
daily life was regulated in every detail by precise and unvarying
rules. "The life of the kings of Egypt," says Diodorus, "was not
like that of other monarchs who are irresponsible and may do just
what they choose; on the contrary, everything was fixed for them by
law, not only their official duties, but even the details of their
daily life. . . . The hours both of day and night were arranged at
which the king had to do, not what he pleased, but what was
prescribed for him. . . . For not only were the times appointed at
which he should transact public business or sit in judgment; but the
very hours for his walking and bathing and sleeping with his wife,
and, in short, performing every act of life were all settled. Custom
enjoined a simple diet; the only flesh he might eat was veal and
goose, and he might only drink a prescribed quantity of wine."
However, there is reason to think that these rules were observed,
not by the ancient Pharaohs, but by the priestly kings who reigned
at Thebes and Ethiopia at the close of the twentieth dynasty.

Of the taboos imposed on priests we may see a striking example in
the rules of life prescribed for the Flamen Dialis at Rome, who has
been interpreted as a living image of Jupiter, or a human embodiment
of the sky-spirit. They were such as the following: The Flamen
Dialis might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army under
arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot on any
part of his garments; no fire except a sacred fire might be taken
out of his house; he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened
bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat,
beans, and ivy; he might not walk under a vine; the feet of his bed
had to be daubed with mud; his hair could be cut only by a free man
and with a bronze knife and his hair and nails when cut had to be
buried under a lucky tree; he might not touch a dead body nor enter
a place where one was burned; he might not see work being done on
holy days; he might not be uncovered in the open air; if a man in
bonds were taken into his house, the captive had to be unbound and
the cords had to be drawn up through a hole in the roof and so let
down into the street. His wife, the Flaminica, had to observe nearly
the same rules, and others of her own besides. She might not ascend
more than three steps of the kind of staircase called Greek; at a
certain festival she might not comb her hair; the leather of her
shoes might not be made from a beast that had died a natural death,
but only from one that had been slain or sacrificed; if she heard
thunder she was tabooed till she had offered an expiatory sacrifice.

Among the Grebo people of Sierra Leone there is a pontiff who bears
the title of Bodia and has been compared, on somewhat slender
grounds, to the high priest of the Jews. He is appointed in
accordance with the behest of an oracle. At an elaborate ceremony of
installation he is anointed, a ring is put on his ankle as a badge
of office, and the door-posts of his house are sprinkled with the
blood of a sacrificed goat. He has charge of the public talismans
and idols, which he feeds with rice and oil every new moon; and he
sacrifices on behalf of the town to the dead and to demons.
Nominally his power is very great, but in practice it is very
limited; for he dare not defy public opinion, and he is held
responsible, even with his life, for any adversity that befalls the
country. It is expected of him that he should cause the earth to
bring forth abundantly, the people to be healthy, war to be driven
far away, and witchcraft to be kept in abeyance. His life is
trammelled by the observance of certain restrictions or taboos. Thus
he may not sleep in any house but his own official residence, which
is called the "anointed house" with reference to the ceremony of
anointing him at inauguration. He may not drink water on the
highway. He may not eat while a corpse is in the town, and he may
not mourn for the dead. If he dies while in office, he must be
buried at dead of night; few may hear of his burial, and none may
mourn for him when his death is made public. Should he have fallen a
victim to the poison ordeal by drinking a decoction of sassywood, as
it is called, he must be buried under a running stream of water.

Among the Todas of Southern India the holy milkman, who acts as
priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and
burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency,
which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy and
may never visit his home or any ordinary village. He must be
celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife. On no account may
any ordinary person touch the holy milkman or the holy dairy; such a
touch would so defile his holiness that he would forfeit his office.
It is only on two days a week, namely Mondays and Thursdays, that a
mere layman may even approach the milkman; on other days if he has
any business with him, he must stand at a distance (some say a
quarter of a mile) and shout his message across the intervening
space. Further, the holy milkman never cuts his hair or pares his
nails so long as he holds office; he never crosses a river by a
bridge, but wades through a ford and only certain fords; if a death
occurs in his clan, he may not attend any of the funeral ceremonies,
unless he first resigns his office and descends from the exalted
rank of milkman to that of a mere common mortal. Indeed it appears
that in old days he had to resign the seals, or rather the pails, of
office whenever any member of his clan departed this life. However,
these heavy restraints are laid in their entirety only on milkmen of
the very highest class.



2. Divorce of the Spiritual from the Temporal Power

THE BURDENSOME observances attached to the royal or priestly office
produced their natural effect. Either men refused to accept the
office, which hence tended to fall into abeyance; or accepting it,
they sank under its weight into spiritless creatures, cloistered
recluses, from whose nerveless fingers the reins of government
slipped into the firmer grasp of men who were often content to wield
the reality of sovereignty without its name. In some countries this
rift in the supreme power deepened into a total and permanent
separation of the spiritual and temporal powers, the old royal house
retaining their purely religious functions, while the civil
government passed into the hands of a younger and more vigorous
race.

To take examples. In a previous part of this work we saw that in
Cambodia it is often necessary to force the kingships of Fire and
Water upon the reluctant successors, and that in Savage Island the
monarchy actually came to an end because at last no one could be
induced to accept the dangerous distinction. In some parts of West
Africa, when the king dies, a family council is secretly held to
determine his successor. He on whom the choice falls is suddenly
seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house, where he is kept in
durance till he consents to accept the crown. Sometimes the heir
finds means of evading the honour which it is sought to thrust upon
him; a ferocious chief has been known to go about constantly armed,
resolute to resist by force any attempt to set him on the throne.
The savage Timmes of Sierra Leone, who elect their king, reserve to
themselves the right of beating him on the eve of his coronation;
and they avail themselves of this constitutional privilege with such
hearty goodwill that sometimes the unhappy monarch does not long
survive his elevation to the throne. Hence when the leading chiefs
have a spite at a man and wish to rid themselves of him, they elect
him king. Formerly, before a man was proclaimed king of Sierra
Leone, it used to be the custom to load him with chains and thrash
him. Then the fetters were knocked off, the kingly robe was placed
on him, and he received in his hands the symbol of royal dignity,
which was nothing but the axe of the executioner. It is not
therefore surprising to read that in Sierra Leone, where such
customs have prevailed, "except among the Mandingoes and Suzees, few
kings are natives of the countries they govern. So different are
their ideas from ours, that very few are solicitous of the honour,
and competition is very seldom heard of."

The Mikados of Japan seem early to have resorted to the expedient of
transferring the honours and burdens of supreme power to their
infant children; and the rise of the Tycoons, long the temporal
sovereigns of the country, is traced to the abdication of a certain
Mikado in favour of his three-year-old son. The sovereignty having
been wrested by a usurper from the infant prince, the cause of the
Mikado was championed by Yoritomo, a man of spirit and conduct, who
overthrew the usurper and restored to the Mikado the shadow, while
he retained for himself the substance, of power. He bequeathed to
his descendants the dignity he had won, and thus became the founder
of the line of Tycoons. Down to the latter half of the sixteenth
century the Tycoons were active and efficient rulers; but the same
fate overtook them which had befallen the Mikados. Immeshed in the
same inextricable web of custom and law, they degenerated into mere
puppets, hardly stirring from their palaces and occupied in a
perpetual round of empty ceremonies, while the real business of
government was managed by the council of state. In Tonquin the
monarchy ran a similar course. Living like his predecessors in
effeminacy and sloth, the king was driven from the throne by an
ambitious adventurer named Mack, who from a fisherman had risen to
be Grand Mandarin. But the king's brother Tring put down the usurper
and restored the king, retaining, however, for himself and his
descendants the dignity of general of all the forces. Thenceforward
the kings, though invested with the title and pomp of sovereignty,
ceased to govern. While they lived secluded in their palaces, all
real political power was wielded by the hereditary generals.

In Mangaia, a Polynesian island, religious and civil authority were
lodged in separate hands, spiritual functions being discharged by a
line of hereditary kings, while the temporal government was
entrusted from time to time to a victorious war-chief, whose
investiture, however, had to be completed by the king. Similarly in
Tonga, besides the civil king whose right to the throne was partly
hereditary and partly derived from his warlike reputation and the
number of his fighting men, there was a great divine chief who
ranked above the king and the other chiefs in virtue of his supposed
descent from one of the chief gods. Once a year the first-fruits of
the ground were offered to him at a solemn ceremony, and it was
believed that if these offerings were not made the vengeance of the
gods would fall in a signal manner on the people. Peculiar forms of
speech, such as were applied to no one else, were used in speaking
of him, and everything that he chanced to touch became sacred or
tabooed. When he and the king met, the monarch had to sit down on
the ground in token of respect until his holiness had passed by. Yet
though he enjoyed the highest veneration by reason of his divine
origin, this sacred personage possessed no political authority, and
if he ventured to meddle with affairs of state it was at the risk of
receiving a rebuff from the king, to whom the real power belonged,
and who finally succeeded in ridding himself of his spiritual rival.

In some parts of Western Africa two kings reign side by side, a
fetish or religious king and a civil king, but the fetish king is
really supreme. He controls the weather and so forth, and can put a
stop to everything. When he lays his red staff on the ground, no one
may pass that way. This division of power between a sacred and a
secular ruler is to be met with wherever the true negro culture has
been left unmolested, but where the negro form of society has been
disturbed, as in Dahomey and Ashantee, there is a tendency to
consolidate the two powers in a single king.

In some parts of the East Indian island of Timor we meet with a
partition of power like that which is represented by the civil king
and the fetish king of Western Africa. Some of the Timorese tribes
recognise two rajahs, the ordinary or civil rajah, who governs the
people, and the fetish or taboo rajah, who is charged with the
control of everything that concerns the earth and its products. This
latter ruler has the right of declaring anything taboo; his
permission must be obtained before new land may be brought under
cultivation, and he must perform certain necessary ceremonies when
the work is being carried out. If drought or blight threatens the
crops, his help is invoked to save them. Though he ranks below the
civil rajah, he exercises a momentous influence on the course of
events, for his secular colleague is bound to consult him in all
important matters. In some of the neighbouring islands, such as
Rotti and eastern Flores, a spiritual ruler of the same sort is
recognised under various native names, which all mean "lord of the
ground." Similarly in the Mekeo district of British New Guinea there
is a double chieftainship. The people are divided into two groups
according to families, and each of the groups has its chief. One of
the two is the war chief, the other is the taboo chief. The office
of the latter is hereditary; his duty is to impose a taboo on any of
the crops, such as the coco-nuts and areca nuts, whenever he thinks
it desirable to prohibit their use. In his office we may perhaps
detect the beginning of a priestly dynasty, but as yet his functions
appear to be more magical than religious, being concerned with the
control of the harvests rather than with the propitiation of higher
powers.




XVIII. The Perils of the Soul



1. The Soul as a Mannikin

THE FOREGOING examples have taught us that the office of a sacred
king or priest is often hedged in by a series of burdensome
restrictions or taboos, of which a principal purpose appears to be
to preserve the life of the divine man for the good of his people.
But if the object of the taboos is to save his life, the question
arises, How is their observance supposed to effect this end? To
understand this we must know the nature of the danger which
threatens the king's life, and which it is the intention of these
curious restrictions to guard against. We must, therefore, ask: What
does early man understand by death? To what causes does he attribute
it? And how does he think it may be guarded against?

As the savage commonly explains the processes of inanimate nature by
supposing that they are produced by living beings working in or
behind the phenomena, so he explains the phenomena of life itself.
If an animal lives and moves, it can only be, he thinks, because
there is a little animal inside which moves it: if a man lives and
moves, it can only be because he has a little man or animal inside
who moves him. The animal inside the animal, the man inside the man,
is the soul. And as the activity of an animal or man is explained by
the presence of the soul, so the repose of sleep or death is
explained by its absence; sleep or trance being the temporary, death
being the permanent absence of the soul. Hence if death be the
permanent absence of the soul, the way to guard against it is either
to prevent the soul from leaving the body, or, if it does depart, to
ensure that it shall return. The precautions adopted by savages to
secure one or other of these ends take the form of certain
prohibitions or taboos, which are nothing but rules intended to
ensure either the continued presence or the return of the soul. In
short, they are life-preservers or life-guards. These general
statements will now be illustrated by examples.

Addressing some Australian blacks, a European missionary said, "I am
not one, as you think, but two." Upon this they laughed. "You may
laugh as much as you like," continued the missionary, "I tell you
that I am two in one; this great body that you see is one; within
that there is another little one which is not visible. The great
body dies, and is buried, but the little body flies away when the
great one dies." To this some of the blacks replied, "Yes, yes. We
also are two, we also have a little body within the breast." On
being asked where the little body went after death, some said it
went behind the bush, others said it went into the sea, and some
said they did not know. The Hurons thought that the soul had a head
and body, arms and legs; in short, that it was a complete little
model of the man himself. The Esquimaux believe that "the soul
exhibits the same shape as the body it belongs to, but is of a more
subtle and ethereal nature." According to the Nootkas the soul has
the shape of a tiny man; its seat is the crown of the head. So long
as it stands erect, its owner is hale and hearty; but when from any
cause it loses its upright position, he loses his senses. Among the
Indian tribes of the Lower Fraser River, man is held to have four
souls, of which the principal one has the form of a mannikin, while
the other three are shadows of it. The Malays conceive the human
soul as a little man, mostly invisible and of the bigness of a
thumb, who corresponds exactly in shape, proportion, and even in
complexion to the man in whose body he resides. This mannikin is of
a thin, unsubstantial nature, though not so impalpable but that it
may cause displacement on entering a physical object, and it can
flit quickly from place to place; it is temporarily absent from the
body in sleep, trance, and disease, and permanently absent after
death.

So exact is the resemblance of the mannikin to the man, in other
words, of the soul to the body, that, as there are fat bodies and
thin bodies, so there are fat souls and thin souls; as there are
heavy bodies and light bodies, long bodies and short bodies, so
there are heavy souls and light souls, long souls and short souls.
The people of Nias think that every man, before he is born, is asked
how long or how heavy a soul he would like, and a soul of the
desired weight or length is measured out to him. The heaviest soul
ever given out weighs about ten grammes. The length of a man's life
is proportioned to the length of his soul; children who die young
had short souls. The Fijian conception of the soul as a tiny human
being comes clearly out in the customs observed at the death of a
chief among the Nakelo tribe. When a chief dies, certain men, who
are the hereditary undertakers, call him, as he lies, oiled and
ornamented, on fine mats, saying, "Rise, sir, the chief, and let us
be going. The day has come over the land." Then they conduct him to
the river side, where the ghostly ferryman comes to ferry Nakelo
ghosts across the stream. As they thus attend the chief on his last
journey, they hold their great fans close to the ground to shelter
him, because, as one of them explained to a missionary, "His soul is
only a little child." People in the Punjaub who tattoo themselves
believe that at death the soul, "the little entire man or woman"
inside the mortal frame, will go to heaven blazoned with the same
tattoo patterns which adorned the body in life. Sometimes, however,
as we shall see, the human soul is conceived not in human but in
animal form.



2. Absence and Recall of the Soul

THE SOUL is commonly supposed to escape by the natural openings of
the body, especially the mouth and nostrils. Hence in Celebes they
sometimes fasten fish-hooks to a sick man's nose, navel, and feet,
so that if his soul should try to escape it may be hooked and held
fast. A Turik on the Baram River, in Borneo, refused to part with
some hook-like stones, because they, as it were, hooked his soul to
his body, and so prevented the spiritual portion of him from
becoming detached from the material. When a Sea Dyak sorcerer or
medicine-man is initiated, his fingers are supposed to be furnished
with fish-hooks, with which he will thereafter clutch the human soul
in the act of flying away, and restore it to the body of the
sufferer. But hooks, it is plain, may be used to catch the souls of
enemies as well as of friends. Acting on this principle head-hunters
in Borneo hang wooden hooks beside the skulls of their slain enemies
in the belief that this helps them on their forays to hook in fresh
heads. One of the implements of a Haida medicine-man is a hollow
bone, in which he bottles up departing souls, and so restores them
to their owners. When any one yawns in their presence the Hindoos
always snap their thumbs, believing that this will hinder the soul
from issuing through the open mouth. The Marquesans used to hold the
mouth and nose of a dying man, in order to keep him in life by
preventing his soul from escaping; the same custom is reported of
the New Caledonians; and with the like intention the Bagobos of the
Philippine Islands put rings of brass wire on the wrists or ankles
of their sick. On the other hand, the Itonamas of South America seal
up the eyes, nose, and mouth of a dying person, in case his ghost
should get out and carry off others; and for a similar reason the
people of Nias, who fear the spirits of the recently deceased and
identify them with the breath, seek to confine the vagrant soul in
its earthly tabernacle by bunging up the nose or tying up the jaws
of the corpse. Before leaving a corpse the Wakelbura of Australia
used to place hot coals in its ears in order to keep the ghost in
the body, until they had got such a good start that he could not
overtake them. In Southern Celebes, to hinder the escape of a
woman's soul in childbed, the nurse ties a band as tightly as
possible round the body of the expectant mother. The Minangkabauers
of Sumatra observe a similar custom; a skein of thread or a string
is sometimes fastened round the wrist or loins of a woman in
childbed, so that when her soul seeks to depart in her hour of
travail it may find the egress barred. And lest the soul of a babe
should escape and be lost as soon as it is born, the Alfoors of
Celebes, when a birth is about to take place, are careful to close
every opening in the house, even the keyhole; and they stop up every
chink and cranny in the walls. Also they tie up the mouths of all
animals inside and outside the house, for fear one of them might
swallow the child's soul. For a similar reason all persons present
in the house, even the mother herself, are obliged to keep their
mouths shut the whole time the birth is taking place. When the
question was put, Why they did not hold their noses also, lest the
child's soul should get into one of them? the answer was that breath
being exhaled as well as inhaled through the nostrils, the soul
would be expelled before it could have time to settle down. Popular
expressions in the language of civilised peoples, such as to have
one's heart in one's mouth, or the soul on the lips or in the nose,
show how natural is the idea that the life or soul may escape by the
mouth or nostrils.

Often the soul is conceived as a bird ready to take flight. This
conception has probably left traces in most languages, and it
lingers as a metaphor in poetry. The Malays carry out the conception
of the bird-soul in a number of odd ways. If the soul is a bird on
the wing, it may be attracted by rice, and so either prevented from
flying away or lured back again from its perilous flight. Thus in
Java when a child is placed on the ground for the first time (a
moment which uncultured people seem to regard as especially
dangerous), it is put in a hen-coop and the mother makes a clucking
sound, as if she were calling hens. And in Sintang, a district of
Borneo, when a person, whether man, woman, or child, has fallen out
of a house or off a tree, and has been brought home, his wife or
other kinswoman goes as speedily as possible to the spot where the
accident happened, and there strews rice, which has been coloured
yellow, while she utters the words, "Cluck! cluck! soul! So-and-so
is in his house again. Cluck! cluck! soul!" Then she gathers up the
rice in a basket, carries it to the sufferer, and drops the grains
from her hand on his head, saying again, "Cluck! cluck! soul!" Here
the intention clearly is to decoy back the loitering bird-soul and
replace it in the head of its owner.

The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and
actually to visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the
acts of which he dreams. For example, when an Indian of Brazil or
Guiana wakes up from a sound sleep, he is firmly convinced that his
soul has really been away hunting, fishing, felling trees, or
whatever else he has dreamed of doing, while all the time his body
has been lying motionless in his hammock. A whole Bororo village has
been thrown into a panic and nearly deserted because somebody had
dreamed that he saw enemies stealthily approaching it. A Macusi
Indian in weak health, who dreamed that his employer had made him
haul the canoe up a series of difficult cataracts, bitterly
reproached his master next morning for his want of consideration in
thus making a poor invalid go out and toil during the night. The
Indians of the Gran Chaco are often heard to relate the most
incredible stories as things which they have themselves seen and
heard; hence strangers who do not know them intimately say in their
haste that these Indians are liars. In point of fact the Indians are
firmly convinced of the truth of what they relate; for these
wonderful adventures are simply their dreams, which they do not
distinguish from waking realities.

Now the absence of the soul in sleep has its dangers, for if from
any cause the soul should be permanently detained away from the
body, the person thus deprived of the vital principle must die.
There is a German belief that the soul escapes from a sleeper's
mouth in the form of a white mouse or a little bird, and that to
prevent the return of the bird or animal would be fatal to the
sleeper. Hence in Transylvania they say that you should not let a
child sleep with its mouth open, or its soul will slip out in the
shape of a mouse, and the child will never wake. Many causes may
detain the sleeper's soul. Thus, his soul may meet the soul of
another sleeper and the two souls may fight; if a Guinea negro
wakens with sore bones in the morning, he thinks that his soul has
been thrashed by another soul in sleep. Or it may meet the soul of a
person just deceased and be carried off by it; hence in the Aru
Islands the inmates of a house will not sleep the night after a
death has taken place in it, because the soul of the deceased is
supposed to be still in the house and they fear to meet it in a
dream. Again, the soul of the sleeper may be prevented by an
accident or by physical force from returning to his body. When a
Dyak dreams of falling into the water, he supposes that this
accident has really befallen his spirit, and he sends for a wizard,
who fishes for the spirit with a hand-net in a basin of water till
he catches it and restores it to its owner. The Santals tell how a
man fell asleep, and growing very thirsty, his soul, in the form of
a lizard, left his body and entered a pitcher of water to drink.
Just then the owner of the pitcher happened to cover it; so the soul
could not return to the body and the man died. While his friends
were preparing to burn the body some one uncovered the pitcher to
get water. The lizard thus escaped and returned to the body, which
immediately revived; so the man rose up and asked his friends why
they were weeping. They told him they thought he was dead and were
about to burn his body. He said he had been down a well to get
water, but had found it hard to get out and had just returned. So
they saw it all.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper,
because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if
the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is
absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very
gradually, to allow the soul time to return. A Fijian in Matuku,
suddenly wakened from a nap by somebody treading on his foot, has
been heard bawling after his soul and imploring it to return. He had
just been dreaming that he was far away in Tonga, and great was his
alarm on suddenly wakening to find his body in Matuku. Death stared
him in the face unless his soul could be induced to speed at once
across the sea and reanimate its deserted tenement. The man would
probably have died of fright if a missionary had not been at hand to
allay his terror.

Still more dangerous is it in the opinion of primitive man to move a
sleeper or alter his appearance, for if this were done the soul on
its return might not be able to find or recognise its body, and so
the person would die. The Minangkabauers deem it highly improper to
blacken or dirty the face of a sleeper, lest the absent soul should
shrink from re-entering a body thus disfigured. Patani Malays fancy
that if a person's face be painted while he sleeps, the soul which
has gone out of him will not recognise him, and he will sleep on
till his face is washed. In Bombay it is thought equivalent to
murder to change the aspect of a sleeper, as by painting his face in
fantastic colours or giving moustaches to a sleeping woman. For when
the soul returns it will not know its own body, and the person will
die.

But in order that a man's soul should quit his body, it is not
necessary that he should be asleep. It may quit him in his waking
hours, and then sickness, insanity, or death will be the result.
Thus a man of the Wurunjeri tribe in Australia lay at his last gasp
because his spirit had departed from him. A medicine-man went in
pursuit and caught the spirit by the middle just as it was about to
plunge into the sunset glow, which is the light cast by the souls of
the dead as they pass in and out of the under-world, where the sun
goes to rest. Having captured the vagrant spirit, the doctor brought
it back under his opossum rug, laid himself down on the dying man,
and put the soul back into him, so that after a time he revived. The
Karens of Burma are perpetually anxious about their souls, lest
these should go roving from their bodies, leaving the owners to die.
When a man has reason to fear that his soul is about to take this
fatal step, a ceremony is performed to retain or recall it, in which
the whole family must take part. A meal is prepared consisting of a
cock and hen, a special kind of rice, and a bunch of bananas. Then
the head of the family takes the bowl which is used to skim rice,
and knocking with it thrice on the top of the houseladder says:
"_Prrrroo!_ Come back, soul, do not tarry outside! If it rains, you
will be wet. If the sun shines, you will be hot. The gnats will
sting you, the leeches will bite you, the tigers will devour you,
the thunder will crush you. _Prrrroo!_ Come back, soul! Here it will
be well with you. You shall want for nothing. Come and eat under
shelter from the wind and the storm." After that the family partakes
of the meal, and the ceremony ends with everybody tying their right
wrist with a string which has been charmed by a sorcerer. Similarly
the Lolos of South-western China believe that the soul leaves the
body in chronic illness. In that case they read a sort of elaborate
litany, calling on the soul by name and beseeching it to return from
the hills, the vales, the rivers, the forests, the fields, or from
wherever it may be straying. At the same time cups of water, wine,
and rice are set at the door for the refreshment of the weary
wandering spirit. When the ceremony is over, they tie a red cord
round the arm of the sick man to tether the soul, and this cord is
worn by him until it decays and drops off.

Some of the Congo tribes believe that when a man is ill, his soul
has left his body and is wandering at large. The aid of the sorcerer
is then called in to capture the vagrant spirit and restore it to
the invalid. Generally the physician declares that he has
successfully chased the soul into the branch of a tree. The whole
town thereupon turns out and accompanies the doctor to the tree,
where the strongest men are deputed to break off the branch in which
the soul of the sick man is supposed to be lodged. This they do and
carry the branch back to the town, insinuating by their gestures
that the burden is heavy and hard to bear. When the branch has been
brought to the sick man's hut, he is placed in an upright position
by its side, and the sorcerer performs the enchantments by which the
soul is believed to be restored to its owner.

Pining, sickness, great fright, and death are ascribed by the Bataks
of Sumatra to the absence of the soul from the body. At first they
try to beckon the wanderer back, and to lure him, like a fowl, by
strewing rice. Then the following form of words is commonly
repeated: "Come back, O soul, whether thou art lingering in the
wood, or on the hills, or in the dale. See, I call thee with a
_toemba bras,_ with an egg of the fowl Rajah _moelija,_ with the
eleven healing leaves. Detain it not, let it come straight here,
detain it not, neither in the wood, nor on the hill, nor in the
dale. That may not be. O come straight home!" Once when a popular
traveller was leaving a Kayan village, the mothers, fearing that
their children's souls might follow him on his journey, brought him
the boards on which they carry their infants and begged him to pray
that the souls of the little ones would return to the familiar
boards and not go away with him into the far country. To each board
was fastened a looped string for the purpose of tethering the
vagrant spirits, and through the loop each baby was made to pass a
chubby finger to make sure that its tiny soul would not wander away.

In an Indian story a king conveys his soul into the dead body of a
Brahman, and a hunchback conveys his soul into the deserted body of
the king. The hunchback is now king and the king is a Brahman.
However, the hunchback is induced to show his skill by transferring
his soul to the dead body of a parrot, and the king seizes the
opportunity to regain possession of his own body. A tale of the same
type, with variations of detail, reappears among the Malays. A king
has incautiously transferred his soul to an ape, upon which the
vizier adroitly inserts his own soul into the king's body and so
takes possession of the queen and the kingdom, while the true king
languishes at court in the outward semblance of an ape. But one day
the false king, who played for high stakes, was watching a combat of
rams, and it happened that the animal on which he had laid his money
fell down dead. All efforts to restore animation proved unavailing
till the false king, with the instinct of a true sportsman,
transferred his own soul to the body of the deceased ram, and thus
renewed the fray. The real king in the body of the ape saw his
chance, and with great presence of mind darted back into his own
body, which the vizier had rashly vacated. So he came to his own
again, and the usurper in the ram's body met with the fate he richly
deserved. Similarly the Greeks told how the soul of Hermotimus of
Clazomenae used to quit his body and roam far and wide, bringing
back intelligence of what he had seen on his rambles to his friends
at home; until one day, when his spirit was abroad, his enemies
contrived to seize his deserted body and committed it to the flames.

The departure of the soul is not always voluntary. It may be
extracted from the body against its will by ghosts, demons, or
sorcerers. Hence, when a funeral is passing the house, the Karens
tie their children with a special kind of string to a particular
part of the house, lest the souls of the children should leave their
bodies and go into the corpse which is passing. The children are
kept tied in this way until the corpse is out of sight. And after
the corpse has been laid in the grave, but before the earth has been
shovelled in, the mourners and friends range themselves round the
grave, each with a bamboo split lengthwise in one hand and a little
stick in the other; each man thrusts his bamboo into the grave, and
drawing the stick along the groove of the bamboo points out to his
soul that in this way it may easily climb up out of the tomb. While
the earth is being shovelled in, the bamboos are kept out of the
way, lest the souls should be in them, and so should be
inadvertently buried with the earth as it is being thrown into the
grave; and when the people leave the spot they carry away the
bamboos, begging their souls to come with them. Further, on
returning from the grave each Karen provides himself with three
little hooks made of branches of trees, and calling his spirit to
follow him, at short intervals, as he returns, he makes a motion as
if hooking it, and then thrusts the hook into the ground. This is
done to prevent the soul of the living from staying behind with the
soul of the dead. When the Karo-Bataks have buried somebody and are
filling in the grave, a sorceress runs about beating the air with a
stick. This she does in order to drive away the souls of the
survivors, for if one of these souls happened to slip into the grave
and to be covered up with earth, its owner would die.

In Uea, one of the Loyalty Islands, the souls of the dead seem to
have been credited with the power of stealing the souls of the
living. For when a man was sick the soul-doctor would go with a
large troop of men and women to the graveyard. Here the men played
on flutes and the women whistled softly to lure the soul home. After
this had gone on for some time they formed in procession and moved
homewards, the flutes playing and the women whistling all the way,
while they led back the wandering soul and drove it gently along
with open palms. On entering the patient's dwelling they commanded
the soul in a loud voice to enter his body.

Often the abduction of a man's soul is set down to demons. Thus fits
and convulsions are generally ascribed by the Chinese to the agency
of certain mischievous spirits who love to draw men's souls out of
their bodies. At Amoy the spirits who serve babies and children in
this way rejoice in the high-sounding titles of "celestial agencies
bestriding galloping horses" and "literary graduates residing
halfway up in the sky." When an infant is writhing in convulsions,
the frightened mother hastens to the roof of the house, and, waving
about a bamboo pole to which one of the child's garments is
attached, cries out several times "My child So-and-so, come back,
return home!" Meantime, another inmate of the house bangs away at a
gong in the hope of attracting the attention of the strayed soul,
which is supposed to recognise the familiar garment and to slip into
it. The garment containing the soul is then placed on or beside the
child, and if the child does not die recovery is sure to follow,
sooner or later. Similarly some Indians catch a man's lost soul in
his boots and restore it to his body by putting his feet into them.

In the Moluccas when a man is unwell it is thought that some devil
has carried away his soul to the tree, mountain, or hill where he
(the devil) resides. A sorcerer having pointed out the devil's
abode, the friends of the patient carry thither cooked rice, fruit,
fish, raw eggs, a hen, a chicken, a silken robe, gold, armlets, and
so forth. Having set out the food in order they pray, saying: "We
come to offer to you, O devil, this offering of food, clothes, gold,
and so on; take it and release the soul of the patient for whom we
pray. Let it return to his body, and he who now is sick shall be
made whole." Then they eat a little and let the hen loose as a
ransom for the soul of the patient; also they put down the raw eggs;
but the silken robe, the gold, and the armlets they take home with
them. As soon as they are come to the house they place a flat bowl
containing the offerings which have been brought back at the sick
man's head, and say to him: "Now is your soul released, and you
shall fare well and live to grey hairs on the earth."

Demons are especially feared by persons who have just entered a new
house. Hence at a house-warming among the Alfoors of Minahassa in
Celebes the priest performs a ceremony for the purpose of restoring
their souls to the inmates. He hangs up a bag at the place of
sacrifice and then goes through a list of the gods. There are so
many of them that this takes him the whole night through without
stopping. In the morning he offers the gods an egg and some rice. By
this time the souls of the household are supposed to be gathered in
the bag. So the priest takes the bag, and holding it on the head of
the master of the house, says, "Here you have your soul; go (soul)
to-morrow away again." He then does the same, saying the same words,
to the housewife and all the other members of the family. Amongst
the same Alfoors one way of recovering a sick man's soul is to let
down a bowl by a belt out of a window and fish for the soul till it
is caught in the bowl and hauled up. And among the same people, when
a priest is bringing back a sick man's soul which he has caught in a
cloth, he is preceded by a girl holding the large leaf of a certain
palm over his head as an umbrella to keep him and the soul from
getting wet, in case it should rain; and he is followed by a man
brandishing a sword to deter other souls from any attempt at
rescuing the captured spirit.

Sometimes the lost soul is brought back in a visible shape. The
Salish or Flathead Indians of Oregon believe that a man's soul may
be separated for a time from his body without causing death and
without the man being aware of his loss. It is necessary, however,
that the lost soul should be soon found and restored to its owner or
he will die. The name of the man who has lost his soul is revealed
in a dream to the medicine-man, who hastens to inform the sufferer
of his loss. Generally a number of men have sustained a like loss at
the same time; all their names are revealed to the medicine-man, and
all employ him to recover their souls. The whole night long these
soulless men go about the village from lodge to lodge, dancing and
singing. Towards daybreak they go into a separate lodge, which is
closed up so as to be totally dark. A small hole is then made in the
roof, through which the medicine-man, with a bunch of feathers,
brushes in the souls, in the shape of bits of bone and the like,
which he receives on a piece of matting. A fire is next kindled, by
the light of which the medicine-man sorts out the souls. First he
puts aside the souls of dead people, of which there are usually
several; for if he were to give the soul of a dead person to a
living man, the man would die instantly. Next he picks out the souls
of all the persons present, and making them all to sit down before
him, he takes the soul of each, in the shape of a splinter of bone,
wood, or shell, and placing it on the owner's head, pats it with
many prayers and contortions till it descends into the heart and so
resumes its proper place.

Again, souls may be extracted from their bodies or detained on their
wanderings not only by ghosts and demons but also by men, especially
by sorcerers. In Fiji, if a criminal refused to confess, the chief
sent for a scarf with which "to catch away the soul of the rogue."
At the sight or even at the mention of the scarf the culprit
generally made a clean breast. For if he did not, the scarf would be
waved over his head till his soul was caught in it, when it would be
carefully folded up and nailed to the end of a chief's canoe; and
for want of his soul the criminal would pine and die. The sorcerers
of Danger Island used to set snares for souls. The snares were made
of stout cinet, about fifteen to thirty feet long, with loops on
either side of different sizes, to suit the different sizes of
souls; for fat souls there were large loops, for thin souls there
were small ones. When a man was sick against whom the sorcerers had
a grudge, they set up these soul-snares near his house and watched
for the flight of his soul. If in the shape of a bird or an insect
it was caught in the snare, the man would infallibly die. In some
parts of West Africa, indeed, wizards are continually setting traps
to catch souls that wander from their bodies in sleep; and when they
have caught one, they tie it up over the fire, and as it shrivels in
the heat the owner sickens. This is done, not out of any grudge
towards the sufferer, but purely as a matter of business. The wizard
does not care whose soul he has captured, and will readily restore
it to its owner, if only he is paid for doing so. Some sorcerers
keep regular asylums for strayed souls, and anybody who has lost or
mislaid his own soul can always have another one from the asylum on
payment of the usual fee. No blame whatever attaches to men who keep
these private asylums or set traps for passing souls; it is their
profession, and in the exercise of it they are actuated by no harsh
or unkindly feelings. But there are also wretches who from pure
spite or for the sake of lucre set and bait traps with the
deliberate purpose of catching the soul of a particular man; and in
the bottom of the pot, hidden by the bait, are knives and sharp
hooks which tear and rend the poor soul, either killing it outright
or mauling it so as to impair the health of its owner when it
succeeds in escaping and returning to him. Miss Kingsley knew a
Kruman who became very anxious about his soul, because for several
nights he had smelt in his dreams the savoury smell of smoked
crawfish seasoned with red pepper. Clearly some ill-wisher had set a
trap baited with this dainty for his dream-soul, intending to do him
grievous bodily, or rather spiritual, harm; and for the next few
nights great pains were taken to keep his soul from straying abroad
in his sleep. In the sweltering heat of the tropical night he lay
sweating and snorting under a blanket, his nose and mouth tied up
with a handkerchief to prevent the escape of his precious soul. In
Hawaii there were sorcerers who caught souls of living people, shut
them up in calabashes, and gave them to people to eat. By squeezing
a captured soul in their hands they discovered the place where
people had been secretly buried.

Nowhere perhaps is the art of abducting human souls more carefully
cultivated or carried to higher perfection than in the Malay
Peninsula. Here the methods by which the wizard works his will are
various, and so too are his motives. Sometimes he desires to destroy
an enemy, sometimes to win the love of a cold or bashful beauty.
Thus, to take an instance of the latter sort of charm, the following
are the directions given for securing the soul of one whom you wish
to render distraught. When the moon, just risen, looks red above the
eastern horizon, go out, and standing in the moonlight, with the big
toe of your right foot on the big toe of your left, make a
speaking-trumpet of your right hand and recite through it the
following words:


   "OM. I loose my shaft, I loose it and the moon clouds over,
    I loose it, and the sun is extinguished.
    I loose it, and the stars burn dim.
    But it is not the sun, moon, and stars that I shoot at,
    It is the stalk of the heart of that child of the congregation,
    So-and-so.

    Cluck! cluck! soul of So-and-so, come and walk with me,
    Come and sit with me,
    Come and sleep and share my pillow.
    Cluck! cluck! soul."


Repeat this thrice and after every repetition blow through your
hollow fist. Or you may catch the soul in your turban, thus. Go out
on the night of the full moon and the two succeeding nights; sit
down on an ant-hill facing the moon, burn incense, and recite the
following incantation:


   "I bring you a betel leaf to chew,
    Dab the lime on to it, Prince Ferocious,
    For Somebody, Prince Distraction's daughter, to chew.
    Somebody at sunrise be distraught for love of me
    Somebody at sunset be distraught for love of me.
    As you remember your parents, remember me;
    As you remember your house and houseladder, remember me;
    When thunder rumbles, remember me;
    When wind whistles, remember me;
    When the heavens rain, remember me;
    When cocks crow, remember me;
    When the dial-bird tells its tales, remember me;
    When you look up at the sun, remember me;
    When you look up at the moon, remember me,
    For in that self-same moon I am there.
    Cluck! cluck! soul of Somebody come hither to me.
    I do not mean to let you have my soul,
    Let your soul come hither to mine."


Now wave the end of your turban towards the moon seven times each
night. Go home and put it under your pillow, and if you want to wear
it in the daytime, burn incense and say, "It is not a turban that I
carry in my girdle, but the soul of Somebody."

The Indians of the Nass River, in British Columbia, are impressed
with a belief that a physician may swallow his patient's soul by
mistake. A doctor who is believed to have done so is made by the
other members of the faculty to stand over the patient, while one of
them thrusts his fingers down the doctor's throat, another kneads
him in the stomach with his knuckles, and a third slaps him on the
back. If the soul is not in him after all, and if the same process
has been repeated upon all the medical men without success, it is
concluded that the soul must be in the head-doctor's box. A party of
doctors, therefore, waits upon him at his house and requests him to
produce his box. When he has done so and arranged its contents on a
new mat, they take the votary of Aesculapius and hold him up by the
heels with his head in a hole in the floor. In this position they
wash his head, and "any water remaining from the ablution is taken
and poured upon the sick man's head." No doubt the lost soul is in
the water.



3. The Soul as a Shadow and a Reflection

BUT the spiritual dangers I have enumerated are not the only ones
which beset the savage. Often he regards his shadow or reflection as
his soul, or at all events as a vital part of himself, and as such
it is necessarily a source of danger to him. For if it is trampled
upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it were done
to his person; and if it is detached from him entirely (as he
believes that it may be) he will die. In the island of Wetar there
are magicians who can make a man ill by stabbing his shadow with a
pike or hacking it with a sword. After Sankara had destroyed the
Buddhists in India, it is said that he journeyed to Nepaul, where he
had some difference of opinion with the Grand Lama. To prove his
supernatural powers, he soared into the air. But as he mounted up
the Grand Lama, perceiving his shadow swaying and wavering on the
ground, struck his knife into it and down fell Sankara and broke his
neck.

In the Banks Islands there are some stones of a remarkably long
shape which go by the name of "eating ghosts," because certain
powerful and dangerous ghosts are believed to lodge in them. If a
man's shadow falls on one of these stones, the ghost will draw his
soul out from him, so that he will die. Such stones, therefore, are
set in a house to guard it; and a messenger sent to a house by the
absent owner will call out the name of the sender, lest the watchful
ghost in the stone should fancy that he came with evil intent and
should do him a mischief. At a funeral in China, when the lid is
about to be placed on the coffin, most of the bystanders, with the
exception of the nearest kin, retire a few steps or even retreat to
another room, for a person's health is believed to be endangered by
allowing his shadow to be enclosed in a coffin. And when the coffin
is about to be lowered into the grave most of the spectators recoil
to a little distance lest their shadows should fall into the grave
and harm should thus be done to their persons. The geomancer and his
assistants stand on the side of the grave which is turned away from
the sun; and the grave-diggers and coffin-bearers attach their
shadows firmly to their persons by tying a strip of cloth tightly
round their waists. Nor is it human beings alone who are thus liable
to be injured by means of their shadows. Animals are to some extent
in the same predicament. A small snail, which frequents the
neighbourhood of the limestone hills in Perak, is believed to suck
the blood of cattle through their shadows; hence the beasts grow
lean and sometimes die from loss of blood. The ancients supposed
that in Arabia, if a hyaena trod on a man's shadow, it deprived him
of the power of speech and motion; and that if a dog, standing on a
roof in the moonlight, cast a shadow on the ground and a hyaena trod
on it, the dog would fall down as if dragged with a rope. Clearly in
these cases the shadow, if not equivalent to the soul, is at least
regarded as a living part of the man or the animal, so that injury
done to the shadow is felt by the person or animal as if it were
done to his body.

Conversely, if the shadow is a vital part of a man or an animal, it
may under certain circumstances be as hazardous to be touched by it
as it would be to come into contact with the person or animal. Hence
the savage makes it a rule to shun the shadow of certain persons
whom for various reasons he regards as sources of dangerous
influence. Amongst the dangerous classes he commonly ranks mourners
and women in general, but especially his mother-in-law. The Shuswap
Indians think that the shadow of a mourner falling upon a person
would make him sick. Amongst the Kurnai of Victoria novices at
initiation were cautioned not to let a woman's shadow fall across
them, as this would make them thin, lazy, and stupid. An Australian
native is said to have once nearly died of fright because the shadow
of his mother-in-law fell on his legs as he lay asleep under a tree.
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his
mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
In the Yuin tribes of New South Wales the rule which forbade a man
to hold any communication with his wife's mother was very strict. He
might not look at her or even in her direction. It was a ground of
divorce if his shadow happened to fall on his mother-in-law: in that
case he had to leave his wife, and she returned to her parents. In
New Britain the native imagination fails to conceive the extent and
nature of the calamities which would result from a man's
accidentally speaking to his wife's mother; suicide of one or both
would probably be the only course open to them. The most solemn form
of oath a New Briton can take is, "Sir, if I am not telling the
truth, I hope I may shake hands with my mother-in-law."

Where the shadow is regarded as so intimately bound up with the life
of the man that its loss entails debility or death, it is natural to
expect that its diminution should be regarded with solicitude and
apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease in the vital
energy of its owner. In Amboyna and Uliase, two islands near the
equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at
noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at
mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the
shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty warrior,
Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with the length of his
shadow. In the morning, when his shadow fell longest, his strength
was greatest; but as the shadow shortened towards noon his strength
ebbed with it, till exactly at noon it reached its lowest point;
then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his strength
returned. A certain hero discovered the secret of Tukaitawa's
strength and slew him at noon. The savage Besisis of the Malay
Peninsula fear to bury their dead at noon, because they fancy that
the shortness of their shadows at that hour would sympathetically
shorten their own lives.

Nowhere, perhaps, does the equivalence of the shadow to the life or
soul come out more clearly than in some customs practised to this
day in South-eastern Europe. In modern Greece, when the foundation
of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to kill a cock, a
ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone,
under which the animal is afterwards buried. The object of the
sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the building. But
sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a man
to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body, or a part of
it, or his shadow, and buries the measure under the
foundation-stone; or he lays the foundation-stone upon the man's
shadow. It is believed that the man will die within the year. The
Roumanians of Transylvania think that he whose shadow is thus
immured will die within forty days; so persons passing by a building
which is in course of erection may hear a warning cry, "Beware lest
they take thy shadow!" Not long ago there were still shadow-traders
whose business it was to provide architects with the shadows
necessary for securing their walls. In these cases the measure of
the shadow is looked on as equivalent to the shadow itself, and to
bury it is to bury the life or soul of the man, who, deprived of it,
must die. Thus the custom is a substitute for the old practice of
immuring a living person in the walls, or crushing him under the
foundation-stone of a new building, in order to give strength and
durability to the structure, or more definitely in order that the
angry ghost may haunt the place and guard it against the intrusion
of enemies.

As some peoples believe a man's soul to be in his shadow, so other
(or the same) peoples believe it to be in his reflection in water or
a mirror. Thus "the Andamanese do not regard their shadows but their
reflections (in any mirror) as their souls." When the Motumotu of
New Guinea first saw their likenesses in a looking-glass, they
thought that their reflections were their souls. In New Caledonia
the old men are of opinion that a person's reflection in water or a
mirror is his soul; but the younger men, taught by the Catholic
priests, maintain that it is a reflection and nothing more, just
like the reflection of palm-trees in the water. The reflection-soul,
being external to the man, is exposed to much the same dangers as
the shadow-soul. The Zulus will not look into a dark pool because
they think there is a beast in it which will take away their
reflections, so that they die. The Basutos say that crocodiles have
the power of thus killing a man by dragging his reflection under
water. When one of them dies suddenly and from no apparent cause,
his relatives will allege that a crocodile must have taken his
shadow some time when he crossed a stream. In Saddle Island,
Melanesia, there is a pool "into which if any one looks he dies; the
malignant spirit takes hold upon his life by means of his reflection
on the water."

We can now understand why it was a maxim both in ancient India and
ancient Greece not to look at one's reflection in water, and why the
Greeks regarded it as an omen of death if a man dreamed of seeing
himself so reflected. They feared that the water-spirits would drag
the person's reflection or soul under water, leaving him soulless to
perish. This was probably the origin of the classical story of the
beautiful Narcissus, who languished and died through seeing his
reflection in the water.

Further, we can now explain the widespread custom of covering up
mirrors or turning them to the wall after a death has taken place in
the house. It is feared that the soul, projected out of the person
in the shape of his reflection in the mirror, may be carried off by
the ghost of the departed, which is commonly supposed to linger
about the house till the burial. The custom is thus exactly parallel
to the Aru custom of not sleeping in a house after a death for fear
that the soul, projected out of the body in a dream, may meet the
ghost and be carried off by it. The reason why sick people should
not see themselves in a mirror, and why the mirror in a sick-room is
therefore covered up, is also plain; in time of sickness, when the
soul might take flight so easily, it is particularly dangerous to
project it out of the body by means of the reflection in a mirror.
The rule is therefore precisely parallel to the rule observed by
some peoples of not allowing sick people to sleep; for in sleep the
soul is projected out of the body, and there is always a risk that
it may not return.

As with shadows and reflections, so with portraits; they are often
believed to contain the soul of the person portrayed. People who
hold this belief are naturally loth to have their likenesses taken;
for if the portrait is the soul, or at least a vital part of the
person portrayed, whoever possesses the portrait will be able to
exercise a fatal influence over the original of it. Thus the
Esquimaux of Bering Strait believe that persons dealing in
witchcraft have the power of stealing a person's shade, so that
without it he will pine away and die. Once at a village on the lower
Yukon River an explorer had set up his camera to get a picture of
the people as they were moving about among their houses. While he
was focusing the instrument, the headman of the village came up and
insisted on peeping under the cloth. Being allowed to do so, he
gazed intently for a minute at the moving figures on the ground
glass, then suddenly withdrew his head and bawled at the top of his
voice to the people, "He has all of your shades in this box." A
panic ensued among the group, and in an instant they disappeared
helterskelter into their houses. The Tepehuanes of Mexico stood in
mortal terror of the camera, and five days' persuasion was necessary
to induce them to pose for it. When at last they consented, they
looked like criminals about to be executed. They believed that by
photographing people the artist could carry off their souls and
devour them at his leisure moments. They said that, when the
pictures reached his country, they would die or some other evil
would befall them. When Dr. Catat and some companions were exploring
the Bara country on the west coast of Madagascar, the people
suddenly became hostile. The day before the travellers, not without
difficulty, had photographed the royal family, and now found
themselves accused of taking the souls of the natives for the
purpose of selling them when they returned to France. Denial was
vain; in compliance with the custom of the country they were obliged
to catch the souls, which were then put into a basket and ordered by
Dr. Catat to return to their respective owners.

Some villagers in Sikhim betrayed a lively horror and hid away
whenever the lens of a camera, or "the evil eye of the box" as they
called it, was turned on them. They thought it took away their souls
with their pictures, and so put it in the power of the owner of the
pictures to cast spells on them, and they alleged that a photograph
of the scenery blighted the landscape. Until the reign of the late
King of Siam no Siamese coins were ever stamped with the image of
the king, "for at that time there was a strong prejudice against the
making of portraits in any medium. Europeans who travel into the
jungle have, even at the present time, only to point a camera at a
crowd to procure its instant dispersion. When a copy of the face of
a person is made and taken away from him, a portion of his life goes
with the picture. Unless the sovereign had been blessed with the
years of a Methusaleh he could scarcely have permitted his life to
be distributed in small pieces together with the coins of the
realm."

Beliefs of the same sort still linger in various parts of Europe.
Not very many years ago some old women in the Greek island of
Carpathus were very angry at having their likenesses drawn, thinking
that in consequence they would pine and die. There are persons in
the West of Scotland "who refuse to have their likenesses taken lest
it prove unlucky; and give as instances the cases of several of
their friends who never had a day's health after being
photographed."




XIX. Tabooed Acts



1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers

SO much for the primitive conceptions of the soul and the dangers to
which it is exposed. These conceptions are not limited to one people
or country; with variations of detail they are found all over the
world, and survive, as we have seen, in modern Europe. Beliefs so
deep-seated and so widespread must necessarily have contributed to
shape the mould in which the early kingship was cast. For if every
person was at such pains to save his own soul from the perils which
threatened it on so many sides, how much more carefully must _he_
have been guarded upon whose life hung the welfare and even the
existence of the whole people, and whom therefore it was the common
interest of all to preserve? Therefore we should expect to find the
king's life protected by a system of precautions or safeguards still
more numerous and minute than those which in primitive society every
man adopts for the safety of his own soul. Now in point of fact the
life of the early kings is regulated, as we have seen and shall see
more fully presently, by a very exact code of rules. May we not then
conjecture that these rules are in fact the very safeguards which we
should expect to find adopted for the protection of the king's life?
An examination of the rules themselves confirms this conjecture. For
from this it appears that some of the rules observed by the kings
are identical with those observed by private persons out of regard
for the safety of their souls; and even of those which seem peculiar
to the king, many, if not all, are most readily explained on the
hypothesis that they are nothing but safeguards or lifeguards of the
king. I will now enumerate some of these royal rules or taboos,
offering on each of them such comments and explanations as may serve
to set the original intention of the rule in its proper light.

As the object of the royal taboos is to isolate the king from all
sources of danger, their general effect is to compel him to live in
a state of seclusion, more or less complete, according to the number
and stringency of the rules he observes. Now of all sources of
danger none are more dreaded by the savage than magic and
witchcraft, and he suspects all strangers of practising these black
arts. To guard against the baneful influence exerted voluntarily or
involuntarily by strangers is therefore an elementary dictate of
savage prudence. Hence before strangers are allowed to enter a
district, or at least before they are permitted to mingle freely
with the inhabitants, certain ceremonies are often performed by the
natives of the country for the purpose of disarming the strangers of
their magical powers, of counteracting the baneful influence which
is believed to emanate from them, or of disinfecting, so to speak,
the tainted atmosphere by which they are supposed to be surrounded.
Thus, when the ambassadors sent by Justin II., Emperor of the East,
to conclude a peace with the Turks had reached their destination,
they were received by shamans, who subjected them to a ceremonial
purification for the purpose of exorcising all harmful influence.
Having deposited the goods brought by the ambassadors in an open
place, these wizards carried burning branches of incense round them,
while they rang a bell and beat on a tambourine, snorting and
falling into a state of frenzy in their efforts to dispel the powers
of evil. Afterwards they purified the ambassadors themselves by
leading them through the flames. In the island of Nanumea (South
Pacific) strangers from ships or from other islands were not allowed
to communicate with the people until they all, or a few as
representatives of the rest, had been taken to each of the four
temples in the island, and prayers offered that the god would avert
any disease or treachery which these strangers might have brought
with them. Meat offerings were also laid upon the altars,
accompanied by songs and dances in honour of the god. While these
ceremonies were going on, all the people except the priests and
their attendants kept out of sight. Amongst the Ot Danoms of Borneo
it is the custom that strangers entering the territory should pay to
the natives a certain sum, which is spent in the sacrifice of
buffaloes or pigs to the spirits of the land and water, in order to
reconcile them to the presence of the strangers, and to induce them
not to withdraw their favour from the people of the country, but to
bless the rice-harvest, and so forth. The men of a certain district
in Borneo, fearing to look upon a European traveller lest he should
make them ill, warned their wives and children not to go near him.
Those who could not restrain their curiosity killed fowls to appease
the evil spirits and smeared themselves with the blood. "More
dreaded," says a traveller in Central Borneo, "than the evil spirits
of the neighbourhood are the evil spirits from a distance which
accompany travellers. When a company from the middle Mahakam River
visited me among the Blu-u Kayans in the year 1897, no woman showed
herself outside her house without a burning bundle of _plehiding_
bark, the stinking smoke of which drives away evil spirits."

When Crevaux was travelling in South America he entered a village of
the Apalai Indians. A few moments after his arrival some of the
Indians brought him a number of large black ants, of a species whose
bite is painful, fastened on palm leaves. Then all the people of the
village, without distinction of age or sex, presented themselves to
him, and he had to sting them all with the ants on their faces,
thighs, and other parts of their bodies. Sometimes, when he applied
the ants too tenderly, they called out "More! more!" and were not
satisfied till their skin was thickly studded with tiny swellings
like what might have been produced by whipping them with nettles.
The object of this ceremony is made plain by the custom observed in
Amboyna and Uliase of sprinkling sick people with pungent spices,
such as ginger and cloves, chewed fine, in order by the prickling
sensation to drive away the demon of disease which may be clinging
to their persons. In Java a popular cure for gout or rheumatism is
to rub Spanish pepper into the nails of the fingers and toes of the
sufferer; the pungency of the pepper is supposed to be too much for
the gout or rheumatism, who accordingly departs in haste. So on the
Slave Coast the mother of a sick child sometimes believes that an
evil spirit has taken possession of the child's body, and in order
to drive him out, she makes small cuts in the body of the little
sufferer and inserts green peppers or spices in the wounds,
believing that she will thereby hurt the evil spirit and force him
to be gone. The poor child naturally screams with pain, but the
mother hardens her heart in the belief that the demon is suffering
equally.

It is probable that the same dread of strangers, rather than any
desire to do them honour, is the motive of certain ceremonies which
are sometimes observed at their reception, but of which the
intention is not directly stated. In the Ongtong Java Islands, which
are inhabited by Polynesians, the priests or sorcerers seem to wield
great influence. Their main business is to summon or exorcise
spirits for the purpose of averting or dispelling sickness, and of
procuring favourable winds, a good catch of fish, and so on. When
strangers land on the islands, they are first of all received by the
sorcerers, sprinkled with water, anointed with oil, and girt with
dried pandanus leaves. At the same time sand and water are freely
thrown about in all directions, and the newcomer and his boat are
wiped with green leaves. After this ceremony the strangers are
introduced by the sorcerers to the chief. In Afghanistan and in some
parts of Persia the traveller, before he enters a village, is
frequently received with a sacrifice of animal life or food, or of
fire and incense. The Afghan Boundary Mission, in passing by
villages in Afghanistan, was often met with fire and incense.
Sometimes a tray of lighted embers is thrown under the hoofs of the
traveller's horse, with the words, "You are welcome." On entering a
village in Central Africa Emin Pasha was received with the sacrifice
of two goats; their blood was sprinkled on the path and the chief
stepped over the blood to greet Emin. Sometimes the dread of
strangers and their magic is too great to allow of their reception
on any terms. Thus when Speke arrived at a certain village, the
natives shut their doors against him, "because they had never before
seen a white man nor the tin boxes that the men were carrying: 'Who
knows,' they said, 'but that these very boxes are the plundering
Watuta transformed and come to kill us? You cannot be admitted.' No
persuasion could avail with them, and the party had to proceed to
the next village."

The fear thus entertained of alien visitors is often mutual.
Entering a strange land the savage feels that he is treading
enchanted ground, and he takes steps to guard against the demons
that haunt it and the magical arts of its inhabitants. Thus on going
to a strange land the Maoris performed certain ceremonies to make it
"common," lest it might have been previously "sacred." When Baron
Miklucho-Maclay was approaching a village on the Maclay Coast of New
Guinea, one of the natives who accompanied him broke a branch from a
tree and going aside whispered to it for a while; then stepping up
to each member of the party, one after another, he spat something
upon his back and gave him some blows with the branch. Lastly, he
went into the forest and buried the branch under withered leaves in
the thickest part of the jungle. This ceremony was believed to
protect the party against all treachery and danger in the village
they were approaching. The idea probably was that the malignant
influences were drawn off from the persons into the branch and
buried with it in the depths of the forest. In Australia, when a
strange tribe has been invited into a district and is approaching
the encampment of the tribe which owns the land, "the strangers
carry lighted bark or burning sticks in their hands, for the
purpose, they say, of clearing and purifying the air." When the
Toradjas are on a head-hunting expedition and have entered the
enemy's country, they may not eat any fruits which the foe has
planted nor any animal which he has reared until they have first
committed an act of hostility, as by burning a house or killing a
man. They think that if they broke this rule they would receive
something of the soul or spiritual essence of the enemy into
themselves, which would destroy the mystic virtue of their
talismans.

Again, it is believed that a man who has been on a journey may have
contracted some magic evil from the strangers with whom he has
associated. Hence, on returning home, before he is readmitted to the
society of his tribe and friends, he has to undergo certain
purificatory ceremonies. Thus the Bechuanas "cleanse or purify
themselves after journeys by shaving their heads, etc., lest they
should have contracted from strangers some evil by witchcraft or
sorcery." In some parts of Western Africa, when a man returns home
after a long absence, before he is allowed to visit his wife, he
must wash his person with a particular fluid, and receive from the
sorcerer a certain mark on his forehead, in order to counteract any
magic spell which a stranger woman may have cast on him in his
absence, and which might be communicated through him to the women of
his village. Two Hindoo ambassadors, who had been sent to England by
a native prince and had returned to India, were considered to have
so polluted themselves by contact with strangers that nothing but
being born again could restore them to purity. "For the purpose of
regeneration it is directed to make an image of pure gold of the
female power of nature, in the shape either of a woman or of a cow.
In this statue the person to be regenerated is enclosed, and dragged
through the usual channel. As a statue of pure gold and of proper
dimensions would be too expensive, it is sufficient to make an image
of the sacred _Yoni,_ through which the person to be regenerated is
to pass." Such an image of pure gold was made at the prince's
command, and his ambassadors were born again by being dragged
through it.

When precautions like these are taken on behalf of the people in
general against the malignant influence supposed to be exercised by
strangers, it is no wonder that special measures are adopted to
protect the king from the same insidious danger. In the middle ages
the envoys who visited a Tartar Khan were obliged to pass between
two fires before they were admitted to his presence, and the gifts
they brought were also carried between the fires. The reason
assigned for the custom was that the fire purged away any magic
influence which the strangers might mean to exercise over the Khan.
When subject chiefs come with their retinues to visit Kalamba (the
most powerful chief of the Bashilange in the Congo Basin) for the
first time or after being rebellious, they have to bathe, men and
women together, in two brooks on two successive days, passing the
nights under the open sky in the market-place. After the second bath
they proceed, entirely naked, to the house of Kalamba, who makes a
long white mark on the breast and forehead of each of them. Then
they return to the market-place and dress, after which they undergo
the pepper ordeal. Pepper is dropped into the eyes of each of them,
and while this is being done the sufferer has to make a confession
of all his sins, to answer all questions that may be put to him, and
to take certain vows. This ends the ceremony, and the strangers are
now free to take up their quarters in the town for as long as they
choose to remain.



2. Taboos on Eating and Drinking

IN THE OPINION of savages the acts of eating and drinking are
attended with special danger; for at these times the soul may escape
from the mouth, or be extracted by the magic arts of an enemy
present. Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast "the
common belief seems to be that the indwelling spirit leaves the body
and returns to it through the mouth; hence, should it have gone out,
it behoves a man to be careful about opening his mouth, lest a
homeless spirit should take advantage of the opportunity and enter
his body. This, it appears, is considered most likely to take place
while the man is eating." Precautions are therefore adopted to guard
against these dangers. Thus of the Bataks it is said that "since the
soul can leave the body, they always take care to prevent their soul
from straying on occasions when they have most need of it. But it is
only possible to prevent the soul from straying when one is in the
house. At feasts one may find the whole house shut up, in order that
the soul may stay and enjoy the good things set before it." The
Zafimanelo in Madagascar lock their doors when they eat, and hardly
any one ever sees them eating. The Warua will not allow any one to
see them eating and drinking, being doubly particular that no person
of the opposite sex shall see them doing so. "I had to pay a man to
let me see him drink; I could not make a man let a woman see him
drink." When offered a drink they often ask that a cloth may be held
up to hide them whilst drinking.

If these are the ordinary precautions taken by common people, the
precautions taken by kings are extraordinary. The king of Loango may
not be seen eating or drinking by man or beast under pain of death.
A favourite dog having broken into the room where the king was
dining, the king ordered it to be killed on the spot. Once the
king's own son, a boy of twelve years old, inadvertently saw the
king drink. Immediately the king ordered him to be finely apparelled
and feasted, after which he commanded him to be cut in quarters, and
carried about the city with a proclamation that he had seen the king
drink. "When the king has a mind to drink, he has a cup of wine
brought; he that brings it has a bell in his hand, and as soon as he
has delivered the cup to the king, he turns his face from him and
rings the bell, on which all present fall down with their faces to
the ground, and continue so till the king has drank. . . . His
eating is much in the same style, for which he has a house on
purpose, where his victuals are set upon a bensa or table: which he
goes to, and shuts the door: when he has done, he knocks and comes
out. So that none ever see the king eat or drink. For it is believed
that if any one should, the king shall immediately die." The
remnants of his food are buried, doubtless to prevent them from
falling into the hands of sorcerers, who by means of these fragments
might cast a fatal spell over the monarch. The rules observed by the
neighbouring king of Cacongo were similar; it was thought that the
king would die if any of his subjects were to see him drink. It is a
capital offence to see the king of Dahomey at his meals. When he
drinks in public, as he does on extraordinary occasions, he hides
himself behind a curtain, or handkerchiefs are held up round his
head, and all the people throw themselves with their faces to the
earth. When the king of Bunyoro in Central Africa went to drink milk
in the dairy, every man must leave the royal enclosure and all the
women had to cover their heads till the king returned. No one might
see him drink. One wife accompanied him to the dairy and handed him
the milk-pot, but she turned away her face while he drained it.



3. Taboos on Showing the Face

IN SOME of the preceding cases the intention of eating and drinking
in strict seclusion may perhaps be to hinder evil influences from
entering the body rather than to prevent the escape of the soul.
This certainly is the motive of some drinking customs observed by
natives of the Congo region. Thus we are told of these people that
"there is hardly a native who would dare to swallow a liquid without
first conjuring the spirits. One of them rings a bell all the time
he is drinking; another crouches down and places his left hand on
the earth; another veils his head; another puts a stalk of grass or
a leaf in his hair, or marks his forehead with a line of clay. This
fetish custom assumes very varied forms. To explain them, the black
is satisfied to say that they are an energetic mode of conjuring
spirits." In this part of the world a chief will commonly ring a
bell at each draught of beer which he swallows, and at the same
moment a lad stationed in front of him brandishes a spear "to keep
at bay the spirits which might try to sneak into the old chief's
body by the same road as the beer." The same motive of warding off
evil spirits probably explains the custom observed by some African
sultans of veiling their faces. The Sultan of Darfur wraps up his
face with a piece of white muslin, which goes round his head several
times, covering his mouth and nose first, and then his forehead, so
that only his eyes are visible. The same custom of veiling the face
as a mark of sovereignty is said to be observed in other parts of
Central Africa. The Sultan of Wadai always speaks from behind a
curtain; no one sees his face except his intimates and a few
favoured persons.



4. Taboos on Quitting the House

BY AN EXTENSION of the like precaution kings are sometimes forbidden
ever to leave their palaces; or, if they are allowed to do so, their
subjects are forbidden to see them abroad. The fetish king of Benin,
who was worshipped as a deity by his subjects, might not quit his
palace. After his coronation the king of Loango is confined to his
palace, which he may not leave. The king of Onitsha "does not step
out of his house into the town unless a human sacrifice is made to
propitiate the gods: on this account he never goes out beyond the
precincts of his premises." Indeed we are told that he may not quit
his palace under pain of death or of giving up one or more slaves to
be executed in his presence. As the wealth of the country is
measured in slaves, the king takes good care not to infringe the
law. Yet once a year at the Feast of Yams the king is allowed, and
even required by custom, to dance before his people outside the high
mud wall of the palace. In dancing he carries a great weight,
generally a sack of earth, on his back to prove that he is still
able to support the burden and cares of state. Were he unable to
discharge this duty, he would be immediately deposed and perhaps
stoned. The kings of Ethiopia were worshipped as gods, but were
mostly kept shut up in their palaces. On the mountainous coast of
Pontus there dwelt in antiquity a rude and warlike people named the
Mosyni or Mosynoeci, through whose rugged country the Ten Thousand
marched on their famous retreat from Asia to Europe. These
barbarians kept their king in close custody at the top of a high
tower, from which after his election he was never more allowed to
descend. Here he dispensed justice to his people; but if he offended
them, they punished him by stopping his rations for a whole day, or
even starving him to death. The kings of Sabaea or Sheba, the spice
country of Arabia, were not allowed to go out of their palaces; if
they did so, the mob stoned them to death. But at the top of the
palace there was a window with a chain attached to it. If any man
deemed he had suffered wrong, he pulled the chain, and the king
perceived him and called him in and gave judgment.



5. Taboos on Leaving Food over

AGAIN, magic mischief may be wrought upon a man through the remains
of the food he has partaken of, or the dishes out of which he has
eaten. On the principles of sympathetic magic a real connexion
continues to subsist between the food which a man has in his stomach
and the refuse of it which he has left untouched, and hence by
injuring the refuse you can simultaneously injure the eater. Among
the Narrinyeri of South Australia every adult is constantly on the
look-out for bones of beasts, birds, or fish, of which the flesh has
been eaten by somebody, in order to construct a deadly charm out of
them. Every one is therefore careful to burn the bones of the
animals which he has eaten, lest they should fall into the hands of
a sorcerer. Too often, however, the sorcerer succeeds in getting
hold of such a bone, and when he does so he believes that he has the
power of life and death over the man, woman, or child who ate the
flesh of the animal. To put the charm in operation he makes a paste
of red ochre and fish oil, inserts in it the eye of a cod and a
small piece of the flesh of a corpse, and having rolled the compound
into a ball sticks it on the top of the bone. After being left for
some time in the bosom of a dead body, in order that it may derive a
deadly potency by contact with corruption, the magical implement is
set up in the ground near the fire, and as the ball melts, so the
person against whom the charm is directed wastes with disease; if
the ball is melted quite away, the victim will die. When the
bewitched man learns of the spell that is being cast upon him, he
endeavours to buy the bone from the sorcerer, and if he obtains it
he breaks the charm by throwing the bone into a river or lake. In
Tana, one of the New Hebrides, people bury or throw into the sea the
leavings of their food, lest these should fall into the hands of the
disease-makers. For if a disease-maker finds the remnants of a meal,
say the skin of a banana, he picks it up and burns it slowly in the
fire. As it burns, the person who ate the banana falls ill and sends
to the disease-maker, offering him presents if he will stop burning
the banana skin. In New Guinea the natives take the utmost care to
destroy or conceal the husks and other remains of their food, lest
these should be found by their enemies and used by them for the
injury or destruction of the eaters. Hence they burn their leavings,
throw them into the sea, or otherwise put them out of harm's way.

From a like fear, no doubt, of sorcery, no one may touch the food
which the king of Loango leaves upon his plate; it is buried in a
hole in the ground. And no one may drink out of the king's vessel.
In antiquity the Romans used immediately to break the shells of eggs
and of snails which they had eaten, in order to prevent enemies from
making magic with them. The common practice, still observed among
us, of breaking egg-shells after the eggs have been eaten may very
well have originated in the same superstition.

The superstitious fear of the magic that may be wrought on a man
through the leavings of his food has had the beneficial effect of
inducing many savages to destroy refuse which, if left to rot, might
through its corruption have proved a real, not a merely imaginary,
source of disease and death. Nor is it only the sanitary condition
of a tribe which has benefited by this superstition; curiously
enough the same baseless dread, the same false notion of causation,
has indirectly strengthened the moral bonds of hospitality, honour,
and good faith among men who entertain it. For it is obvious that no
one who intends to harm a man by working magic on the refuse of his
food will himself partake of that food, because if he did so he
would, on the principles of sympathetic magic, suffer equally with
his enemy from any injury done to the refuse. This is the idea which
in primitive society lends sanctity to the bond produced by eating
together; by participation in the same food two men give, as it
were, hostages for their good behaviour; each guarantees the other
that he will devise no mischief against him, since, being physically
united with him by the common food in their stomachs, any harm he
might do to his fellow would recoil on his own head with precisely
the same force with which it fell on the head of his victim. In
strict logic, however, the sympathetic bond lasts only so long as
the food is in the stomach of each of the parties. Hence the
covenant formed by eating together is less solemn and durable than
the covenant formed by transfusing the blood of the covenanting
parties into each other's veins, for this transfusion seems to knit
them together for life.




XX. Tabooed Persons



1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed

WE have seen that the Mikado's food was cooked every day in new pots
and served up in new dishes; both pots and dishes were of common
clay, in order that they might be broken or laid aside after they
had been once used. They were generally broken, for it was believed
that if any one else ate his food out of these sacred dishes, his
mouth and throat would become swollen and inflamed. The same ill
effect was thought to be experienced by any one who should wear the
Mikado's clothes without his leave; he would have swellings and
pains all over his body. In Fiji there is a special name (_kana
lama_) for the disease supposed to be caused by eating out of a
chief's dishes or wearing his clothes. "The throat and body swell,
and the impious person dies. I had a fine mat given to me by a man
who durst not use it because Thakombau's eldest son had sat upon it.
There was always a family or clan of commoners who were exempt from
this danger. I was talking about this once to Thakombau. 'Oh yes,'
said he. 'Here, So-and-so! come and scratch my back.' The man
scratched; he was one of those who could do it with impunity." The
name of the men thus highly privileged was _Na nduka ni,_ or the
dirt of the chief.

In the evil effects thus supposed to follow upon the use of the
vessels or clothes of the Mikado and a Fijian chief we see that
other side of the god-man's character to which attention has been
already called. The divine person is a source of danger as well as
of blessing; he must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded
against. His sacred organism, so delicate that a touch may disorder
it, is also, as it were, electrically charged with a powerful
magical or spiritual force which may discharge itself with fatal
effect on whatever comes in contact with it. Accordingly the
isolation of the man-god is quite as necessary for the safety of
others as for his own. His magical virtue is in the strictest sense
of the word contagious: his divinity is a fire, which, under proper
restraints, confers endless blessings, but, if rashly touched or
allowed to break bounds, burns and destroys what it touches. Hence
the disastrous effects supposed to attend a breach of taboo; the
offender has thrust his hand into the divine fire, which shrivels up
and consumes him on the spot.

The Nubas, for example, who inhabit the wooded and fertile range of
Jebel Nuba in Eastern Africa, believe that they would die if they
entered the house of their priestly king; however, they can evade
the penalty of their intrusion by baring the left shoulder and
getting the king to lay his hand on it. And were any man to sit on a
stone which the king has consecrated to his own use, the
transgressor would die within the year. The Cazembes of Angola
regard their king as so holy that no one can touch him without being
killed by the magical power which pervades his sacred person. But
since contact with him is sometimes unavoidable, they have devised a
means whereby the sinner can escape with his life. Kneeling down
before the king he touches the back of the royal hand with the back
of his own, then snaps his fingers; afterwards he lays the palm of
his hand on the palm of the king's hand, then snaps his fingers
again. This ceremony is repeated four or five times, and averts the
imminent danger of death. In Tonga it was believed that if any one
fed himself with his own hands after touching the sacred person of a
superior chief or anything that belonged to him, he would swell up
and die; the sanctity of the chief, like a virulent poison, infected
the hands of his inferior, and, being communicated through them to
the food, proved fatal to the eater. A commoner who had incurred
this danger could disinfect himself by performing a certain
ceremony, which consisted in touching the sole of a chief's foot
with the palm and back of each of his hands, and afterwards rinsing
his hands in water. If there was no water near, he rubbed his hands
with the juicy stem of a plantain or banana. After that he was free
to feed himself with his own hands without danger of being attacked
by the malady which would otherwise follow from eating with tabooed
or sanctified hands. But until the ceremony of expiation or
disinfection had been performed, if he wished to eat he had either
to get some one to feed him, or else to go down on his knees and
pick up the food from the ground with his mouth like a beast. He
might not even use a toothpick himself, but might guide the hand of
another person holding the toothpick. The Tongans were subject to
induration of the liver and certain forms of scrofula, which they
often attributed to a failure to perform the requisite expiation
after having inadvertently touched a chief or his belongings. Hence
they often went through the ceremony as a precaution, without
knowing that they had done anything to call for it. The king of
Tonga could not refuse to play his part in the rite by presenting
his foot to such as desired to touch it, even when they applied to
him at an inconvenient time. A fat unwieldy king, who perceived his
subjects approaching with this intention, while he chanced to be
taking his walks abroad, has been sometimes seen to waddle as fast
as his legs could carry him out of their way, in order to escape the
importunate and not wholly disinterested expression of their homage.
If any one fancied he might have already unwittingly eaten with
tabooed hands, he sat down before the chief, and, taking the chief's
foot, pressed it against his own stomach, that the food in his belly
might not injure him, and that he might not swell up and die. Since
scrofula was regarded by the Tongans as a result of eating with
tabooed hands, we may conjecture that persons who suffered from it
among them often resorted to the touch or pressure of the king's
foot as a cure for their malady. The analogy of the custom with the
old English practice of bringing scrofulous patients to the king to
be healed by his touch is sufficiently obvious, and suggests, as I
have already pointed out elsewhere, that among our own remote
ancestors scrofula may have obtained its name of the King's Evil,
from a belief, like that of the Tongans, that it was caused as well
as cured by contact with the divine majesty of kings.

In New Zealand the dread of the sanctity of chiefs was at least as
great as in Tonga. Their ghostly power, derived from an ancestral
spirit, diffused itself by contagion over everything they touched,
and could strike dead all who rashly or unwittingly meddled with it.
For instance, it once happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank
and great sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the
wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief
had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking
questions. Hardly had he finished when he was informed by a
horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had eaten was
the chief's. "I knew the unfortunate delinquent well. He was
remarkable for courage, and had signalised himself in the wars of
the tribe," but "no sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was
seized by the most extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the
stomach, which never ceased till he died, about sundown the same
day. He was a strong man, in the prime of life, and if any pakeha
[European] freethinker should have said he was not killed by the
_tapu_ of the chief, which had been communicated to the food by
contact, he would have been listened to with feelings of contempt
for his ignorance and inability to understand plain and direct
evidence." This is not a solitary case. A Maori woman having eaten
of some fruit, and being afterwards told that the fruit had been
taken from a tabooed place, exclaimed that the spirit of the chief,
whose sanctity had been thus profaned, would kill her. This was in
the afternoon, and next day by twelve o'clock she was dead. A Maori
chief's tinder-box was once the means of killing several persons;
for, having been lost by him, and found by some men who used it to
light their pipes, they died of fright on learning to whom it had
belonged. So, too, the garments of a high New Zealand chief will
kill any one else who wears them. A chief was observed by a
missionary to throw down a precipice a blanket which he found too
heavy to carry. Being asked by the missionary why he did not leave
it on a tree for the use of a future traveller, the chief replied
that "it was the fear of its being taken by another which caused him
to throw it where he did, for if it were worn, his tapu" (that is,
his spiritual power communicated by contact to the blanket and
through the blanket to the man) "would kill the person." For a
similar reason a Maori chief would not blow a fire with his mouth;
for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire,
which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it
on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate
the meat, which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which was
breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief's
breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die.

Thus in the Polynesian race, to which the Maoris belong,
superstition erected round the persons of sacred chiefs a real,
though at the same time purely imaginary barrier, to transgress
which actually entailed the death of the transgressor whenever he
became aware of what he had done. This fatal power of the
imagination working through superstitious terrors is by no means
confined to one race; it appears to be common among savages. For
example, among the aborigines of Australia a native will die after
the infliction of even the most superficial wound, if only he
believes that the weapon which inflicted the wound had been sung
over and thus endowed with magical virtue. He simply lies down,
refuses food, and pines away. Similarly among some of the Indian
tribes of Brazil, if the medicine-man predicted the death of any one
who had offended him, "the wretch took to his hammock instantly in
such full expectation of dying, that he would neither eat nor drink,
and the prediction was a sentence which faith effectually executed."



2. Mourners tabooed

THUS regarding his sacred chiefs and kings as charged with a
mysterious spiritual force which so to say explodes at contact, the
savage naturally ranks them among the dangerous classes of society,
and imposes upon them the same sort of restraints that he lays on
manslayers, menstruous women, and other persons whom he looks upon
with a certain fear and horror. For example, sacred kings and
priests in Polynesia were not allowed to touch food with their
hands, and had therefore to be fed by others; and as we have just
seen, their vessels, garments, and other property might not be used
by others on pain of disease and death. Now precisely the same
observances are exacted by some savages from girls at their first
menstruation, women after childbirth, homicides, mourners, and all
persons who have come into contact with the dead. Thus, for example,
to begin with the last class of persons, among the Maoris any one
who had handled a corpse, helped to convey it to the grave, or
touched a dead man's bones, was cut off from all intercourse and
almost all communication with mankind. He could not enter any house,
or come into contact with any person or thing, without utterly
bedevilling them. He might not even touch food with his hands, which
had become so frightfully tabooed or unclean as to be quite useless.
Food would be set for him on the ground, and he would then sit or
kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held behind his back,
would gnaw at it as best he could. In some cases he would be fed by
another person, who with outstretched arm contrived to do it without
touching the tabooed man; but the feeder was himself subjected to
many severe restrictions, little less onerous than those which were
imposed upon the other. In almost every populous village there lived
a degraded wretch, the lowest of the low, who earned a sorry
pittance by thus waiting upon the defiled. Clad in rags, daubed from
head to foot with red ochre and stinking shark oil, always solitary
and silent, generally old, haggard, and wizened, often half crazed,
he might be seen sitting motionless all day apart from the common
path or thoroughfare of the village, gazing with lack-lustre eyes on
the busy doings in which he might never take a part. Twice a day a
dole of food would be thrown on the ground before him to munch as
well as he could without the use of his hands; and at night,
huddling his greasy tatters about him, he would crawl into some
miserable lair of leaves and refuse, where, dirty, cold, and hungry,
he passed, in broken ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night as a
prelude to another wretched day. Such was the only human being
deemed fit to associate at arm's length with one who had paid the
last offices of respect and friendship to the dead. And when, the
dismal term of his seclusion being over, the mourner was about to
mix with his fellows once more, all the dishes he had used in his
seclusion were diligently smashed, and all the garments he had worn
were carefully thrown away, lest they should spread the contagion of
his defilement among others, just as the vessels and clothes of
sacred kings and chiefs are destroyed or cast away for a similar
reason. So complete in these respects is the analogy which the
savage traces between the spiritual influences that emanate from
divinities and from the dead, between the odour of sanctity and the
stench of corruption.

The rule which forbids persons who have been in contact with the
dead to touch food with their hands would seem to have been
universal in Polynesia. Thus in Samoa "those who attended the
deceased were most careful not to handle food, and for days were fed
by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness and the loss of
teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by the household
god if they violated the rule." Again, in Tonga, "no person can
touch a dead chief without being taboo'd for ten lunar months,
except chiefs, who are only taboo'd for three, four, or five months,
according to the superiority of the dead chief; except again it be
the body of Tooitonga [the great divine chief], and then even the
greatest chief would be taboo'd ten months. . . . During the time a
man is taboo'd he must not feed himself with his own hands, but must
be fed by somebody else: he must not even use a toothpick himself,
but must guide another person's hand holding the toothpick. If he is
hungry and there is no one to feed him, he must go down upon his
hands and knees, and pick up his victuals with his mouth: and if he
infringes upon any of these rules, it is firmly expected that he
will swell up and die."

Among the Shuswap of British Columbia widows and widowers in
mourning are secluded and forbidden to touch their own head or body;
the cups and cooking-vessels which they use may be used by no one
else. They must build a sweat-house beside a creek, sweat there all
night and bathe regularly, after which they must rub their bodies
with branches of spruce. The branches may not be used more than
once, and when they have served their purpose they are stuck into
the ground all round the hut. No hunter would come near such
mourners, for their presence is unlucky. If their shadow were to
fall on any one, he would be taken ill at once. They employ thorn
bushes for bed and pillow, in order to keep away the ghost of the
deceased; and thorn bushes are also laid all around their beds. This
last precaution shows clearly what the spiritual danger is which
leads to the exclusion of such persons from ordinary society; it is
simply a fear of the ghost who is supposed to be hovering near them.
In the Mekeo district of British New Guinea a widower loses all his
civil rights and becomes a social outcast, an object of fear and
horror, shunned by all. He may not cultivate a garden, nor show
himself in public, nor traverse the village, nor walk on the roads
and paths. Like a wild beast he must skulk in the long grass and the
bushes; and if he sees or hears any one coming, especially a woman,
he must hide behind a tree or a thicket. If he wishes to fish or
hunt, he must do it alone and at night. If he would consult any one,
even the missionary, he does so by stealth and at night; he seems to
have lost his voice and speaks only in whispers. Were he to join a
party of fishers or hunters, his presence would bring misfortune on
them; the ghost of his dead wife would frighten away the fish or the
game. He goes about everywhere and at all times armed with a
tomahawk to defend himself, not only against wild boars in the
jungle, but against the dreaded spirit of his departed spouse, who
would do him an ill turn if she could; for all the souls of the dead
are malignant and their only delight is to harm the living.



3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth

IN GENERAL, we may say that the prohibition to use the vessels,
garments, and so forth of certain persons, and the effects supposed
to follow an infraction of the rule, are exactly the same whether
the persons to whom the things belong are sacred or what we might
call unclean and polluted. As the garments which have been touched
by a sacred chief kill those who handle them, so do the things which
have been touched by a menstruous women. An Australian blackfellow,
who discovered that his wife had lain on his blanket at her
menstrual period, killed her and died of terror himself within a
fortnight. Hence Australian women at these times are forbidden under
pain of death to touch anything that men use, or even to walk on a
path that any man frequents. They are also secluded at childbirth,
and all vessels used by them during their seclusion are burned. In
Uganda the pots which a woman touches, while the impurity of
childbirth or of menstruation is on her, should be destroyed; spears
and shields defiled by her touch are not destroyed, but only
purified. "Among all the Déné and most other American tribes, hardly
any other being was the object of so much dread as a menstruating
woman. As soon as signs of that condition made themselves apparent
in a young girl she was carefully segregated from all but female
company, and had to live by herself in a small hut away from the
gaze of the villagers or of the male members of the roving band.
While in that awful state, she had to abstain from touching anything
belonging to man, or the spoils of any venison or other animal, lest
she would thereby pollute the same, and condemn the hunters to
failure, owing to the anger of the game thus slighted. Dried fish
formed her diet, and cold water, absorbed through a drinking tube,
was her only beverage. Moreover, as the very sight of her was
dangerous to society, a special skin bonnet, with fringes falling
over her face down to her breast, hid her from the public gaze, even
some time after she had recovered her normal state." Among the
Bribri Indians of Costa Rica a menstruous woman is regarded as
unclean. The only plates she may use for her food are banana leaves,
which, when she has done with them, she throws away in some
sequestered spot; for were a cow to find them and eat them, the
animal would waste away and perish. And she drinks out of a special
vessel for a like reason; because if any one drank out of the same
cup after her, he would surely die.

Among many peoples similar restrictions are imposed on women in
childbed and apparently for similar reasons; at such periods women
are supposed to be in a dangerous condition which would infect any
person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into quarantine
until, with the recovery of their health and strength, the imaginary
danger has passed away. Thus, in Tahiti a woman after childbirth was
secluded for a fortnight or three weeks in a temporary hut erected
on sacred ground; during the time of her seclusion she was debarred
from touching provisions, and had to be fed by another. Further, if
any one else touched the child at this period, he was subjected to
the same restrictions as the mother until the ceremony of her
purification had been performed. Similarly in the island of Kadiak,
off Alaska, a woman about to be delivered retires to a miserable low
hovel built of reeds, where she must remain for twenty days after
the birth of her child, whatever the season may be, and she is
considered so unclean that no one will touch her, and food is
reached to her on sticks. The Bribri Indians regard the pollution of
childbed as much more dangerous even than that of menstruation. When
a woman feels her time approaching, she informs her husband, who
makes haste to build a hut for her in a lonely spot. There she must
live alone, holding no converse with anybody save her mother or
another woman. After her delivery the medicine-man purifies her by
breathing on her and laying an animal, it matters not what, upon
her. But even this ceremony only mitigates her uncleanness into a
state considered to be equivalent to that of a menstruous woman; and
for a full lunar month she must live apart from her housemates,
observing the same rules with regard to eating and drinking as at
her monthly periods. The case is still worse, the pollution is still
more deadly, if she has had a miscarriage or has been delivered of a
stillborn child. In that case she may not go near a living soul: the
mere contact with things she has used is exceedingly dangerous: her
food is handed to her at the end of a long stick. This lasts
generally for three weeks, after which she may go home, subject only
to the restrictions incident to an ordinary confinement.

Some Bantu tribes entertain even more exaggerated notions of the
virulent infection spread by a woman who has had a miscarriage and
has concealed it. An experienced observer of these people tells us
that the blood of childbirth "appears to the eyes of the South
Africans to be tainted with a pollution still more dangerous than
that of the menstrual fluid. The husband is excluded from the hut
for eight days of the lying-in period, chiefly from fear that he
might be contaminated by this secretion. He dare not take his child
in his arms for the three first months after the birth. But the
secretion of childbed is particularly terrible when it is the
product of a miscarriage, especially _a concealed miscarriage._ In
this case it is not merely the man who is threatened or killed, it
is the whole country, it is the sky itself which suffers. By a
curious association of ideas a physiological fact causes cosmic
troubles!" As for the disastrous effect which a miscarriage may have
on the whole country I will quote the words of a medicine-man and
rain-maker of the Ba-Pedi tribe: "When a woman has had a
miscarriage, when she has allowed her blood to flow, and has hidden
the child, it is enough to cause the burning winds to blow and to
parch the country with heat. The rain no longer falls, for the
country is no longer in order. When the rain approaches the place
where the blood is, it will not dare to approach. It will fear and
remain at a distance. That woman has committed a great fault. She
has spoiled the country of the chief, for she has hidden blood which
had not yet been well congealed to fashion a man. That blood is
taboo. It should never drip on the road! The chief will assemble his
men and say to them, 'Are you in order in your villages?' Some one
will answer, 'Such and such a woman was pregnant and we have not yet
seen the child which she has given birth to.' Then they go and
arrest the woman. They say to her, 'Show us where you have hidden
it.' They go and dig at the spot, they sprinkle the hole with a
decoction of two sorts of roots prepared in a special pot. They take
a little of the earth of this grave, they throw it into the river,
then they bring back water from the river and sprinkle it where she
shed her blood. She herself must wash every day with the medicine.
Then the country will be moistened again (by rain). Further, we
(medicine-men), summon the women of the country; we tell them to
prepare a ball of the earth which contains the blood. They bring it
to us one morning. If we wish to prepare medicine with which to
sprinkle the whole country, we crumble this earth to powder; at the
end of five days we send little boys and little girls, girls that
yet know nothing of women's affairs and have not yet had relations
with men. We put the medicine in the horns of oxen, and these
children go to all the fords, to all the entrances of the country. A
little girl turns up the soil with her mattock, the others dip a
branch in the horn and sprinkle the inside of the hole saying,
'Rain! rain!' So we remove the misfortune which the women have
brought on the roads; the rain will be able to come. The country is
purified!"



4. Warriors tabooed

ONCE more, warriors are conceived by the savage to move, so to say,
in an atmosphere of spiritual danger which constrains them to
practise a variety of superstitious observances quite different in
their nature from those rational precautions which, as a matter of
course, they adopt against foes of flesh and blood. The general
effect of these observances is to place the warrior, both before and
after victory, in the same state of seclusion or spiritual
quarantine in which, for his own safety, primitive man puts his
human gods and other dangerous characters. Thus when the Maoris went
out on the war-path they were sacred or taboo in the highest degree,
and they and their friends at home had to observe strictly many
curious customs over and above the numerous taboos of ordinary life.
They became, in the irreverent language of Europeans who knew them
in the old fighting days, "tabooed an inch thick"; and as for the
leader of the expedition, he was quite unapproachable. Similarly,
when the Israelites marched forth to war they were bound by certain
rules of ceremonial purity identical with rules observed by Maoris
and Australian blackfellows on the war-path. The vessels they used
were sacred, and they had to practise continence and a custom of
personal cleanliness of which the original motive, if we may judge
from the avowed motive of savages who conform to the same custom,
was a fear lest the enemy should obtain the refuse of their persons,
and thus be enabled to work their destruction by magic. Among some
Indian tribes of North America a young warrior in his first campaign
had to conform to certain customs, of which two were identical with
the observances imposed by the same Indians on girls at their first
menstruation: the vessels he ate and drank out of might be touched
by no other person, and he was forbidden to scratch his head or any
other part of his body with his fingers; if he could not help
scratching himself, he had to do it with a stick. The latter rule,
like the one which forbids a tabooed person to feed himself with his
own fingers, seems to rest on the supposed sanctity or pollution,
whichever we choose to call it, of the tabooed hands. Moreover among
these Indian tribes the men on the war-path had always to sleep at
night with their faces turned towards their own country; however
uneasy the posture, they might not change it. They might not sit
upon the bare ground, nor wet their feet, nor walk on a beaten path
if they could help it; when they had no choice but to walk on a
path, they sought to counteract the ill effect of doing so by
doctoring their legs with certain medicines or charms which they
carried with them for the purpose. No member of the party was
permitted to step over the legs, hands, or body of any other member
who chanced to be sitting or lying on the ground; and it was equally
forbidden to step over his blanket, gun, tomahawk, or anything that
belonged to him. If this rule was inadvertently broken, it became
the duty of the member whose person or property had been stepped
over to knock the other member down, and it was similarly the duty
of that other to be knocked down peaceably and without resistance.
The vessels out of which the warriors ate their food were commonly
small bowls of wood or birch bark, with marks to distinguish the two
sides; in marching from home the Indians invariably drank out of one
side of the bowl, and in returning they drank out of the other. When
on their way home they came within a day's march of the village,
they hung up all their bowls on trees, or threw them away on the
prairie, doubtless to prevent their sanctity or defilement from
being communicated with disastrous effects to their friends, just as
we have seen that the vessels and clothes of the sacred Mikado, of
women at childbirth and menstruation, and of persons defiled by
contact with the dead are destroyed or laid aside for a similar
reason. The first four times that an Apache Indian goes out on the
war-path, he is bound to refrain from scratching his head with his
fingers and from letting water touch his lips. Hence he scratches
his head with a stick, and drinks through a hollow reed or cane.
Stick and reed are attached to the warrior's belt and to each other
by a leathern thong. The rule not to scratch their heads with their
fingers, but to use a stick for the purpose instead, was regularly
observed by Ojebways on the war-path.

With regard to the Creek Indians and kindred tribes we are told they
"will not cohabit with women while they are out at war; they
religiously abstain from every kind of intercourse even with their
own wives, for the space of three days and nights before they go to
war, and so after they return home, because they are to sanctify
themselves." Among the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga tribes of South Africa
not only have the warriors to abstain from women, but the people
left behind in the villages are also bound to continence; they think
that any incontinence on their part would cause thorns to grow on
the ground traversed by the warriors, and that success would not
attend the expedition.

Why exactly many savages have made it a rule to refrain from women
in time of war, we cannot say for certain, but we may conjecture
that their motive was a superstitious fear lest, on the principles
of sympathetic magic, close contact with women should infect them
with feminine weakness and cowardice. Similarly some savages imagine
that contact with a woman in childbed enervates warriors and
enfeebles their weapons. Indeed the Kayans of Central Borneo go so
far as to hold that to touch a loom or women's clothes would so
weaken a man that he would have no success in hunting, fishing, and
war. Hence it is not merely sexual intercourse with women that the
savage warrior sometimes shuns; he is careful to avoid the sex
altogether. Thus among the hill tribes of Assam, not only are men
forbidden to cohabit with their wives during or after a raid, but
they may not eat food cooked by a woman; nay, they should not
address a word even to their own wives. Once a woman, who
unwittingly broke the rule by speaking to her husband while he was
under the war taboo, sickened and died when she learned the awful
crime she had committed.



5. Manslayers tabooed

IF THE READER still doubts whether the rules of conduct which we
have just been considering are based on superstitious fears or
dictated by a rational prudence, his doubts will probably be
dissipated when he learns that rules of the same sort are often
imposed even more stringently on warriors after the victory has been
won and when all fear of the living corporeal foe is at an end. In
such cases one motive for the inconvenient restrictions laid on the
victors in their hour of triumph is probably a dread of the angry
ghosts of the slain; and that the fear of the vengeful ghosts does
influence the behaviour of the slayers is often expressly affirmed.
The general effect of the taboos laid on sacred chiefs, mourners,
women at childbirth, men on the war-path, and so on, is to seclude
or isolate the tabooed persons from ordinary society, this effect
being attained by a variety of rules, which oblige the men or women
to live in separate huts or in the open air, to shun the commerce of
the sexes, to avoid the use of vessels employed by others, and so
forth. Now the same effect is produced by similar means in the case
of victorious warriors, particularly such as have actually shed the
blood of their enemies. In the island of Timor, when a warlike
expedition has returned in triumph bringing the heads of the
vanquished foe, the leader of the expedition is forbidden by
religion and custom to return at once to his own house. A special
hut is prepared for him, in which he has to reside for two months,
undergoing bodily and spiritual purification. During this time he
may not go to his wife nor feed himself; the food must be put into
his mouth by another person. That these observances are dictated by
fear of the ghosts of the slain seems certain; for from another
account of the ceremonies performed on the return of a successful
head-hunter in the same island we learn that sacrifices are offered
on this occasion to appease the soul of the man whose head has been
taken; the people think that some misfortune would befall the victor
were such offerings omitted. Moreover, a part of the ceremony
consists of a dance accompanied by a song, in which the death of the
slain man is lamented and his forgiveness is entreated. "Be not
angry," they say, "because your head is here with us; had we been
less lucky, our heads might now have been exposed in your village.
We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now
rest and leave us at peace. Why were you our enemy? Would it not
have been better that we should remain friends? Then your blood
would not have been spilt and your head would not have been cut
off." The people of Paloo in Central Celebes take the heads of their
enemies in war and afterwards propitiate the souls of the slain in
the temple.

Among the tribes at the mouth of the Wanigela River, in New Guinea,
"a man who has taken life is considered to be impure until he has
undergone certain ceremonies: as soon as possible after the deed he
cleanses himself and his weapon. This satisfactorily accomplished,
he repairs to his village and seats himself on the logs of
sacrificial staging. No one approaches him or takes any notice
whatever of him. A house is prepared for him which is put in charge
of two or three small boys as servants. He may eat only toasted
bananas, and only the centre portion of them--the ends being thrown
away. On the third day of his seclusion a small feast is prepared by
his friends, who also fashion some new perineal bands for him. This
is called _ivi poro._ The next day the man dons all his best
ornaments and badges for taking life, and sallies forth fully armed
and parades the village. The next day a hunt is organised, and a
kangaroo selected from the game captured. It is cut open and the
spleen and liver rubbed over the back of the man. He then walks
solemnly down to the nearest water, and standing straddle-legs in it
washes himself. All the young untried warriors swim between his
legs. This is supposed to impart courage and strength to them. The
following day, at early dawn, he dashes out of his house, fully
armed, and calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied
himself that he has thoroughly scared the ghost of the dead man, he
returns to his house. The beating of flooring-boards and the
lighting of fires is also a certain method of scaring the ghost. A
day later his purification is finished. He can then enter his wife's
house."

In Windessi, Dutch New Guinea, when a party of head-hunters has been
successful, and they are nearing home, they announce their approach
and success by blowing on triton shells. Their canoes are also
decked with branches. The faces of the men who have taken a head are
blackened with charcoal. If several have taken part in killing the
same victim, his head is divided among them. They always time their
arrival so as to reach home in the early morning. They come rowing
to the village with a great noise, and the women stand ready to
dance in the verandahs of the houses. The canoes row past the _room
sram_ or house where the young men live; and as they pass, the
murderers throw as many pointed sticks or bamboos at the wall or the
roof as there were enemies killed. The day is spent very quietly.
Now and then they drum or blow on the conch; at other times they
beat the walls of the houses with loud shouts to drive away the
ghosts of the slain. So the Yabim of New Guinea believe that the
spirit of a murdered man pursues his murderer and seeks to do him a
mischief. Hence they drive away the spirit with shouts and the
beating of drums. When the Fijians had buried a man alive, as they
often did, they used at nightfall to make a great uproar by means of
bamboos, trumpet-shells, and so forth, for the purpose of
frightening away his ghost, lest he should attempt to return to his
old home. And to render his house unattractive to him they
dismantled it and clothed it with everything that to their ideas
seemed most repulsive. On the evening of the day on which they had
tortured a prisoner to death, the American Indians were wont to run
through the village with hideous yells, beating with sticks on the
furniture, the walls, and the roofs of the huts to prevent the angry
ghost of their victim from settling there and taking vengeance for
the torments that his body had endured at their hands. "Once," says
a traveller, "on approaching in the night a village of Ottawas, I
found all the inhabitants in confusion: they were all busily engaged
in raising noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind. Upon
inquiry, I found that a battle had been lately fought between the
Ottawas and the Kickapoos, and that the object of all this noise was
to prevent the ghosts of the departed combatants from entering the
village."

Among the Basutos "ablution is specially performed on return from
battle. It is absolutely necessary that the warriors should rid
themselves, as soon as possible, of the blood they have shed, or the
shades of their victims would pursue them incessantly, and disturb
their slumbers. They go in a procession, and in full armour, to the
nearest stream. At the moment they enter the water a diviner, placed
higher up, throws some purifying substances into the current. This
is, however, not strictly necessary. The javelins and battle-axes
also undergo the process of washing." Among the Bageshu of East
Africa a man who has killed another may not return to his own house
on the same day, though he may enter the village and spend the night
in a friend's house. He kills a sheep and smears his chest, his
right arm, and his head with the contents of the animal's stomach.
His children are brought to him and he smears them in like manner.
Then he smears each side of the doorway with the tripe and entrails,
and finally throws the rest of the stomach on the roof of his house.
For a whole day he may not touch food with his hands, but picks it
up with two sticks and so conveys it to his mouth. His wife is not
under any such restrictions. She may even go to mourn for the man
whom her husband has killed, if she wishes to do so. Among the
Angoni, to the north of the Zambesi, warriors who have slain foes on
an expedition smear their bodies and faces with ashes, hang garments
of their victims on their persons, and tie bark ropes round their
necks, so that the ends hang down over their shoulders or breasts.
This costume they wear for three days after their return, and rising
at break of day they run through the village uttering frightful
yells to drive away the ghosts of the slain, which, if they were not
thus banished from the houses, might bring sickness and misfortune
on the inmates.

In some of these accounts nothing is said of an enforced seclusion,
at least after the ceremonial cleansing, but some South African
tribes certainly require the slayer of a very gallant foe in war to
keep apart from his wife and family for ten days after he has washed
his body in running water. He also receives from the tribal doctor a
medicine which he chews with his food. When a Nandi of East Africa
has killed a member of another tribe, he paints one side of his
body, spear, and sword red, and the other side white. For four days
after the slaughter he is considered unclean and may not go home. He
has to build a small shelter by a river and live there; he may not
associate with his wife or sweetheart, and he may eat nothing but
porridge, beef, and goat's flesh. At the end of the fourth day he
must purify himself by taking a strong purge made from the bark of
the _segetet_ tree and by drinking goat's milk mixed with blood.
Among the Bantu tribes of Kavirondo, when a man has killed an enemy
in warfare he shaves his head on his return home, and his friends
rub a medicine, which generally consists of goat's dung, over his
body to prevent the spirit of the slain man from troubling him.
Exactly the same custom is practised for the same reason by the
Wageia of East Africa. With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is
somewhat different. Three days after his return from the fight the
warrior shaves his head. But before he may enter his village he has
to hang a live fowl, head uppermost, round his neck; then the bird
is decapitated and its head left hanging round his neck. Soon after
his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his
ghost may not haunt his slayer. In the Pelew Islands, when the men
return from a warlike expedition in which they have taken a life,
the young warriors who have been out fighting for the first time,
and all who handled the slain, are shut up in the large
council-house and become tabooed. They may not quit the edifice, nor
bathe, nor touch a woman, nor eat fish; their food is limited to
coco-nuts and syrup. They rub themselves with charmed leaves and
chew charmed betel. After three days they go together to bathe as
near as possible to the spot where the man was killed.

Among the Natchez Indians of North America young braves who had
taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of
abstinence for six months. They might not sleep with their wives nor
eat flesh; their only food was fish and hasty-pudding. If they broke
these rules, they believed that the soul of the man they had killed
would work their death by magic, that they would gain no more
successes over the enemy, and that the least wound inflicted on them
would prove mortal. When a Choctaw had killed an enemy and taken his
scalp, he went into mourning for a month, during which he might not
comb his hair, and if his head itched he might not scratch it except
with a little stick which he wore fastened to his wrist for the
purpose. This ceremonial mourning for the enemies they had slain was
not uncommon among the North American Indians.

Thus we see that warriors who have taken the life of a foe in battle
are temporarily cut off from free intercourse with their fellows,
and especially with their wives, and must undergo certain rites of
purification before they are readmitted to society. Now if the
purpose of their seclusion and of the expiatory rites which they
have to perform is, as we have been led to believe, no other than to
shake off, frighten, or appease the angry spirit of the slain man,
we may safely conjecture that the similar purification of homicides
and murderers, who have imbrued their hands in the blood of a
fellow-tribesman, had at first the same significance, and that the
idea of a moral or spiritual regeneration symbolised by the washing,
the fasting, and so on, was merely a later interpretation put upon
the old custom by men who had outgrown the primitive modes of
thought in which the custom originated. The conjecture will be
confirmed if we can show that savages have actually imposed certain
restrictions on the murderer of a fellow-tribesman from a definite
fear that he is haunted by the ghost of his victim. This we can do
with regard to the Omahas of North America. Among these Indians the
kinsmen of a murdered man had the right to put the murderer to
death, but sometimes they waived their right in consideration of
presents which they consented to accept. When the life of the
murderer was spared, he had to observe certain stringent rules for a
period which varied from two to four years. He must walk barefoot,
and he might eat no warm food, nor raise his voice, nor look around.
He was compelled to pull his robe about him and to have it tied at
the neck even in hot weather; he might not let it hang loose or fly
open. He might not move his hands about, but had to keep them close
to his body. He might not comb his hair, and it might not be blown
about by the wind. When the tribe went out hunting, he was obliged
to pitch his tent about a quarter of mile from the rest of the
people "lest the ghost of his victim should raise a high wind, which
might cause damage." Only one of his kindred was allowed to remain
with him at his tent. No one wished to eat with him, for they said,
"If we eat with him whom Wakanda hates, Wakanda will hate us."
Sometimes he wandered at night crying and lamenting his offence. At
the end of his long isolation the kinsmen of the murdered man heard
his crying and said, "It is enough. Begone, and walk among the
crowd. Put on moccasins and wear a good robe." Here the reason
alleged for keeping the murderer at a considerable distance from the
hunters gives the clue to all the other restrictions laid on him: he
was haunted and therefore dangerous. The ancient Greeks believed
that the soul of a man who had just been killed was wroth with his
slayer and troubled him; wherefore it was needful even for the
involuntary homicide to depart from his country for a year until the
anger of the dead man had cooled down; nor might the slayer return
until sacrifice had been offered and ceremonies of purification
performed. If his victim chanced to be a foreigner, the homicide had
to shun the native country of the dead man as well as his own. The
legend of the matricide Orestes, how he roamed from place to place
pursued by the Furies of his murdered mother, and none would sit at
meat with him, or take him in, till he had been purified, reflects
faithfully the real Greek dread of such as were still haunted by an
angry ghost.



6. Hunters and Fishers tabooed

IN SAVAGE society the hunter and the fisherman have often to observe
rules of abstinence and to submit to ceremonies of purification of
the same sort as those which are obligatory on the warrior and the
manslayer; and though we cannot in all cases perceive the exact
purpose which these rules and ceremonies are supposed to serve, we
may with some probability assume that, just as the dread of the
spirits of his enemies is the main motive for the seclusion and
purification of the warrior who hopes to take or has already taken
their lives, so the huntsman or fisherman who complies with similar
customs is principally actuated by a fear of the spirits of the
beasts, birds, or fish which he has killed or intends to kill. For
the savage commonly conceives animals to be endowed with souls and
intelligences like his own, and hence he naturally treats them with
similar respect. Just as he attempts to appease the ghosts of the
men he has slain, so he essays to propitiate the spirits of the
animals he has killed. These ceremonies of propitiation will be
described later on in this work; here we have to deal, first, with
the taboos observed by the hunter and the fisherman before or during
the hunting and fishing seasons, and, second, with the ceremonies of
purification which have to be practised by these men on returning
with their booty from a successful chase.

While the savage respects, more or less, the souls of all animals,
he treats with particular deference the spirits of such as are
either especially useful to him or formidable on account of their
size, strength, or ferocity. Accordingly the hunting and killing of
these valuable or dangerous beasts are subject to more elaborate
rules and ceremonies than the slaughter of comparatively useless and
insignificant creatures. Thus the Indians of Nootka Sound prepared
themselves for catching whales by observing a fast for a week,
during which they ate very little, bathed in the water several times
a day, sang, and rubbed their bodies, limbs, and faces with shells
and bushes till they looked as if they had been severely torn with
briars. They were likewise required to abstain from any commerce
with their women for the like period, this last condition being
considered indispensable to their success. A chief who failed to
catch a whale has been known to attribute his failure to a breach of
chastity on the part of his men. It should be remarked that the
conduct thus prescribed as a preparation for whaling is precisely
that which in the same tribe of Indians was required of men about to
go on the war-path. Rules of the same sort are, or were formerly,
observed by Malagasy whalers. For eight days before they went to sea
the crew of a whaler used to fast, abstaining from women and liquor,
and confessing their most secret faults to each other; and if any
man was found to have sinned deeply, he was forbidden to share in
the expedition. In the island of Mabuiag continence was imposed on
the people both before they went to hunt the dugong and while the
turtles were pairing. The turtle-season lasts during parts of
October and November; and if at that time unmarried persons had
sexual intercourse with each other, it was believed that when the
canoe approached the floating turtle, the male would separate from
the female and both would dive down in different directions. So at
Mowat in New Guinea men have no relation with women when the turtles
are coupling, though there is considerable laxity of morals at other
times. In the island of Uap, one of the Caroline group, every
fisherman plying his craft lies under a most strict taboo during the
whole of the fishing season, which lasts for six or eight weeks.
Whenever he is on shore he must spend all his time in the men's
clubhouse, and under no pretext whatever may he visit his own house
or so much as look upon the faces of his wife and womenkind. Were he
but to steal a glance at them, they think that flying fish must
inevitably bore out his eyes at night. If his wife, mother, or
daughter brings any gift for him or wishes to talk with him, she
must stand down towards the shore with her back turned to the men's
clubhouse. Then the fisherman may go out and speak to her, or with
his back turned to her he may receive what she has brought him;
after which he must return at once to his rigorous confinement.
Indeed the fishermen may not even join in dance and song with the
other men of the clubhouse in the evening; they must keep to
themselves and be silent. In Mirzapur, when the seed of the silkworm
is brought into the house, the Kol or Bhuiyar puts it in a place
which has been carefully plastered with holy cowdung to bring good
luck. From that time the owner must be careful to avoid ceremonial
impurity. He must give up cohabitation with his wife; he may not
sleep on a bed, nor shave himself, nor cut his nails, nor anoint
himself with oil, nor eat food cooked with butter, nor tell lies,
nor do anything else that he deems wrong. He vows to Singarmati Devi
that, if the worms are duly born, he will make her an offering. When
the cocoons open and the worms appear, he assembles the women of the
house and they sing the same song as at the birth of a baby, and red
lead is smeared on the parting of the hair of all the married women
of the neighbourhood. When the worms pair, rejoicings are made as at
a marriage. Thus the silkworms are treated as far as possible like
human beings. Hence the custom which prohibits the commerce of the
sexes while the worms are hatching may be only an extension, by
analogy, of the rule which is observed by many races, that the
husband may not cohabit with his wife during pregnancy and
lactation.

In the island of Nias the hunters sometimes dig pits, cover them
lightly over with twigs, grass, and leaves, and then drive the game
into them. While they are engaged in digging the pits, they have to
observe a number of taboos. They may not spit, or the game would
turn back in disgust from the pits. They may not laugh, or the sides
of the pit would fall in. They may eat no salt, prepare no fodder
for swine, and in the pit they may not scratch themselves, for if
they did, the earth would be loosened and would collapse. And the
night after digging the pit they may have no intercourse with a
woman, or all their labour would be in vain.

This practice of observing strict chastity as a condition of success
in hunting and fishing is very common among rude races; and the
instances of it which have been cited render it probable that the
rule is always based on a superstition rather than on a
consideration of the temporary weakness which a breach of the custom
may entail on the hunter or fisherman. In general it appears to be
supposed that the evil effect of incontinence is not so much that it
weakens him, as that, for some reason or other, it offends the
animals, who in consequence will not suffer themselves to be caught.
A Carrier Indian of British Columbia used to separate from his wife
for a full month before he set traps for bears, and during this time
he might not drink from the same vessel as his wife, but had to use
a special cup made of birch bark. The neglect of these precautions
would cause the game to escape after it had been snared. But when he
was about to snare martens, the period of continence was cut down to
ten days.

An examination of all the many cases in which the savage bridles his
passions and remains chaste from motives of superstition, would be
instructive, but I cannot attempt it now. I will only add a few
miscellaneous examples of the custom before passing to the
ceremonies of purification which are observed by the hunter and
fisherman after the chase and the fishing are over. The workers in
the salt-pans near Siphoum, in Laos, must abstain from all sexual
relations at the place where they are at work; and they may not
cover their heads nor shelter themselves under an umbrella from the
burning rays of the sun. Among the Kachins of Burma the ferment used
in making beer is prepared by two women, chosen by lot, who during
the three days that the process lasts may eat nothing acid and may
have no conjugal relations with their husbands; otherwise it is
supposed that the beer would be sour. Among the Masai honey-wine is
brewed by a man and a woman who live in a hut set apart for them
till the wine is ready for drinking. But they are strictly forbidden
to have sexual intercourse with each other during this time; it is
deemed essential that they should be chaste for two days before they
begin to brew and for the whole of the six days that the brewing
lasts. The Masai believe that were the couple to commit a breach of
chastity, not only would the wine be undrinkable but the bees which
made the honey would fly away. Similarly they require that a man who
is making poison should sleep alone and observe other taboos which
render him almost an outcast. The Wandorobbo, a tribe of the same
region as the Masai, believe that the mere presence of a woman in
the neighbourhood of a man who is brewing poison would deprive the
poison of its venom, and that the same thing would happen if the
wife of the poison-maker were to commit adultery while her husband
was brewing the poison. In this last case it is obvious that a
rationalistic explanation of the taboo is impossible. How could the
loss of virtue in the poison be a physical consequence of the loss
of virtue in the poison-maker's wife? Clearly the effect which the
wife's adultery is supposed to have on the poison is a case of
sympathetic magic; her misconduct sympathetically affects her
husband and his work at a distance. We may, accordingly, infer with
some confidence that the rule of continence imposed on the
poison-maker himself is also a simple case of sympathetic magic, and
not, as a civilised reader might be disposed to conjecture, a wise
precaution designed to prevent him from accidentally poisoning his
wife.

Among the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga tribes of South Africa, when the
site of a new village has been chosen and the houses are building,
all the married people are forbidden to have conjugal relations with
each other. If it were discovered that any couple had broken this
rule, the work of building would immediately be stopped, and another
site chosen for the village. For they think that a breach of
chastity would spoil the village which was growing up, that the
chief would grow lean and perhaps die, and that the guilty woman
would never bear another child. Among the Chams of Cochin-China,
when a dam is made or repaired on a river for the sake of
irrigation, the chief who offers the traditional sacrifices and
implores the protection of the deities on the work has to stay all
the time in a wretched hovel of straw, taking no part in the labour,
and observing the strictest continence; for the people believe that
a breach of his chastity would entail a breach of the dam. Here, it
is plain, there can be no idea of maintaining the mere bodily vigour
of the chief for the accomplishment of a task in which he does not
even bear a hand.

If the taboos or abstinences observed by hunters and fishermen
before and during the chase are dictated, as we have seen reason to
believe, by superstitious motives, and chiefly by a dread of
offending or frightening the spirits of the creatures whom it is
proposed to kill, we may expect that the restraints imposed after
the slaughter has been perpetrated will be at least as stringent,
the slayer and his friends having now the added fear of the angry
ghosts of his victims before their eyes. Whereas on the hypothesis
that the abstinences in question, including those from food, drink,
and sleep, are merely salutary precautions for maintaining the men
in health and strength to do their work, it is obvious that the
observance of these abstinences or taboos after the work is done,
that is, when the game is killed and the fish caught, must be wholly
superfluous, absurd, and inexplicable. But as I shall now show,
these taboos often continue to be enforced or even increased in
stringency after the death of the animals, in other words, after the
hunter or fisher has accomplished his object by making his bag or
landing his fish. The rationalistic theory of them therefore breaks
down entirely; the hypothesis of superstition is clearly the only
one open to us.

Among the Inuit or Esquimaux of Bering Strait "the dead bodies of
various animals must be treated very carefully by the hunter who
obtains them, so that their shades may not be offended and bring bad
luck or even death upon him or his people." Hence the Unalit hunter
who has had a hand in the killing of a white whale, or even has
helped to take one from the net, is not allowed to do any work for
the next four days, that being the time during which the shade or
ghost of the whale is supposed to stay with its body. At the same
time no one in the village may use any sharp or pointed instrument
for fear of wounding the whale's shade, which is believed to be
hovering invisible in the neighbourhood; and no loud noise may be
made lest it should frighten or offend the ghost. Whoever cuts a
whale's body with an iron axe will die. Indeed the use of all iron
instruments is forbidden in the village during these four days.

These same Esquimaux celebrate a great annual festival in December
when the bladders of all the seals, whales, walrus, and white bears
that have been killed in the year are taken into the assembly-house
of the village. They remain there for several days, and so long as
they do so the hunters avoid all intercourse with women, saying that
if they failed in that respect the shades of the dead animals would
be offended. Similarly among the Aleuts of Alaska the hunter who had
struck a whale with a charmed spear would not throw again, but
returned at once to his home and separated himself from his people
in a hut specially constructed for the purpose, where he stayed for
three days without food or drink, and without touching or looking
upon a woman. During this time of seclusion he snorted occasionally
in imitation of the wounded and dying whale, in order to prevent the
whale which he had struck from leaving the coast. On the fourth day
he emerged from his seclusion and bathed in the sea, shrieking in a
hoarse voice and beating the water with his hands. Then, taking with
him a companion, he repaired to that part of the shore where he
expected to find the whale stranded. If the beast was dead, he at
once cut out the place where the death-wound had been inflicted. If
the whale was not dead, he again returned to his home and continued
washing himself until the whale died. Here the hunter's imitation of
the wounded whale is probably intended by means of homoeopathic
magic to make the beast die in earnest. Once more the soul of the
grim polar bear is offended if the taboos which concern him are not
observed. His soul tarries for three days near the spot where it
left his body, and during these days the Esquimaux are particularly
careful to conform rigidly to the laws of taboo, because they
believe that punishment overtakes the transgressor who sins against
the soul of a bear far more speedily than him who sins against the
souls of the sea-beasts.

When the Kayans have shot one of the dreaded Bornean panthers, they
are very anxious about the safety of their souls, for they think
that the soul of a panther is almost more powerful than their own.
Hence they step eight times over the carcase of the dead beast
reciting the spell, "Panther, thy soul under my soul." On returning
home they smear themselves, their dogs, and their weapons with the
blood of fowls in order to calm their souls and hinder them from
fleeing away; for, being themselves fond of the flesh of fowls, they
ascribe the same taste to their souls. For eight days afterwards
they must bathe by day and by night before going out again to the
chase. Among the Hottentots, when a man has killed a lion, leopard,
elephant, or rhinoceros, he is esteemed a great hero, but he has to
remain at home quite idle for three days, during which his wife may
not come near him; she is also enjoined to restrict herself to a
poor diet and to eat no more than is barely necessary to keep her in
health. Similarly the Lapps deem it the height of glory to kill a
bear, which they consider the king of beasts. Nevertheless, all the
men who take part in the slaughter are regarded as unclean, and must
live by themselves for three days in a hut or tent made specially
for them, where they cut up and cook the bear's carcase. The
reindeer which brought in the carcase on a sledge may not be driven
by a woman for a whole year; indeed, according to one account, it
may not be used by anybody for that period. Before the men go into
the tent where they are to be secluded, they strip themselves of the
garments they had worn in killing the bear, and their wives spit the
red juice of alder bark in their faces. They enter the tent not by
the ordinary door but by an opening at the back. When the bear's
flesh has been cooked, a portion of it is sent by the hands of two
men to the women, who may not approach the men's tent while the
cooking is going on. The men who convey the flesh to the women
pretend to be strangers bringing presents from a foreign land; the
women keep up the pretence and promise to tie red threads round the
legs of the strangers. The bear's flesh may not be passed in to the
women through the door of their tent, but must be thrust in at a
special opening made by lifting up the hem of the tent-cover. When
the three days' seclusion is over and the men are at liberty to
return to their wives, they run, one after the other, round the
fire, holding the chain by which pots are suspended over it. This is
regarded as a form of purification; they may now leave the tent by
the ordinary door and rejoin the women. But the leader of the party
must still abstain from cohabitation with his wife for two days
more.

Again, the Caffres are said to dread greatly the boa-constrictor or
an enormous serpent resembling it; "and being influenced by certain
superstitious notions they even fear to kill it. The man who
happened to put it to death, whether in self-defence or otherwise,
was formerly required to lie in a running stream of water during the
day for several weeks together; and no beast whatever was allowed to
be slaughtered at the hamlet to which he belonged, until this duty
had been fully performed. The body of the snake was then taken and
carefully buried in a trench, dug close to the cattle-fold, where
its remains, like those of a chief, were henceforward kept perfectly
undisturbed. The period of penance, as in the case of mourning for
the dead, is now happily reduced to a few days." In Madras it is
considered a great sin to kill a cobra. When this has happened, the
people generally burn the body of the serpent, just as they burn the
bodies of human beings. The murderer deems himself polluted for
three days. On the second day milk is poured on the remains of the
cobra. On the third day the guilty wretch is free from pollution.

In these last cases the animal whose slaughter has to be atoned for
is sacred, that is, it is one whose life is commonly spared from
motives of superstition. Yet the treatment of the sacrilegious
slayer seems to resemble so closely the treatment of hunters and
fishermen who have killed animals for food in the ordinary course of
business, that the ideas on which both sets of customs are based may
be assumed to be substantially the same. Those ideas, if I am right,
are the respect which the savage feels for the souls of beasts,
especially valuable or formidable beasts, and the dread which he
entertains of their vengeful ghosts. Some confirmation of this view
may be drawn from the ceremonies observed by fishermen of Annam when
the carcase of a whale is washed ashore. These fisherfolk, we are
told, worship the whale on account of the benefits they derive from
it. There is hardly a village on the sea-shore which has not its
small pagoda, containing the bones, more or less authentic, of a
whale. When a dead whale is washed ashore, the people accord it a
solemn burial. The man who first caught sight of it acts as chief
mourner, performing the rites which as chief mourner and heir he
would perform for a human kinsman. He puts on all the garb of woe,
the straw hat, the white robe with long sleeves turned inside out,
and the other paraphernalia of full mourning. As next of kin to the
deceased he presides over the funeral rites. Perfumes are burned,
sticks of incense kindled, leaves of gold and silver scattered,
crackers let off. When the flesh has been cut off and the oil
extracted, the remains of the carcase are buried in the sand. After
wards a shed is set up and offerings are made in it. Usually some
time after the burial the spirit of the dead whale takes possession
of some person in the village and declares by his mouth whether he
is a male or a female.




XXI. Tabooed Things



1. The Meaning of Taboo

THUS in primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by
divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the
rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at
puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various
classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and
condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might
pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral
distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution
are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of
all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the
danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what
we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The
danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary;
imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may
kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid. To seclude these
persons from the rest of the world so that the dreaded spiritual
danger shall neither reach them nor spread from them, is the object
of the taboos which they have to observe. These taboos act, so to
say, as electrical insulators to preserve the spiritual force with
which these persons are charged from suffering or inflicting harm by
contact with the outer world.

To the illustrations of these general principles which have been
already given I shall now add some more, drawing my examples, first,
from the class of tabooed things, and, second, from the class of
tabooed words; for in the opinion of the savage both things and
words may, like persons, be charged or electrified, either
temporarily or permanently, with the mysterious virtue of taboo, and
may therefore require to be banished for a longer or shorter time
from the familiar usage of common life. And the examples will be
chosen with special reference to those sacred chiefs, kings and
priests, who, more than anybody else, live fenced about by taboo as
by a wall. Tabooed things will be illustrated in the present
chapter, and tabooed words in the next.



2. Iron tabooed

IN THE FIRST place we may observe that the awful sanctity of kings
naturally leads to a prohibition to touch their sacred persons. Thus
it was unlawful to lay hands on the person of a Spartan king: no one
might touch the body of the king or queen of Tahiti: it is forbidden
to touch the person of the king of Siam under pain of death; and no
one may touch the king of Cambodia, for any purpose whatever,
without his express command. In July 1874 the king was thrown from
his carriage and lay insensible on the ground, but not one of his
suite dared to touch him; a European coming to the spot carried the
injured monarch to his palace. Formerly no one might touch the king
of Corea; and if he deigned to touch a subject, the spot touched
became sacred, and the person thus honoured had to wear a visible
mark (generally a cord of red silk) for the rest of his life. Above
all, no iron might touch the king's body. In 1800 King
Tieng-tsong-tai-oang died of a tumour in the back, no one dreaming
of employing the lancet, which would probably have saved his life.
It is said that one king suffered terribly from an abscess in the
lip, till his physician called in a jester, whose pranks made the
king laugh heartily, and so the abscess burst. Roman and Sabine
priests might not be shaved with iron but only with bronze razors or
shears; and whenever an iron graving-tool was brought into the
sacred grove of the Arval Brothers at Rome for the purpose of
cutting an inscription in stone, an expiatory sacrifice of a lamb
and a pig must be offered, which was repeated when the graving-tool
was removed from the grove. As a general rule iron might not be
brought into Greek sanctuaries. In Crete sacrifices were offered to
Menedemus without the use of iron, because the legend ran that
Menedemus had been killed by an iron weapon in the Trojan war. The
Archon of Plataea might not touch iron; but once a year, at the
annual commemoration of the men who fell at the battle of Plataea,
he was allowed to carry a sword wherewith to sacrifice a bull. To
this day a Hottentot priest never uses an iron knife, but always a
sharp splint of quartz, in sacrificing an animal or circumcising a
lad. Among the Ovambo of South-west Africa custom requires that lads
should be circumcised with a sharp flint; if none is to hand, the
operation may be performed with iron, but the iron must afterwards
be buried. Amongst the Moquis of Arizona stone knives, hatchets, and
so on have passed out of common use, but are retained in religious
ceremonies. After the Pawnees had ceased to use stone arrow-heads
for ordinary purposes, they still employed them to slay the
sacrifices, whether human captives or buffalo and deer. Amongst the
Jews no iron tool was used in building the Temple at Jerusalem or in
making an altar. The old wooden bridge (_Pons Sublicius_) at Rome,
which was considered sacred, was made and had to be kept in repair
without the use of iron or bronze. It was expressly provided by law
that the temple of Jupiter Liber at Furfo might be repaired with
iron tools. The council chamber at Cyzicus was constructed of wood
without any iron nails, the beams being so arranged that they could
be taken out and replaced.

This superstitious objection to iron perhaps dates from that early
time in the history of society when iron was still a novelty, and as
such was viewed by many with suspicion and dislike. For everything
new is apt to excite the awe and dread of the savage. "It is a
curious superstition," says a pioneer in Borneo, "this of the
Dusuns, to attribute anything--whether good or bad, lucky or
unlucky--that happens to them to something novel which has arrived
in their country. For instance, my living in Kindram has caused the
intensely hot weather we have experienced of late." The unusually
heavy rains which happened to follow the English survey of the
Nicobar Islands in the winter of 1886-1887 were imputed by the
alarmed natives to the wrath of the spirits at the theodolites,
dumpy-levellers, and other strange instruments which had been set up
in so many of their favourite haunts; and some of them proposed to
soothe the anger of the spirits by sacrificing a pig. In the
seventeenth century a succession of bad seasons excited a revolt
among the Esthonian peasantry, who traced the origin of the evil to
a watermill, which put a stream to some inconvenience by checking
its flow. The first introduction of iron ploughshares into Poland
having been followed by a succession of bad harvests, the farmers
attributed the badness of the crops to the iron ploughshares, and
discarded them for the old wooden ones. To this day the primitive
Baduwis of Java, who live chiefly by husbandry, will use no iron
tools in tilling their fields.

The general dislike of innovation, which always makes itself
strongly felt in the sphere of religion, is sufficient by itself to
account for the superstitious aversion to iron entertained by kings
and priests and attributed by them to the gods; possibly this
aversion may have been intensified in places by some such accidental
cause as the series of bad seasons which cast discredit on iron
ploughshares in Poland. But the disfavour in which iron is held by
the gods and their ministers has another side. Their antipathy to
the metal furnishes men with a weapon which may be turned against
the spirits when occasion serves. As their dislike of iron is
supposed to be so great that they will not approach persons and
things protected by the obnoxious metal, iron may obviously be
employed as a charm for banning ghosts and other dangerous spirits.
And often it is so used. Thus in the Highlands of Scotland the great
safeguard against the elfin race is iron, or, better yet, steel. The
metal in any form, whether as a sword, a knife, a gun-barrel, or
what not, is all-powerful for this purpose. Whenever you enter a
fairy dwelling you should always remember to stick a piece of steel,
such as a knife, a needle, or a fish-hook, in the door; for then the
elves will not be able to shut the door till you come out again. So,
too, when you have shot a deer and are bringing it home at night, be
sure to thrust a knife into the carcase, for that keeps the fairies
from laying their weight on it. A knife or nail in your pocket is
quite enough to prevent the fairies from lifting you up at night.
Nails in the front of a bed ward off elves from women "in the straw"
and from their babes; but to make quite sure it is better to put the
smoothing-iron under the bed, and the reaping-hook in the window. If
a bull has fallen over a rock and been killed, a nail stuck into it
will preserve the flesh from the fairies. Music discoursed on a
Jew's harp keeps the elfin women away from the hunter, because the
tongue of the instrument is of steel. In Morocco iron is considered
a great protection against demons; hence it is usual to place a
knife or dagger under a sick man's pillow. The Singhalese believe
that they are constantly surrounded by evil spirits, who lie in wait
to do them harm. A peasant would not dare to carry good food, such
as cakes or roast meat, from one place to another without putting an
iron nail on it to prevent a demon from taking possession of the
viands and so making the eater ill. No sick person, whether man or
woman, would venture out of the house without a bunch of keys or a
knife in his hand, for without such a talisman he would fear that
some devil might take advantage of his weak state to slip into his
body. And if a man has a large sore on his body he tries to keep a
morsel of iron on it as a protection against demons. On the Slave
Coast when a mother sees her child gradually wasting away, she
concludes that a demon has entered into the child, and takes her
measures accordingly. To lure the demon out of the body of her
offspring, she offers a sacrifice of food; and while the devil is
bolting it, she attaches iron rings and small bells to her child's
ankles and hangs iron chains round his neck. The jingling of the
iron and the tinkling of the bells are supposed to prevent the
demon, when he has concluded his repast, from entering again into
the body of the little sufferer. Hence many children may be seen in
this part of Africa weighed down with iron ornaments.



3. Sharp Weapons tabooed

THERE is a priestly king to the north of Zengwih in Burma, revered
by the Sotih as the highest spiritual and temporal authority, into
whose house no weapon or cutting instrument may be brought. This
rule may perhaps be explained by a custom observed by various
peoples after a death; they refrain from the use of sharp
instruments so long as the ghost of the deceased is supposed to be
near, lest they should wound it. Thus among the Esquimaux of Bering
Strait "during the day on which a person dies in the village no one
is permitted to work, and the relatives must perform no labour
during the three following days. It is especially forbidden during
this period to cut with any edged instrument, such as a knife or an
axe; and the use of pointed instruments, like needles or bodkins, is
also forbidden. This is said to be done to avoid cutting or injuring
the shade, which may be present at any time during this period, and,
if accidentally injured by any of these things, it would become very
angry and bring sickness or death to the people. The relatives must
also be very careful at this time not to make any loud or harsh
noises that may startle or anger the shade." We have seen that in
like manner after killing a white whale these Esquimaux abstain from
the use of cutting or pointed instruments for four days, lest they
should unwittingly cut or stab the whale's ghost. The same taboo is
sometimes observed by them when there is a sick person in the
village, probably from a fear of injuring his shade which may be
hovering outside of his body. After a death the Roumanians of
Transylvania are careful not to leave a knife lying with the sharp
edge uppermost so long as the corpse remains in the house, "or else
the soul will be forced to ride on the blade." For seven days after
a death, the corpse being still in the house, the Chinese abstain
from the use of knives and needles, and even of chopsticks, eating
their food with their fingers. On the third, sixth, ninth, and
fortieth days after the funeral the old Prussians and Lithuanians
used to prepare a meal, to which, standing at the door, they invited
the soul of the deceased. At these meals they sat silent round the
table and used no knives and the women who served up the food were
also without knives. If any morsels fell from the table they were
left lying there for the lonely souls that had no living relations
or friends to feed them. When the meal was over the priest took a
broom and swept the souls out of the house, saying, "Dear souls, ye
have eaten and drunk. Go forth, go forth." We can now understand why
no cutting instrument may be taken into the house of the Burmese
pontiff. Like so many priestly kings, he is probably regarded as
divine, and it is therefore right that his sacred spirit should not
be exposed to the risk of being cut or wounded whenever it quits his
body to hover invisible in the air or to fly on some distant
mission.



4. Blood tabooed

WE have seen that the Flamen Dialis was forbidden to touch or even
name raw flesh. At certain times a Brahman teacher is enjoined not
to look on raw flesh, blood, or persons whose hands have been cut
off. In Uganda the father of twins is in a state of taboo for some
time after birth; among other rules he is forbidden to kill anything
or to see blood. In the Pelew Islands when a raid has been made on a
village and a head carried off, the relations of the slain man are
tabooed and have to submit to certain observances in order to escape
the wrath of his ghost. They are shut up in the house, touch no raw
flesh, and chew betel over which an incantation has been uttered by
the exorcist. After this the ghost of the slaughtered man goes away
to the enemy's country in pursuit of his murderer. The taboo is
probably based on the common belief that the soul or spirit of the
animal is in the blood. As tabooed persons are believed to be in a
perilous state--for example, the relations of the slain man are
liable to the attacks of his indignant ghost--it is especially
necessary to isolate them from contact with spirits; hence the
prohibition to touch raw meat. But as usual the taboo is only the
special enforcement of a general precept; in other words, its
observance is particularly enjoined in circumstances which seem
urgently to call for its application, but apart from such
circumstances the prohibition is also observed, though less
strictly, as a common rule of life. Thus some of the Esthonians will
not taste blood because they believe that it contains the animal's
soul, which would enter the body of the person who tasted the blood.
Some Indian tribes of North America, "through a strong principle of
religion, abstain in the strictest manner from eating the blood of
any animal, as it contains the life and spirit of the beast." Jewish
hunters poured out the blood of the game they had killed and covered
it up with dust. They would not taste the blood, believing that the
soul or life of the animal was in the blood, or actually was the
blood.

It is a common rule that royal blood may not be shed upon the
ground. Hence when a king or one of his family is to be put to death
a mode of execution is devised by which the royal blood shall not be
spilt upon the earth. About the year 1688 the generalissimo of the
army rebelled against the king of Siam and put him to death "after
the manner of royal criminals, or as princes of the blood are
treated when convicted of capital crimes, which is by putting them
into a large iron caldron, and pounding them to pieces with wooden
pestles, because none of their royal blood must be spilt on the
ground, it being, by their religion, thought great impiety to
contaminate the divine blood by mixing it with earth." When Kublai
Khan defeated and took his uncle Nayan, who had rebelled against
him, he caused Nayan to be put to death by being wrapt in a carpet
and tossed to and fro till he died, "because he would not have the
blood of his Line Imperial spilt upon the ground or exposed in the
eye of Heaven and before the Sun." "Friar Ricold mentions the Tartar
maxim: 'One Khan will put another to death to get possession of the
throne, but he takes great care that the blood be not spilt. For
they say that it is highly improper that the blood of the Great Khan
should be spilt upon the ground; so they cause the victim to be
smothered somehow or other.' The like feeling prevails at the court
of Burma, where a peculiar mode of execution without bloodshed is
reserved for princes of the blood."

The reluctance to spill royal blood seems to be only a particular
case of a general unwillingness to shed blood or at least to allow
it to fall on the ground. Marco Polo tells us that in his day
persons caught in the streets of Cambaluc (Peking) at unseasonable
hours were arrested, and if found guilty of a misdemeanor were
beaten with a stick. "Under this punishment people sometimes die,
but they adopt it in order to eschew bloodshed, for their _Bacsis_
say that it is an evil thing to shed man's blood." In West Sussex
people believe that the ground on which human blood has been shed is
accursed and will remain barren for ever. Among some primitive
peoples, when the blood of a tribesman has to be spilt it is not
suffered to fall upon the ground, but is received upon the bodies of
his fellow-tribesmen. Thus in some Australian tribes boys who are
being circumcised are laid on a platform, formed by the living
bodies of the tribesmen; and when a boy's tooth is knocked out as an
initiatory ceremony, he is seated on the shoulders of a man, on
whose breast the blood flows and may not be wiped away. "Also the
Gauls used to drink their enemies' blood and paint themselves
therewith. So also they write that the old Irish were wont; and so
have I seen some of the Irish do, but not their enemies' but
friends' blood, as, namely, at the execution of a notable traitor at
Limerick, called Murrogh O'Brien, I saw an old woman, which was his
foster-mother, take up his head whilst he was quartered and suck up
all the blood that ran thereout, saying that the earth was not
worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast
and tore her hair, crying out and shrieking most terribly." Among
the Latuka of Central Africa the earth on which a drop of blood has
fallen at childbirth is carefully scraped up with an iron shovel,
put into a pot along with the water used in washing the mother, and
buried tolerably deep outside the house on the left-hand side. In
West Africa, if a drop of your blood has fallen on the ground, you
must carefully cover it up, rub and stamp it into the soil; if it
has fallen on the side of a canoe or a tree, the place is cut out
and the chip destroyed. One motive of these African customs may be a
wish to prevent the blood from falling into the hands of magicians,
who might make an evil use of it. That is admittedly the reason why
people in West Africa stamp out any blood of theirs which has
dropped on the ground or cut out any wood that has been soaked with
it. From a like dread of sorcery natives of New Guinea are careful
to burn any sticks, leaves, or rags which are stained with their
blood; and if the blood has dripped on the ground they turn up the
soil and if possible light a fire on the spot. The same fear
explains the curious duties discharged by a class of men called
_ramanga_ or "blue blood" among the Betsileo of Madagascar. It is
their business to eat all the nail-parings and to lick up all the
spilt blood of the nobles. When the nobles pare their nails, the
parings are collected to the last scrap and swallowed by these
_ramanga._ If the parings are too large, they are minced small and
so gulped down. Again, should a nobleman wound himself, say in
cutting his nails or treading on something, the _ramanga_ lick up
the blood as fast as possible. Nobles of high rank hardly go
anywhere without these humble attendants; but if it should happen
that there are none of them present, the cut nails and the spilt
blood are carefully collected to be afterwards swallowed by the
_ramanga._ There is scarcely a nobleman of any pretensions who does
not strictly observe this custom, the intention of which probably is
to prevent these parts of his person from falling into the hands of
sorcerers, who on the principles of contagious magic could work him
harm thereby.

The general explanation of the reluctance to shed blood on the
ground is probably to be found in the belief that the soul is in the
blood, and that therefore any ground on which it may fall
necessarily becomes taboo or sacred. In New Zealand anything upon
which even a drop of a high chief's blood chances to fall becomes
taboo or sacred to him. For instance, a party of natives having come
to visit a chief in a fine new canoe, the chief got into it, but in
doing so a splinter entered his foot, and the blood trickled on the
canoe, which at once became sacred to him. The owner jumped out,
dragged the canoe ashore opposite the chief's house, and left it
there. Again, a chief in entering a missionary's house knocked his
head against a beam, and the blood flowed. The natives said that in
former times the house would have belonged to the chief. As usually
happens with taboos of universal application, the prohibition to
spill the blood of a tribesman on the ground applies with peculiar
stringency to chiefs and kings, and is observed in their case long
after it has ceased to be observed in the case of others.



5. The Head tabooed

MANY peoples regard the head as peculiarly sacred; the special
sanctity attributed to it is sometimes explained by a belief that it
contains a spirit which is very sensitive to injury or disrespect.
Thus the Yorubas hold that every man has three spiritual inmates, of
whom the first, called Olori, dwells in the head and is the man's
protector, guardian, and guide. Offerings are made to this spirit,
chiefly of fowls, and some of the blood mixed with palmoil is rubbed
on the forehead. The Karens suppose that a being called the _tso_
resides in the upper part of the head, and while it retains its seat
no harm can befall the person from the efforts of the seven
_Kelahs,_ or personified passions. "But if the _tso_ becomes
heedless or weak certain evil to the person is the result. Hence the
head is carefully attended to, and all possible pains are taken to
provide such dress and attire as will be pleasing to the _tso._" The
Siamese think that a spirit called _khuan_ or _kwun_ dwells in the
human head, of which it is the guardian spirit. The spirit must be
carefully protected from injury of every kind; hence the act of
shaving or cutting the hair is accompanied with many ceremonies. The
_kwun_ is very sensitive on points of honour, and would feel
mortally insulted if the head in which he resides were touched by
the hand of a stranger. The Cambodians esteem it a grave offence to
touch a man's head; some of them will not enter a place where
anything whatever is suspended over their heads; and the meanest
Cambodian would never consent to live under an inhabited room. Hence
the houses are built of one story only; and even the Government
respects the prejudice by never placing a prisoner in the stocks
under the floor of a house, though the houses are raised high above
the ground. The same superstition exists amongst the Malays; for an
early traveller reports that in Java people "wear nothing on their
heads, and say that nothing must be on their heads . . . and if any
person were to put his hand upon their head they would kill him; and
they do not build houses with storeys, in order that they may not
walk over each other's heads."

The same superstition as to the head is found in full force
throughout Polynesia. Thus of Gattanewa, a Marquesan chief, it is
said that "to touch the top of his head, or anything which had been
on his head, was sacrilege. To pass over his head was an indignity
never to be forgotten." The son of a Marquesan high priest has been
seen to roll on the ground in an agony of rage and despair, begging
for death, because some one had desecrated his head and deprived him
of his divinity by sprinkling a few drops of water on his hair. But
it was not the Marquesan chiefs only whose heads were sacred. The
head of every Marquesan was taboo, and might neither be touched nor
stepped over by another; even a father might not step over the head
of his sleeping child; women were forbidden to carry or touch
anything that had been in contact with, or had merely hung over, the
head of their husband or father. No one was allowed to be over the
head of the king of Tonga. In Tahiti any one who stood over the king
or queen, or passed his hand over their heads, might be put to
death. Until certain rites were performed over it, a Tahitian infant
was especially taboo; whatever touched the child's head, while it
was in this state, became sacred and was deposited in a consecrated
place railed in for the purpose at the child's house. If a branch of
a tree touched the child's head, the tree was cut down; and if in
its fall it injured another tree so as to penetrate the bark, that
tree also was cut down as unclean and unfit for use. After the rites
were performed these special taboos ceased; but the head of a
Tahitian was always sacred, he never carried anything on it, and to
touch it was an offence. So sacred was the head of a Maori chief
that "if he only touched it with his fingers, he was obliged
immediately to apply them to his nose, and snuff up the sanctity
which they had acquired by the touch, and thus restore it to the
part from whence it was taken." On account of the sacredness of his
head a Maori chief "could not blow the fire with his mouth, for the
breath being sacred, communicated his sanctity to it, and a brand
might be taken by a slave, or a man of another tribe, or the fire
might be used for other purposes, such as cooking, and so cause his
death."



6. Hair tabooed

WHEN the head was considered so sacred that it might not even be
touched without grave offence, it is obvious that the cutting of the
hair must have been a delicate and difficult operation. The
difficulties and dangers which, on the primitive view, beset the
operation are of two kinds. There is first the danger of disturbing
the spirit of the head, which may be injured in the process and may
revenge itself upon the person who molests him. Secondly, there is
the difficulty of disposing of the shorn locks. For the savage
believes that the sympathetic connexion which exists between himself
and every part of his body continues to exist even after the
physical connexion has been broken, and that therefore he will
suffer from any harm that may befall the several parts of his body,
such as the clippings of his hair or the parings of his nails.
Accordingly he takes care that these severed portions of himself
shall not be left in places where they might either be exposed to
accidental injury or fall into the hands of malicious persons who
might work magic on them to his detriment or death. Such dangers are
common to all, but sacred persons have more to fear from them than
ordinary people, so the precautions taken by them are
proportionately stringent. The simplest way of evading the peril is
not to cut the hair at all; and this is the expedient adopted where
the risk is thought to be more than usually great. The Frankish
kings were never allowed to crop their hair; from their childhood
upwards they had to keep it unshorn. To poll the long locks that
floated on their shoulders would have been to renounce their right
to the throne. When the wicked brothers Clotaire and Childebert
coveted the kingdom of their dead brother Clodomir, they inveigled
into their power their little nephews, the two sons of Clodomir; and
having done so, they sent a messenger bearing scissors and a naked
sword to the children's grandmother, Queen Clotilde, at Paris. The
envoy showed the scissors and the sword to Clotilde, and bade her
choose whether the children should be shorn and live or remain
unshorn and die. The proud queen replied that if her grandchildren
were not to come to the throne she would rather see them dead than
shorn. And murdered they were by their ruthless uncle Clotaire with
his own hand. The king of Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, must
wear his hair long, and so must his grandees. Among the Hos, a negro
tribe of West Africa, "there are priests on whose head no razor may
come during the whole of their lives. The god who dwells in the man
forbids the cutting of his hair on pain of death. If the hair is at
last too long, the owner must pray to his god to allow him at least
to clip the tips of it. The hair is in fact conceived as the seat
and lodging-place of his god, so that were it shorn the god would
lose his abode in the priest." The members of a Masai clan, who are
believed to possess the art of making rain, may not pluck out their
beards, because the loss of their beards would, it is supposed,
entail the loss of their rain-making powers. The head chief and the
sorcerers of the Masai observe the same rule for a like reason: they
think that were they to pull out their beards, their supernatural
gifts would desert them.

Again, men who have taken a vow of vengeance sometimes keep their
hair unshorn till they have fulfilled their vow. Thus of the
Marquesans we are told that "occasionally they have their head
entirely shaved, except one lock on the crown, which is worn loose
or put up in a knot. But the latter mode of wearing the hair is only
adopted by them when they have a solemn vow, as to revenge the death
of some near relation, etc. In such case the lock is never cut off
until they have fulfilled their promise." A similar custom was
sometimes observed by the ancient Germans; among the Chatti the
young warriors never clipped their hair or their beard till they had
slain an enemy. Among the Toradjas, when a child's hair is cut to
rid it of vermin, some locks are allowed to remain on the crown of
the head as a refuge for one of the child's souls. Otherwise the
soul would have no place in which to settle, and the child would
sicken. The Karo-Bataks are much afraid of frightening away the soul
of a child; hence when they cut its hair, they always leave a patch
unshorn, to which the soul can retreat before the shears. Usually
this lock remains unshorn all through life, or at least up till
manhood.



7. Ceremonies at Hair-cutting

BUT when it becomes necessary to crop the hair, measures are taken
to lessen the dangers which are supposed to attend the operation.
The chief of Namosi in Fiji always ate a man by way of precaution
when he had had his hair cut. "There was a certain clan that had to
provide the victim, and they used to sit in solemn council among
themselves to choose him. It was a sacrificial feast to avert evil
from the chief." Amongst the Maoris many spells were uttered at
hair-cutting; one, for example, was spoken to consecrate the
obsidian knife with which the hair was cut; another was pronounced
to avert the thunder and lightning which hair-cutting was believed
to cause. "He who has had his hair cut is in immediate charge of the
Atua (spirit); he is removed from the contact and society of his
family and his tribe; he dare not touch his food himself; it is put
into his mouth by another person; nor can he for some days resume
his accustomed occupations or associate with his fellow-men." The
person who cuts the hair is also tabooed; his hands having been in
contact with a sacred head, he may not touch food with them or
engage in any other employment; he is fed by another person with
food cooked over a sacred fire. He cannot be released from the taboo
before the following day, when he rubs his hands with potato or fern
root which has been cooked on a sacred fire; and this food having
been taken to the head of the family in the female line and eaten by
her, his hands are freed from the taboo. In some parts of New
Zealand the most sacred day of the year was that appointed for
hair-cutting; the people assembled in large numbers on that day from
all the neighbourhood.



8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails

BUT even when the hair and nails have been safely cut, there remains
the difficulty of disposing of them, for their owner believes
himself liable to suffer from any harm that may befall them. The
notion that a man may be bewitched by means of the clippings of his
hair, the parings of his nails, or any other severed portion of his
person is almost world-wide, and attested by evidence too ample, too
familiar, and too tedious in its uniformity to be here analysed at
length. The general idea on which the superstition rests is that of
the sympathetic connexion supposed to persist between a person and
everything that has once been part of his body or in any way closely
related to him. A very few examples must suffice. They belong to
that branch of sympathetic magic which may be called contagious.
Dread of sorcery, we are told, formed one of the most salient
characteristics of the Marquesan islanders in the old days. The
sorcerer took some of the hair, spittle, or other bodily refuse of
the man he wished to injure, wrapped it up in a leaf, and placed the
packet in a bag woven of threads or fibres, which were knotted in an
intricate way. The whole was then buried with certain rites, and
thereupon the victim wasted away of a languishing sickness which
lasted twenty days. His life, however, might be saved by discovering
and digging up the buried hair, spittle, or what not; for as soon as
this was done the power of the charm ceased. A Maori sorcerer intent
on bewitching somebody sought to get a tress of his victim's hair,
the parings of his nails, some of his spittle, or a shred of his
garment. Having obtained the object, whatever it was, he chanted
certain spells and curses over it in a falsetto voice and buried it
in the ground. As the thing decayed, the person to whom it had
belonged was supposed to waste away. When an Australian blackfellow
wishes to get rid of his wife, he cuts off a lock of her hair in her
sleep, ties it to his spear-thrower, and goes with it to a
neighbouring tribe, where he gives it to a friend. His friend sticks
the spear-thrower up every night before the camp fire, and when it
falls down it is a sign that the wife is dead. The way in which the
charm operates was explained to Dr. Howitt by a Wirajuri man. "You
see," he said, "when a blackfellow doctor gets hold of something
belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings over it, the
fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles the poor
fellow."

The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that if mice get a person's
shorn hair and make a nest of it, the person will suffer from
headache or even become idiotic. Similarly in Germany it is a common
notion that if birds find a person's cut hair, and build their nests
with it, the person will suffer from headache; sometimes it is
thought that he will have an eruption on the head. The same
superstition prevails, or used to prevail, in West Sussex.

Again it is thought that cut or combed-out hair may disturb the
weather by producing rain and hail, thunder and lightning. We have
seen that in New Zealand a spell was uttered at hair-cutting to
avert thunder and lightning. In the Tyrol, witches are supposed to
use cut or combed-out hair to make hailstones or thunderstorms with.
Thlinkeet Indians have been known to attribute stormy weather to the
rash act of a girl who had combed her hair outside of the house. The
Romans seem to have held similar views, for it was a maxim with them
that no one on shipboard should cut his hair or nails except in a
storm, that is, when the mischief was already done. In the Highlands
of Scotland it is said that no sister should comb her hair at night
if she have a brother at sea. In West Africa, when the Mani of
Chitombe or Jumba died, the people used to run in crowds to the
corpse and tear out his hair, teeth, and nails, which they kept as a
rain-charm, believing that otherwise no rain would fall. The Makoko
of the Anzikos begged the missionaries to give him half their beards
as a rain-charm.

If cut hair and nails remain in sympathetic connexion with the
person from whose body they have been severed, it is clear that they
can be used as hostages for his good behaviour by any one who may
chance to possess them; for on the principles of contagious magic he
has only to injure the hair or nails in order to hurt simultaneously
their original owner. Hence when the Nandi have taken a prisoner
they shave his head and keep the shorn hair as a surety that he will
not attempt to escape; but when the captive is ransomed, they return
his shorn hair with him to his own people.

To preserve the cut hair and nails from injury and from the
dangerous uses to which they may be put by sorcerers, it is
necessary to deposit them in some safe place. The shorn locks of a
Maori chief were gathered with much care and placed in an adjoining
cemetery. The Tahitians buried the cuttings of their hair at the
temples. In the streets of Soku a modern traveller observed cairns
of large stones piled against walls with tufts of human hair
inserted in the crevices. On asking the meaning of this, he was told
that when any native of the place polled his hair he carefully
gathered up the clippings and deposited them in one of these cairns,
all of which were sacred to the fetish and therefore inviolable.
These cairns of sacred stones, he further learned, were simply a
precaution against witchcraft, for if a man were not thus careful in
disposing of his hair, some of it might fall into the hands of his
enemies, who would, by means of it, be able to cast spells over him
and so compass his destruction. When the top-knot of a Siamese child
has been cut with great ceremony, the short hairs are put into a
little vessel made of plantain leaves and set adrift on the nearest
river or canal. As they float away, all that was wrong or harmful in
the child's disposition is believed to depart with them. The long
hairs are kept till the child makes a pilgrimage to the holy
Footprint of Buddha on the sacred hill at Prabat. They are then
presented to the priests, who are supposed to make them into brushes
with which they sweep the Footprint; but in fact so much hair is
thus offered every year that the priests cannot use it all, so they
quietly burn the superfluity as soon as the pilgrims' backs are
turned. The cut hair and nails of the Flamen Dialis were buried
under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of the Vestal Virgins were
hung on an ancient lotus-tree.

Often the clipped hair and nails are stowed away in any secret
place, not necessarily in a temple or cemetery or at a tree, as in
the cases already mentioned. Thus in Swabia you are recommended to
deposit your clipped hair in some spot where neither sun nor moon
can shine on it, for example in the earth or under a stone. In
Danzig it is buried in a bag under the threshold. In Ugi, one of the
Solomon Islands, men bury their hair lest it should fall into the
hands of an enemy, who would make magic with it and so bring
sickness or calamity on them. The same fear seems to be general in
Melanesia, and has led to a regular practice of hiding cut hair and
nails. The same practice prevails among many tribes of South Africa,
from a fear lest wizards should get hold of the severed particles
and work evil with them. The Caffres carry still further this dread
of allowing any portion of themselves to fall into the hands of an
enemy; for not only do they bury their cut hair and nails in a
secret spot, but when one of them cleans the head of another he
preserves the vermin which he catches, "carefully delivering them to
the person to whom they originally appertained, supposing, according
to their theory, that as they derived their support from the blood
of the man from whom they were taken, should they be killed by
another, the blood of his neighbour would be in his possession, thus
placing in his hands the power of some superhuman influence."

Sometimes the severed hair and nails are preserved, not to prevent
them from falling into the hands of a magician, but that the owner
may have them at the resurrection of the body, to which some races
look forward. Thus the Incas of Peru "took extreme care to preserve
the nail-parings and the hairs that were shorn off or torn out with
a comb; placing them in holes or niches in the walls; and if they
fell out, any other Indian that saw them picked them up and put them
in their places again. I very often asked different Indians, at
various times, why they did this, in order to see what they would
say, and they all replied in the same words saying, 'Know that all
persons who are born must return to life' (they have no word to
express resurrection), 'and the souls must rise out of their tombs
with all that belonged to their bodies. We, therefore, in order that
we may not have to search for our hair and nails at a time when
there will be much hurry and confusion, place them in one place,
that they may be brought together more conveniently, and, whenever
it is possible, we are also careful to spit in one place.'"
Similarly the Turks never throw away the parings of their nails, but
carefully stow them in cracks of the walls or of the boards, in the
belief that they will be needed at the resurrection. The Armenians
do not throw away their cut hair and nails and extracted teeth, but
hide them in places that are esteemed holy, such as a crack in the
church wall, a pillar of the house, or a hollow tree. They think
that all these severed portions of themselves will be wanted at the
resurrection, and that he who has not stowed them away in a safe
place will have to hunt about for them on the great day. In the
village of Drumconrath in Ireland there used to be some old women
who, having ascertained from Scripture that the hairs of their heads
were all numbered by the Almighty, expected to have to account for
them at the day of judgment. In order to be able to do so they
stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their cottages.

Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into the
hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of the
Victorian tribes. In the Upper Vosges they say that you should never
leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but burn
them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you. For the
same reason Italian women either burn their loose hairs or throw
them into a place where no one is likely to look for them. The
almost universal dread of witchcraft induces the West African
negroes, the Makololo of South Africa, and the Tahitians to burn or
bury their shorn hair. In the Tyrol many people burn their hair lest
the witches should use it to raise thunderstorms; others burn or
bury it to prevent the birds from lining their nests with it, which
would cause the heads from which the hair came to ache.

This destruction of the hair and nails plainly involves an
inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly
to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by
sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon
the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man from
whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion still
exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without
injury to the man.



9. Spittle tabooed

THE SAME fear of witchcraft which has led so many people to hide or
destroy their loose hair and nails has induced other or the same
people to treat their spittle in a like fashion. For on the
principles of sympathetic magic the spittle is part of the man, and
whatever is done to it will have a corresponding effect on him. A
Chilote Indian, who has gathered up the spittle of an enemy, will
put it in a potato, and hang the potato in the smoke, uttering
certain spells as he does so in the belief that his foe will waste
away as the potato dries in the smoke. Or he will put the spittle in
a frog and throw the animal into an inaccessible, unnavigable river,
which will make the victim quake and shake with ague. The natives of
Urewera, a district of New Zealand, enjoyed a high reputation for
their skill in magic. It was said that they made use of people's
spittle to bewitch them. Hence visitors were careful to conceal
their spittle, lest they should furnish these wizards with a handle
for working them harm. Similarly among some tribes of South Africa
no man will spit when an enemy is near, lest his foe should find the
spittle and give it to a wizard, who would then mix it with magical
ingredients so as to injure the person from whom it fell. Even in a
man's own house his saliva is carefully swept away and obliterated
for a similar reason.

If common folk are thus cautious, it is natural that kings and
chiefs should be doubly so. In the Sandwich Islands chiefs were
attended by a confidential servant bearing a portable spittoon, and
the deposit was carefully buried every morning to put it out of the
reach of sorcerers. On the Slave Coast, for the same reason,
whenever a king or chief expectorates, the saliva is scrupulously
gathered up and hidden or buried. The same precautions are taken for
the same reason with the spittle of the chief of Tabali in Southern
Nigeria.

The magical use to which spittle may be put marks it out, like blood
or nail-parings, as a suitable material basis for a covenant, since
by exchanging their saliva the covenanting parties give each other a
guarantee of good faith. If either of them afterwards foreswears
himself, the other can punish his perfidy by a magical treatment of
the purjurer's spittle which he has in his custody. Thus when the
Wajagga of East Africa desire to make a covenant, the two parties
will sometimes sit down with a bowl of milk or beer between them,
and after uttering an incantation over the beverage they each take a
mouthful of the milk or beer and spit it into the other's mouth. In
urgent cases, when there is no time to spend on ceremony, the two
will simply spit into each other's mouth, which seals the covenant
just as well.



10. Foods tabooed

AS MIGHT have been expected, the superstitions of the savage cluster
thick about the subject of food; and he abstains from eating many
animals and plants, wholesome enough in themselves, which for one
reason or another he fancies would prove dangerous or fatal to the
eater. Examples of such abstinence are too familiar and far too
numerous to quote. But if the ordinary man is thus deterred by
superstitious fear from partaking of various foods, the restraints
of this kind which are laid upon sacred or tabooed persons, such as
kings and priests, are still more numerous and stringent. We have
already seen that the Flamen Dialis was forbidden to eat or even
name several plants and animals, and that the flesh diet of Egyptian
kings was restricted to veal and goose. In antiquity many priests
and many kings of barbarous peoples abstained wholly from a flesh
diet. The _Gangas_ or fetish priests of the Loango Coast are
forbidden to eat or even see a variety of animals and fish, in
consequence of which their flesh diet is extremely limited; often
they live only on herbs and roots, though they may drink fresh
blood. The heir to the throne of Loango is forbidden from infancy to
eat pork; from early childhood he is interdicted the use of the
_cola_ fruit in company; at puberty he is taught by a priest not to
partake of fowls except such as he has himself killed and cooked;
and so the number of taboos goes on increasing with his years. In
Fernando Po the king after installation is forbidden to eat cocco
(_arum acaule_), deer, and porcupine, which are the ordinary foods
of the people. The head chief of the Masai may eat nothing but milk,
honey, and the roasted livers of goats; for if he partook of any
other food he would lose his power of soothsaying and of compounding
charms.



11. Knots and Rings tabooed

WE have seen that among the many taboos which the Flamen Dialis at
Rome had to observe, there was one that forbade him to have a knot
on any part of his garments, and another that obliged him to wear no
ring unless it were broken. In like manner Moslem pilgrims to Mecca
are in a state of sanctity or taboo and may wear on their persons
neither knots nor rings. These rules are probably of kindred
significance, and may conveniently be considered together. To begin
with knots, many people in different parts of the world entertain a
strong objection to having any knot about their person at certain
critical seasons, particularly childbirth, marriage, and death. Thus
among the Saxons of Transylvania, when a woman is in travail all
knots on her garments are untied, because it is believed that this
will facilitate her delivery, and with the same intention all the
locks in the house, whether on doors or boxes, are unlocked. The
Lapps think that a lying-in woman should have no knot on her
garments, because a knot would have the effect of making the
delivery difficult and painful. In the East Indies this superstition
is extended to the whole time of pregnancy; the people believe that
if a pregnant woman were to tie knots, or braid, or make anything
fast, the child would thereby be constricted or the woman would
herself be "tied up" when her time came. Nay, some of them enforce
the observance of the rule on the father as well as the mother of
the unborn child. Among the Sea Dyaks neither of the parents may
bind up anything with a string or make anything fast during the
wife's pregnancy. In the Toumbuluh tribe of North Celebes a ceremony
is performed in the fourth or fifth month of a woman's pregnancy,
and after it her husband is forbidden, among many other things, to
tie any fast knots and to sit with his legs crossed over each other.

In all these cases the idea seems to be that the tying of a knot
would, as they say in the East Indies, "tie up" the woman, in other
words, impede and perhaps prevent her delivery, or delay her
convalescence after the birth. On the principles of homoeopathic or
imitative magic the physical obstacle or impediment of a knot on a
cord would create a corresponding obstacle or impediment in the body
of the woman. That this is really the explanation of the rule
appears from a custom observed by the Hos of West Africa at a
difficult birth. When a woman is in hard labour and cannot bring
forth, they call in a magician to her aid. He looks at her and says,
"The child is bound in the womb, that is why she cannot be
delivered." On the entreaties of her female relations he then
promises to loosen the bond so that she may bring forth. For that
purpose he orders them to fetch a tough creeper from the forest, and
with it he binds the hands and feet of the sufferer on her back.
Then he takes a knife and calls out the woman's name, and when she
answers he cuts through the creeper with a knife, saying, "I cut
through to-day thy bonds and thy child's bonds." After that he chops
up the creeper small, puts the bits in a vessel of water, and bathes
the woman with the water. Here the cutting of the creeper with which
the woman's hands and feet are bound is a simple piece of
homoeopathic or imitative magic: by releasing her limbs from their
bonds the magician imagines that he simultaneously releases the
child in her womb from the trammels which impede its birth. The same
train of thought underlies a practice observed by some peoples of
opening all locks, doors, and so on, while a birth is taking place
in the house. We have seen that at such a time the Germans of
Transylvania open all the locks, and the same thing is done also in
Voigtland and Mecklenburg. In North-western Argyllshire
superstitious people used to open every lock in the house at
childbirth. In the island of Salsette near Bombay, when a woman is
in hard labour, all locks of doors or drawers are opened with a key
to facilitate her delivery. Among the Mandelings of Sumatra the lids
of all chests, boxes, pans, and so forth are opened; and if this
does not produce the desired effect, the anxious husband has to
strike the projecting ends of some of the house-beams in order to
loosen them; for they think that "everything must be open and loose
to facilitate the delivery." In Chittagong, when a woman cannot
bring her child to the birth, the midwife gives orders to throw all
doors and windows wide open, to uncork all bottles, to remove the
bungs from all casks, to unloose the cows in the stall, the horses
in the stable, the watchdog in his kennel, to set free sheep, fowls,
ducks, and so forth. This universal liberty accorded to the animals
and even to inanimate things is, according to the people, an
infallible means of ensuring the woman's delivery and allowing the
babe to be born. In the island of Saghalien, when a woman is in
labour, her husband undoes everything that can be undone. He loosens
the plaits of his hair and the laces of his shoes. Then he unties
whatever is tied in the house or its vicinity. In the courtyard he
takes the axe out of the log in which it is stuck; he unfastens the
boat, if it is moored to a tree, he withdraws the cartridges from
his gun, and the arrows from his crossbow.

Again, we have seen that a Toumbuluh man abstains not only from
tying knots, but also from sitting with crossed legs during his
wife's pregnancy. The train of thought is the same in both cases.
Whether you cross threads in tying a knot, or only cross your legs
in sitting at your ease, you are equally, on the principles of
homoeopathic magic, crossing or thwarting the free course of things,
and your action cannot but check and impede whatever may be going
forward in your neighbourhood. Of this important truth the Romans
were fully aware. To sit beside a pregnant woman or a patient under
medical treatment with clasped hands, says the grave Pliny, is to
cast a malignant spell over the person, and it is worse still if you
nurse your leg or legs with your clasped hands, or lay one leg over
the other. Such postures were regarded by the old Romans as a let
and hindrance to business of every sort, and at a council of war or
a meeting of magistrates, at prayers and sacrifices, no man was
suffered to cross his legs or clasp his hands. The stock instance of
the dreadful consequences that might flow from doing one or the
other was that of Alcmena, who travailed with Hercules for seven
days and seven nights, because the goddess Lucina sat in front of
the house with clasped hands and crossed legs, and the child could
not be born until the goddess had been beguiled into changing her
attitude. It is a Bulgarian superstition that if a pregnant woman is
in the habit of sitting with crossed legs, she will suffer much in
childbed. In some parts of Bavaria, when conversation comes to a
standstill and silence ensues, they say, "Surely somebody has
crossed his legs."

The magical effect of knots in trammelling and obstructing human
activity was believed to be manifested at marriage not less than at
birth. During the Middle Ages, and down to the eighteenth century,
it seems to have been commonly held in Europe that the consummation
of marriage could be prevented by any one who, while the wedding
ceremony was taking place, either locked a lock or tied a knot in a
cord, and then threw the lock or the cord away. The lock or the
knotted cord had to be flung into water; and until it had been found
and unlocked, or untied, no real union of the married pair was
possible. Hence it was a grave offence, not only to cast such a
spell, but also to steal or make away with the material instrument
of it, whether lock or knotted cord. In the year 1718 the parliament
of Bordeaux sentenced some one to be burned alive for having spread
desolation through a whole family by means of knotted cords; and in
1705 two persons were condemned to death in Scotland for stealing
certain charmed knots which a woman had made, in order thereby to
mar the wedded happiness of Spalding of Ashintilly. The belief in
the efficacy of these charms appears to have lingered in the
Highlands of Pertshire down to the end of the eighteenth century,
for at that time it was still customary in the beautiful parish of
Logierait, between the river Tummel and the river Tay, to unloose
carefully every knot in the clothes of the bride and bridegroom
before the celebration of the marriage ceremony. We meet with the
same superstition and the same custom at the present day in Syria.
The persons who help a Syrian bridegroom to don his wedding garments
take care that no knot is tied on them and no button buttoned, for
they believe that a button buttoned or a knot tied would put it
within the power of his enemies to deprive him of his nuptial rights
by magical means. The fear of such charms is diffused all over North
Africa at the present day. To render a bridegroom impotent the
enchanter has only to tie a knot in a handkerchief which he had
previously placed quietly on some part of the bridegroom's body when
he was mounted on horseback ready to fetch his bride: so long as the
knot in the handkerchief remains tied, so long will the bridegroom
remain powerless to consummate the marriage.

The maleficent power of knots may also be manifested in the
infliction of sickness, disease, and all kinds of misfortune. Thus
among the Hos of West Africa a sorcerer will sometimes curse his
enemy and tie a knot in a stalk of grass, saying, "I have tied up
So-and-so in this knot. May all evil light upon him! When he goes
into the field, may a snake sting him! When he goes to the chase,
may a ravening beast attack him! And when he steps into a river, may
the water sweep him away! When it rains, may the lightning strike
him! May evil nights be his!" It is believed that in the knot the
sorcerer has bound up the life of his enemy. In the Koran there is
an allusion to the mischief of "those who puff into the knots," and
an Arab commentator on the passage explains that the words refer to
women who practise magic by tying knots in cords, and then blowing
and spitting upon them. He goes on to relate how, once upon a time,
a wicked Jew bewitched the prophet Mohammed himself by tying nine
knots on a string, which he then hid in a well. So the prophet fell
ill, and nobody knows what might have happened if the archangel
Gabriel had not opportunely revealed to the holy man the place where
the knotted cord was concealed. The trusty Ali soon fetched the
baleful thing from the well; and the prophet recited over it certain
charms, which were specially revealed to him for the purpose. At
every verse of the charms a knot untied itself, and the prophet
experienced a certain relief.

If knots are supposed to kill, they are also supposed to cure. This
follows from the belief that to undo the knots which are causing
sickness will bring the sufferer relief. But apart from this
negative virtue of maleficent knots, there are certain beneficent
knots to which a positive power of healing is ascribed. Pliny tells
us that some folk cured diseases of the groin by taking a thread
from a web, tying seven or nine knots on it, and then fastening it
to the patient's groin; but to make the cure effectual it was
necessary to name some widow as each knot was tied. O'Donovan
describes a remedy for fever employed among the Turcomans. The
enchanter takes some camel hair and spins it into a stout thread,
droning a spell the while. Next he ties seven knots on the thread,
blowing on each knot before he pulls it tight. This knotted thread
is then worn as a bracelet on his wrist by the patient. Every day
one of the knots is untied and blown upon, and when the seventh knot
is undone the whole thread is rolled up into a ball and thrown into
a river, bearing away (as they imagine) the fever with it.

Again knots may be used by an enchantress to win a lover and attach
him firmly to herself. Thus the love-sick maid in Virgil seeks to
draw Daphnis to her from the city by spells and by tying three knots
on each of three strings of different colours. So an Arab maiden,
who had lost her heart to a certain man, tried to gain his love and
bind him to herself by tying knots in his whip; but her jealous
rival undid the knots. On the same principle magic knots may be
employed to stop a runaway. In Swazieland you may often see grass
tied in knots at the side of the footpaths. Every one of these knots
tells of a domestic tragedy. A wife has run away from her husband,
and he and his friends have gone in pursuit, binding up the paths,
as they call it, in this fashion to prevent the fugitive from
doubling back over them. A net, from its affluence of knots, has
always been considered in Russia very efficacious against sorcerers;
hence in some places, when a bride is being dressed in her wedding
attire, a fishing-net is flung over her to keep her out of harm's
way. For a similar purpose the bridegroom and his companions are
often girt with pieces of net, or at least with tight-drawn girdles,
for before a wizard can begin to injure them he must undo all the
knots in the net, or take off the girdles. But often a Russian
amulet is merely a knotted thread. A skein of red wool wound about
the arms and legs is thought to ward off agues and fevers; and nine
skeins, fastened round a child's neck, are deemed a preservative
against scarlatina. In the Tver Government a bag of a special kind
is tied to the neck of the cow which walks before the rest of a
herd, in order to keep off wolves; its force binds the maw of the
ravening beast. On the same principle, a padlock is carried thrice
round a herd of horses before they go afield in the spring, and the
bearer locks and unlocks it as he goes, saying, "I lock from my herd
the mouths of the grey wolves with this steel lock."

Knots and locks may serve to avert not only wizards and wolves but
death itself. When they brought a woman to the stake at St. Andrews
in 1572 to burn her alive for a witch, they found on her a white
cloth like a collar, with strings and many knots on the strings.
They took it from her, sorely against her will, for she seemed to
think that she could not die in the fire, if only the cloth with the
knotted strings was on her. When it was taken away, she said, "Now I
have no hope of myself." In many parts of England it is thought that
a person cannot die so long as any locks are locked or bolts shot in
the house. It is therefore a very common practice to undo all locks
and bolts when the sufferer is plainly near his end, in order that
his agony may not be unduly prolonged. For example, in the year
1863, at Taunton, a child lay sick of scarlatina and death seemed
inevitable. "A jury of matrons was, as it were, empanelled, and to
prevent the child 'dying hard' all the doors in the house, all the
drawers, all the boxes, all the cupboards were thrown wide open, the
keys taken out, and the body of the child placed under a beam,
whereby a sure, certain, and easy passage into eternity could be
secured." Strange to say, the child declined to avail itself of the
facilities for dying so obligingly placed at its disposal by the
sagacity and experience of the British matrons of Taunton; it
preferred to live rather than give up the ghost just then.

The rule which prescribes that at certain magical and religious
ceremonies the hair should hang loose and the feet should be bare is
probably based on the same fear of trammelling and impeding the
action in hand, whatever it may be, by the presence of any knot or
constriction, whether on the head or on the feet of the performer. A
similar power to bind and hamper spiritual as well as bodily
activities is ascribed by some people to rings. Thus in the island
of Carpathus people never button the clothes they put upon a dead
body and they are careful to remove all rings from it; "for the
spirit, they say, can even be detained in the little finger, and
cannot rest." Here it is plain that even if the soul is not
definitely supposed to issue at death from the finger-tips, yet the
ring is conceived to exercise a certain constrictive influence which
detains and imprisons the immortal spirit in spite of its efforts to
escape from the tabernacle of clay; in short the ring, like the
knot, acts as a spiritual fetter. This may have been the reason of
an ancient Greek maxim, attributed to Pythagoras, which forbade
people to wear rings. Nobody might enter the ancient Arcadian
sanctuary of the Mistress at Lycosura with a ring on his or her
finger. Persons who consulted the oracle of Faunus had to be chaste,
to eat no flesh, and to wear no rings.

On the other hand, the same constriction which hinders the egress of
the soul may prevent the entrance of evil spirits; hence we find
rings used as amulets against demons, witches, and ghosts. In the
Tyrol it is said that a woman in childbed should never take off her
wedding-ring, or spirits and witches will have power over her. Among
the Lapps, the person who is about to place a corpse in the coffin
receives from the husband, wife, or children of the deceased a brass
ring, which he must wear fastened to his right arm until the corpse
is safely deposited in the grave. The ring is believed to serve the
person as an amulet against any harm which the ghost might do to
him. How far the custom of wearing finger-rings may have been
influenced by, or even have sprung from, a belief in their efficacy
as amulets to keep the soul in the body, or demons out of it, is a
question which seems worth considering. Here we are only concerned
with the belief in so far as it seems to throw light on the rule
that the Flamen Dialis might not wear a ring unless it were broken.
Taken in conjunction with the rule which forbade him to have a knot
on his garments, it points to a fear that the powerful spirit
embodied in him might be trammelled and hampered in its goings-out
and comings-in by such corporeal and spiritual fetters as rings and
knots.




XXII. Tabooed Words



1. Personal Names tabooed

UNABLE to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage
commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or
thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal
association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in
such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through
his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part
of his person. In fact, primitive man regards his name as a vital
portion of himself and takes care of it accordingly. Thus, for
example, the North American Indian "regards his name, not as a mere
label, but as a distinct part of his personality, just as much as
are his eyes or his teeth, and believes that injury will result as
surely from the malicious handling of his name as from a wound
inflicted on any part of his physical organism. This belief was
found among the various tribes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and
has occasioned a number of curious regulations in regard to the
concealment and change of names." Some Esquimaux take new names when
they are old, hoping thereby to get a new lease of life. The
Tolampoos of Celebes believe that if you write a man's name down you
can carry off his soul along with it. Many savages at the present
day regard their names as vital parts of themselves, and therefore
take great pains to conceal their real names, lest these should give
to evil-disposed persons a handle by which to injure their owners.

Thus, to begin with the savages who rank at the bottom of the social
scale, we are told that the secrecy with which among the Australian
aborigines personal names are often kept from general knowledge
"arises in great measure from the belief that an enemy, who knows
your name, has in it something which he can use magically to your
detriment." "An Australian black," says another writer, "is always
very unwilling to tell his real name, and there is no doubt that
this reluctance is due to the fear that through his name he may be
injured by sorcerers." Amongst the tribes of Central Australia every
man, woman, and child has, besides a personal name which is in
common use, a secret or sacred name which is bestowed by the older
men upon him or her soon after birth, and which is known to none but
the fully initiated members of the group. This secret name is never
mentioned except upon the most solemn occasions; to utter it in the
hearing of women or of men of another group would be a most serious
breach of tribal custom, as serious as the most flagrant case of
sacrilege among ourselves. When mentioned at all, the name is spoken
only in a whisper, and not until the most elaborate precautions have
been taken that it shall be heard by no one but members of the
group. "The native thinks that a stranger knowing his secret name
would have special power to work him ill by means of magic."

The same fear seems to have led to a custom of the same sort amongst
the ancient Egyptians, whose comparatively high civilisation was
strangely dashed and chequered with relics of the lowest savagery.
Every Egyptian received two names, which were known respectively as
the true name and the good name, or the great name and the little
name; and while the good or little name was made public, the true or
great name appears to have been carefully concealed. A Brahman child
receives two names, one for common use, the other a secret name
which none but his father and mother should know. The latter is only
used at ceremonies such as marriage. The custom is intended to
protect the person against magic, since a charm only becomes
effectual in combination with the real name. Similarly, the natives
of Nias believe that harm may be done to a person by the demons who
hear his name pronounced. Hence the names of infants, who are
especially exposed to the assaults of evil sprits, are never spoken;
and often in haunted spots, such as the gloomy depths of the forest,
the banks of a river, or beside a bubbling spring, men will abstain
from calling each other by their names for a like reason.

The Indians of Chiloe keep their names secret and do not like to
have them uttered aloud; for they say that there are fairies or imps
on the mainland or neighbouring islands who, if they knew folk's
names, would do them an injury; but so long as they do not know the
names, these mischievous sprites are powerless. The Araucanians will
hardly ever tell a stranger their names because they fear that he
would thereby acquire some supernatural power over themselves. Asked
his name by a stranger, who is ignorant of their superstitions, an
Araucanian will answer, "I have none." When an Ojebway is asked his
name, he will look at some bystander and ask him to answer. "This
reluctance arises from an impression they receive when young, that
if they repeat their own names it will prevent their growth, and
they will be small in stature. On account of this unwillingness to
tell their names, many strangers have fancied that they either have
no names or have forgotten them."

In this last case no scruple seems to be felt about communicating a
man's name to strangers, and no ill effects appear to be dreaded as
a consequence of divulging it; harm is only done when a name is
spoken by its owner. Why is this? and why in particular should a man
be thought to stunt his growth by uttering his own name? We may
conjecture that to savages who act and think thus a person's name
only seems to be a part of himself when it is uttered with his own
breath; uttered by the breath of others it has no vital connexion
with him, and no harm can come to him through it. Whereas, so these
primitive philosophers may have argued, when a man lets his own name
pass his lips, he is parting with a living piece of himself, and if
he persists in so reckless a course he must certainly end by
dissipating his energy and shattering his constitution. Many a
broken-down debauchee, many a feeble frame wasted with disease, may
have been pointed out by these simple moralists to their awe-struck
disciples as a fearful example of the fate that must sooner or later
overtake the profligate who indulges immoderately in the seductive
habit of mentioning his own name.

However we may explain it, the fact is certain that many a savage
evinces the strongest reluctance to pronounce his own name, while at
the same time he makes no objection at all to other people
pronouncing it, and will even invite them to do so for him in order
to satisfy the curiosity of an inquisitive stranger. Thus in some
parts of Madagascar it is taboo for a person to tell his own name,
but a slave or attendant will answer for him. The same curious
inconsistency, as it may seem to us, is recorded of some tribes of
American Indians. Thus we are told that "the name of an American
Indian is a sacred thing, not to be divulged by the owner himself
without due consideration. One may ask a warrior of any tribe to
give his name, and the question will be met with either a
point-blank refusal or the more diplomatic evasion that he cannot
understand what is wanted of him. The moment a friend approaches,
the warrior first interrogated will whisper what is wanted, and the
friend can tell the name, receiving a reciprocation of the courtesy
from the other." This general statement applies, for example, to the
Indian tribes of British Columbia, as to whom it is said that "one
of their strangest prejudices, which appears to pervade all tribes
alike, is a dislike to telling their names--thus you never get a
man's right name from himself; but they will tell each other's names
without hesitation." In the whole of the East Indian Archipelago the
etiquette is the same. As a general rule no one will utter his own
name. To enquire, "What is your name?" is a very indelicate question
in native society. When in the course of administrative or judicial
business a native is asked his name, instead of replying he will
look at his comrade to indicate that he is to answer for him, or he
will say straight out, "Ask him." The superstition is current all
over the East Indies without exception, and it is found also among
the Motu and Motumotu tribes, the Papuans of Finsch Haven in North
New Guinea, the Nufoors of Dutch New Guinea, and the Melanesians of
the Bismarck Archipelago. Among many tribes of South Africa men and
women never mention their names if they can get any one else to do
it for them, but they do not absolutely refuse when it cannot be
avoided.

Sometimes the embargo laid on personal names is not permanent; it is
conditional on circumstances, and when these change it ceases to
operate. Thus when the Nandi men are away on a foray, nobody at home
may pronounce the names of the absent warriors; they must be
referred to as birds. Should a child so far forget itself as to
mention one of the distant ones by name, the mother would rebuke it,
saying, "Don't talk of the birds who are in the heavens." Among the
Bangala of the Upper Congo, while a man is fishing and when he
returns with his catch, his proper name is in abeyance and nobody
may mention it. Whatever the fisherman's real name may be, he is
called _mwele_ without distinction. The reason is that the river is
full of spirits, who, if they heard the fisherman's real name, might
so work against him that he would catch little or nothing. Even when
he has caught his fish and landed with them, the buyer must still
not address him by his proper name, but must only call him _mwele;_
for even then, if the spirits were to hear his proper name, they
would either bear it in mind and serve him out another day, or they
might so mar the fish he had caught that he would get very little
for them. Hence the fisherman can extract heavy damages from anybody
who mentions his name, or can compel the thoughtless speaker to
relieve him of the fish at a good price so as to restore his luck.
When the Sulka of New Britain are near the territory of their
enemies the Gaktei, they take care not to mention them by their
proper name, believing that were they to do so, their foes would
attack and slay them. Hence in these circumstances they speak of the
Gaktei as _o lapsiek,_ that is, "the rotten tree-trunks," and they
imagine that by calling them that they make the limbs of their
dreaded enemies ponderous and clumsy like logs. This example
illustrates the extremely materialistic view which these savages
take of the nature of words; they suppose that the mere utterance of
an expression signifying clumsiness will homoeopathically affect
with clumsiness the limbs of their distant foemen. Another
illustration of this curious misconception is furnished by a Caffre
superstition that the character of a young thief can be reformed by
shouting his name over a boiling kettle of medicated water, then
clapping a lid on the kettle and leaving the name to steep in the
water for several days. It is not in the least necessary that the
thief should be aware of the use that is being made of his name
behind his back; the moral reformation will be effected without his
knowledge.

When it is deemed necessary that a man's real name should be kept
secret, it is often customary, as we have seen, to call him by a
surname or nickname. As distinguished from the real or primary
names, these secondary names are apparently held to be no part of
the man himself, so that they may be freely used and divulged to
everybody without endangering his safety thereby. Sometimes in order
to avoid the use of his own name a man will be called after his
child. Thus we are informed that "the Gippsland blacks objected
strongly to let any one outside the tribe know their names, lest
their enemies, learning them, should make them vehicles of
incantation, and so charm their lives away. As children were not
thought to have enemies, they used to speak of a man as 'the father,
uncle, or cousin of So-and-so,' naming a child; but on all occasions
abstained from mentioning the name of a grown-up person." The
Alfoors of Poso in Celebes will not pronounce their own names. Among
them, accordingly, if you wish to ascertain a person's name, you
ought not to ask the man himself, but should enquire of others. But
if this is impossible, for example, when there is no one else near,
you should ask him his child's name, and then address him as the
"Father of So-and-so." Nay, these Alfoors are shy of uttering the
names even of children; so when a boy or girl has a nephew or niece,
he or she is addressed as "Uncle of So-and-so," or "Aunt of
So-and-so." In pure Malay society, we are told, a man is never asked
his name, and the custom of naming parents after their children is
adopted only as a means of avoiding the use of the parents' own
names. The writer who makes this statement adds in confirmation of
it that childless persons are named after their younger brothers.
Among the Land Dyaks children as they grow up are called, according
to their sex, the father or mother of a child of their father's or
mother's younger brother or sister, that is, they are called the
father or mother of what we should call their first cousin. The
Caffres used to think it discourteous to call a bride by her own
name, so they would call her "the Mother of So-and-so," even when
she was only betrothed, far less a wife and a mother. Among the
Kukis and Zemis or Kacha Nagas of Assam parents drop their names
after the birth of a child and are named Father and Mother of
So-and-so. Childless couples go by the name of "the childless
father," "the childless mother," "the father of no child," "the
mother of no child." The widespread custom of naming a father after
his child has sometimes been supposed to spring from a desire on the
father's part to assert his paternity, apparently as a means of
obtaining those rights over his children which had previously, under
a system of mother-kin, been possessed by the mother. But this
explanation does not account for the parallel custom of naming the
mother after her child, which seems commonly to co-exist with the
practice of naming the father after the child. Still less, if
possible, does it apply to the customs of calling childless couples
the father and mother of children which do not exist, of naming
people after their younger brothers, and of designating children as
the uncles and aunts of So-and-so, or as the fathers and mothers of
their first cousins. But all these practices are explained in a
simple and natural way if we suppose that they originate in a
reluctance to utter the real names of persons addressed or directly
referred to. That reluctance is probably based partly on a fear of
attracting the notice of evil spirits, partly on a dread of
revealing the name to sorcerers, who would thereby obtain a handle
for injuring the owner of the name.



2. Names of Relations tabooed

IT might naturally be expected that the reserve so commonly
maintained with regard to personal names would be dropped or at
least relaxed among relations and friends. But the reverse of this
is often the case. It is precisely the persons most intimately
connected by blood and especially by marriage to whom the rule
applies with the greatest stringency. Such people are often
forbidden, not only to pronounce each other's names, but even to
utter ordinary words which resemble or have a single syllable in
common with these names. The persons who are thus mutually debarred
from mentioning each other's names are especially husbands and
wives, a man and his wife's parents, and a woman and her husband's
father. For example, among the Caffres a woman may not publicly
pronounce the birth-name of her husband or of any of his brothers,
nor may she use the interdicted word in its ordinary sense. If her
husband, for instance, be called u-Mpaka, from _impaka,_ a small
feline animal, she must speak of that beast by some other name.
Further, a Caffre wife is forbidden to pronounce even mentally the
names of her father-in-law and of all her husband's male relations
in the ascending line; and whenever the emphatic syllable of any of
their names occurs in another word, she must avoid it by
substituting either an entirely new word, or, at least, another
syllable in its place. Hence this custom has given rise to an almost
distinct language among the women, which the Caffres call "women's
speech." The interpretation of this "women's speech" is naturally
very difficult, "for no definite rules can be given for the
formation of these substituted words, nor is it possible to form a
dictionary of them, their number being so great--since there may be
many women, even in the same tribe, who would be no more at liberty
to use the substitutes employed by some others, than they are to use
the original words themselves." A Caffre man, on his side, may not
mention the name of his mother-in-law, nor may she pronounce his;
but he is free to utter words in which the emphatic syllable of her
name occurs. A Kirghiz woman dares not pronounce the names of the
older relations of her husband, nor even use words which resemble
them in sound. For example, if one of these relations is called
Shepherd, she may not speak of sheep, but must call them "the
bleating ones"; if his name is Lamb, she must refer to lambs as "the
young bleating ones." In Southern India wives believe that to tell
their husband's name or to pronounce it even in a dream would bring
him to an untimely end. Among the Sea Dyaks a man may not pronounce
the name of his father-in-law or mother-in-law without incurring the
wrath of the spirits. And since he reckons as his father-in-law and
mother-in-law not only the father and mother of his own wife, but
also the fathers and mothers of his brothers' wives and sisters'
husbands, and likewise the fathers and mothers of all his cousins,
the number of tabooed names may be very considerable and the
opportunities of error correspondingly numerous. To make confusion
worse confounded, the names of persons are often the names of common
things, such as moon, bridge, barley, cobra, leopard; so that when
any of a man's many fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law are called by
such names, these common words may not pass his lips. Among the
Alfoors of Minahassa, in Celebes, the custom is carried still
further so as to forbid the use even of words which merely resemble
the personal names in sound. It is especially the name of a
father-in-law which is thus laid under an interdict. If he, for
example, is called Kalala, his son-in-law may not speak of a horse
by its common name _kawalo;_ he must call it a "riding-beast"
(_sasakajan_). So among the Alfoors of the island of Buru it is
taboo to mention the names of parents and parents-in-law, or even to
speak of common objects by words which resemble these names in
sound. Thus, if your mother-in-law is called Dalu, which means
"betel," you may not ask for betel by its ordinary name, you must
ask for "red mouth"; if you want betel-leaf, you may not say
betel-leaf (_dalu 'mun_), you must say _karon fenna._ In the same
island it is also taboo to mention the name of an elder brother in
his presence. Transgressions of these rules are punished with fines.
In Sunda it is thought that a particular crop would be spoilt if a
man were to mention the names of his father and mother.

Among the Nufoors of Dutch New Guinea persons who are related to
each other by marriage are forbidden to mention each other's names.
Among the connexions whose names are thus tabooed are wife,
mother-in-law, father-in-law, your wife's uncles and aunts and also
her grand-uncles and grand-aunts, and the whole of your wife's or
your husband's family in the same generation as yourself, except
that men may mention the names of their brothers-in-law, though
women may not. The taboo comes into operation as soon as the
betrothal has taken place and before the marriage has been
celebrated. Families thus connected by the betrothal of two of their
members are not only forbidden to pronounce each other's names; they
may not even look at each other, and the rule gives rise to the most
comical scenes when they happen to meet unexpectedly. And not merely
the names themselves, but any words that sound like them are
scrupulously avoided and other words used in their place. If it
should chance that a person has inadvertently uttered a forbidden
name, he must at once throw himself on the floor and say, "I have
mentioned a wrong name. I throw it through the chinks of the floor
in order that I may eat well."

In the western islands of Torres Straits a man never mentioned the
personal names of his father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law,
and sister-in-law; and a woman was subject to the same restrictions.
A brother-in-law might be spoken of as the husband or brother of
some one whose name it was lawful to mention; and similarly a
sister-in-law might be called the wife of So-and-so. If a man by
chance used the personal name of his brother-in-law, he was ashamed
and hung his head. His shame was only relieved when he had made a
present as compensation to the man whose name he had taken in vain.
The same compensation was made to a sister-in-law, a father-in-law,
and a mother-in-law for the accidental mention of their names. Among
the natives who inhabit the coast of the Gazelle Peninsula in New
Britain to mention the name of a brother-in-law is the grossest
possible affront you can offer to him; it is a crime punishable with
death. In the Banks' Islands, Melanesia, the taboos laid on the
names of persons connected by marriage are very strict. A man will
not mention the name of his father-in-law, much less the name of his
mother-in-law, nor may he name his wife's brother; but he may name
his wife's sister--she is nothing to him. A woman may not name her
father-in-law, nor on any account her son-in-law. Two people whose
children have intermarried are also debarred from mentioning each
other's names. And not only are all these persons forbidden to utter
each other's names; they may not even pronounce ordinary words which
chance to be either identical with these names or to have any
syllables in common with them. Thus we hear of a native of these
islands who might not use the common words for "pig" and "to die,"
because these words occurred in the polysyllabic name of his
son-in-law; and we are told of another unfortunate who might not
pronounce the everyday words for "hand" and "hot" on account of his
wife's brother's name, and who was even debarred from mentioning the
number "one," because the word for "one" formed part of the name of
his wife's cousin.

The reluctance to mention the names or even syllables of the names
of persons connected with the speaker by marriage can hardly be
separated from the reluctance evinced by so many people to utter
their own names or the names of the dead or of the dead or of chiefs
and kings; and if the reticence as to these latter names springs
mainly from superstition, we may infer that the reticence as to the
former has no better foundation. That the savage's unwillingness to
mention his own name is based, at least in part, on a superstitious
fear of the ill use that might be made of it by his foes, whether
human or spiritual, has already been shown. It remains to examine
the similar usage in regard to the names of the dead and of royal
personages.



3. Names of the Dead tabooed

THE CUSTOM of abstaining from all mention of the names of the dead
was observed in antiquity by the Albanians of the Caucasus, and at
the present day it is in full force among many savage tribes. Thus
we are told that one of the customs most rigidly observed and
enforced amongst the Australian aborigines is never to mention the
name of a deceased person, whether male or female; to name aloud one
who has departed this life would be a gross violation of their most
sacred prejudices, and they carefully abstain from it. The chief
motive for this abstinence appears to be a fear of evoking the
ghost, although the natural unwillingness to revive past sorrows
undoubtedly operates also to draw the veil of oblivion over the
names of the dead. Once Mr. Oldfield so terrified a native by
shouting out the name of a deceased person, that the man fairly took
to his heels and did not venture to show himself again for several
days. At their next meeting he bitterly reproached the rash white
man for his indiscretion; "nor could I," adds Mr. Oldfield, "induce
him by any means to utter the awful sound of a dead man's name, for
by so doing he would have placed himself in the power of the malign
spirits." Among the aborigines of Victoria the dead were very rarely
spoken of, and then never by their names; they were referred to in a
subdued voice as "the lost one" or "the poor fellow that is no
more." To speak of them by name would, it was supposed, excite the
malignity of Couit-gil, the spirit of the departed, which hovers on
earth for a time before it departs for ever towards the setting sun.
Of the tribes on the Lower Murray River we are told that when a
person dies "they carefully avoid mentioning his name; but if
compelled to do so, they pronounce it in a very low whisper, so
faint that they imagine the spirit cannot hear their voice." Amongst
the tribes of Central Australia no one may utter the name of the
deceased during the period of mourning, unless it is absolutely
necessary to do so, and then it is only done in a whisper for fear
of disturbing and annoying the man's spirit which is walking about
in ghostly form. If the ghost hears his name mentioned he concludes
that his kinsfolk are not mourning for him properly; if their grief
were genuine they could not bear to bandy his name about. Touched to
the quick by their hard-hearted indifference the indignant ghost
will come and trouble them in dreams.

The same reluctance to utter the names of the dead appears to
prevail among all the Indian tribes of America from Hudson's Bay
Territory to Patagonia. Among the Goajiros of Colombia to mention
the dead before his kinsmen is a dreadful offence, which is often
punished with death; for if it happens on the _rancho_ of the
deceased, in presence of his nephew or uncle, they will assuredly
kill the offender on the spot if they can. But if he escapes, the
penalty resolves itself into a heavy fine, usually of two or more
oxen.

A similar reluctance to mention the names of the dead is reported of
peoples so widely separated from each other as the Samoyeds of
Siberia and the Todas of Southern India; the Mongols of Tartary and
the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Ainos of Japan and the Akamba and
Nandi of Eastern Africa; the Tinguianes of the Philippines and the
inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands, of Borneo, of Madagascar, and of
Tasmania. In all cases, even where it is not expressly stated, the
fundamental reason for this avoidance is probably the fear of the
ghost. That this is the real motive with the Tuaregs we are
positively informed. They dread the return of the dead man's spirit,
and do all they can to avoid it by shifting their camp after a
death, ceasing for ever to pronounce the name of the departed, and
eschewing everything that might be regarded as an evocation or
recall of his soul. Hence they do not, like the Arabs, designate
individuals by adding to their personal names the names of their
fathers; they never speak of So-and-so, son of So-and-so; they give
to every man a name which will live and die with him. So among some
of the Victorian tribes in Australia personal names were rarely
perpetuated, because the natives believed that any one who adopted
the name of a deceased person would not live long; probably his
ghostly namesake was supposed to come and fetch him away to the
spirit-land.

The same fear of the ghost, which moves people to suppress his old
name, naturally leads all persons who bear a similar name to
exchange it for another, lest its utterance should attract the
attention of the ghost, who cannot reasonably be expected to
discriminate between all the different applications of the same
name. Thus we are told that in the Adelaide and Encounter Bay tribes
of South Australia the repugnance to mentioning the names of those
who have died lately is carried so far, that persons who bear the
same name as the deceased abandon it, and either adopt temporary
names or are known by any others that happen to belong to them. A
similar custom prevails among some of the Queensland tribes; but the
prohibition to use the names of the dead is not permanent, though it
may last for many years. In some Australian tribes the change of
name thus brought about is permanent; the old name is laid aside for
ever, and the man is known by his new name for the rest of his life,
or at least until he is obliged to change it again for a like
reason. Among the North American Indians all persons, whether men or
women, who bore the name of one who had just died were obliged to
abandon it and to adopt other names, which was formally done at the
first ceremony of mourning for the dead. In some tribes to the east
of the Rocky Mountains this change of name lasted only during the
season of mourning, but in other tribes on the Pacific Coast of
North America it seems to have been permanent.

Sometimes by an extension of the same reasoning all the near
relations of the deceased change their names, whatever they may
happen to be, doubtless from a fear that the sound of the familiar
names might lure back the vagrant spirit to its old home. Thus in
some Victorian tribes the ordinary names of all the next of kin were
disused during the period of mourning, and certain general terms,
prescribed by custom, were substituted for them. To call a mourner
by his own name was considered an insult to the departed, and often
led to fighting and bloodshed. Among Indian tribes of North-western
America near relations of the deceased often change their names
"under an impression that spirits will be attracted back to earth if
they hear familiar names often repeated." Among the Kiowa Indians
the name of the dead is never spoken in the presence of the
relatives, and on the death of any member of a family all the others
take new names. This custom was noted by Raleigh's colonists on
Roanoke Island more than three centuries ago. Among the Lengua
Indians not only is a dead man's name never mentioned, but all the
survivors change their names also. They say that Death has been
among them and has carried off a list of the living, and that he
will soon come back for more victims; hence in order to defeat his
fell purpose they change their names, believing that on his return
Death, though he has got them all on his list, will not be able to
identify them under their new names, and will depart to pursue the
search elsewhere. Nicobarese mourners take new names in order to
escape the unwelcome attentions of the ghost; and for the same
purpose they disguise themselves by shaving their heads so that the
ghost is unable to recognise them.

Further, when the name of the deceased happens to be that of some
common object, such as an animal, or plant, or fire, or water, it is
sometimes considered necessary to drop that word in ordinary speech
and replace it by another. A custom of this sort, it is plain, may
easily be a potent agent of change in language; for where it
prevails to any considerable extent many words must constantly
become obsolete and new ones spring up. And this tendency has been
remarked by observers who have recorded the custom in Australia,
America, and elsewhere. For example, with regard to the Australian
aborigines it has been noted that "the dialects change with almost
every tribe. Some tribes name their children after natural objects;
and when the person so named dies, the word is never again
mentioned; another word has therefore to be invented for the object
after which the child was called." The writer gives as an instance
the case of a man whose name Karla signified "fire"; when Karla
died, a new word for fire had to be introduced. "Hence," adds the
writer, "the language is always changing." Again, in the Encounter
Bay tribe of South Australia, if a man of the name of Ngnke, which
means "water," were to die, the whole tribe would be obliged to use
some other word to express water for a considerable time after his
decease. The writer who records this custom surmises that it may
explain the presence of a number of synonyms in the language of the
tribe. This conjecture is confirmed by what we know of some
Victorian tribes whose speech comprised a regular set of synonyms to
be used instead of the common terms by all members of a tribe in
times of mourning. For instance, if a man called Waa ( "crow")
departed this life, during the period of mourning for him nobody
might call a crow a _waa;_ everybody had to speak of the bird as a
_narrapart._ When a person who rejoiced in the title of Ringtail
Opossum (_weearn_) had gone the way of all flesh, his sorrowing
relations and the tribe at large were bound for a time to refer to
ringtail opossums by the more sonorous name of _manuungkuurt._ If
the community were plunged in grief for the loss of a respected
female who bore the honourable name of Turkey Bustard, the proper
name for turkey bustards, which was _barrim barrim,_ went out, and
_tillit tilliitsh_ came in. And so _mutatis mutandis_ with the names
of Black Cockatoo, Grey Duck, Gigantic Crane, Kangaroo, Eagle,
Dingo, and the rest.

A similar custom used to be constantly transforming the language of
the Abipones of Paraguay, amongst whom, however, a word once
abolished seems never to have been revived. New words, says the
missionary Dobrizhoffer, sprang up every year like mushrooms in a
night, because all words that resembled the names of the dead were
abolished by proclamation and others coined in their place. The mint
of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe, and
whatever term they stamped with their approval and put in
circulation was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and
low alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and
settlement of the tribe. You would be astonished, says the same
missionary, to see how meekly the whole nation acquiesces in the
decision of a withered old hag, and how completely the old familiar
words fall instantly out of use and are never repeated either
through force of habit or forgetfulness. In the seven years that
Dobrizhoffer spent among these Indians the native word for jaguar
was changed thrice, and the words for crocodile, thorn, and the
slaughter of cattle underwent similar though less varied
vicissitudes. As a result of this habit, the vocabularies of the
missionaries teemed with erasures, old words having constantly to be
struck out as obsolete and new ones inserted in their place. In many
tribes of British New Guinea the names of persons are also the names
of common things. The people believe that if the name of a deceased
person is pronounced, his spirit will return, and as they have no
wish to see it back among them the mention of his name is tabooed
and a new word is created to take its place, whenever the name
happens to be a common term of the language. Consequently many words
are permanently lost or revived with modified or new meanings. In
the Nicobar Islands a similar practice has similarly affected the
speech of the natives. "A most singular custom," says Mr. de
Roepstorff, "prevails among them which one would suppose must most
effectually hinder the 'making of history,' or, at any rate, the
transmission of historical narrative. By a strict rule, which has
all the sanction of Nicobar superstition, no man's name may be
mentioned after his death! To such a length is this carried that
when, as very frequently happens, the man rejoiced in the name of
'Fowl,' 'Hat', 'Fire,' 'Road,' etc., in its Nicobarese equivalent,
the use of these words is carefully eschewed for the future, not
only as being the personal designation of the deceased, but even as
the names of the common things they represent; the words die out of
the language, and either new vocables are coined to express the
thing intended, or a substitute for the disused word is found in
other Nicobarese dialects or in some foreign tongue. This
extraordinary custom not only adds an element of instability to the
language, but destroys the continuity of political life, and renders
the record of past events precarious and vague, if not impossible."

That a superstition which suppresses the names of the dead must cut
at the very root of historical tradition has been remarked by other
workers in this field. "The Klamath people," observes Mr. A. S.
Gatschet, "possess no historic traditions going further back in time
than a century, for the simple reason that there was a strict law
prohibiting the mention of the person or acts of a deceased
individual by _using his name._ This law was rigidly observed among
the Californians no less than among the Oregonians, and on its
transgression the death penalty could be inflicted. This is
certainly enough to suppress all historical knowledge within a
people. How can history be written without names?"

In many tribes, however, the power of this superstition to blot out
the memory of the past is to some extent weakened and impaired by a
natural tendency of the human mind. Time, which wears out the
deepest impressions, inevitably dulls, if it does not wholly efface,
the print left on the savage mind by the mystery and horror of
death. Sooner or later, as the memory of his loved ones fades slowly
away, he becomes more willing to speak of them, and thus their rude
names may sometimes be rescued by the philosophic enquirer before
they have vanished, like autumn leaves or winter snows, into the
vast undistinguished limbo of the past. In some of the Victorian
tribes the prohibition to mention the names of the dead remained in
force only during the period of mourning; in the Port Lincoln tribe
of South Australia it lasted many years. Among the Chinook Indians
of North America "custom forbids the mention of a dead man's name,
at least till many years have elapsed after the bereavement." Among
the Puyallup Indians the observance of the taboo is relaxed after
several years, when the mourners have forgotten their grief; and if
the deceased was a famous warrior, one of his descendants, for
instance a great-grandson, may be named after him. In this tribe the
taboo is not much observed at any time except by the relations of
the dead. Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the
name of the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so
to say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief
being abated, it pleased the relations "to lift up the tree and
raise the dead." By raising the dead they meant bestowing the name
of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all intents
and purposes a reincarnation of the deceased, since on the
principles of savage philosophy the name is a vital part, if not the
soul, of the man.

Among the Lapps, when a woman was with child and near the time of
her delivery, a deceased ancestor or relation used to appear to her
in a dream and inform her what dead person was to be born again in
her infant, and whose name the child was therefore to bear. If the
woman had no such dream, it fell to the father or the relatives to
determine the name by divination or by consulting a wizard. Among
the Khonds a birth is celebrated on the seventh day after the event
by a feast given to the priest and to the whole village. To
determine the child's name the priest drops grains of rice into a
cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor. From the
movements of the seed in the water, and from observations made on
the person of the infant, he pronounces which of his progenitors has
reappeared in him, and the child generally, at least among the
northern tribes, receives the name of that ancestor. Among the
Yorubas, soon after a child has been born, a priest of Ifa, the god
of divination, appears on the scene to ascertain what ancestral soul
has been reborn in the infant. As soon as this has been decided, the
parents are told that the child must conform in all respects to the
manner of life of the ancestor who now animates him or her, and if,
as often happens, they profess ignorance, the priest supplies the
necessary information. The child usually receives the name of the
ancestor who has been born again in him.



4. Names of Kings and other Sacred Persons tabooed

WHEN we see that in primitive society the names of mere commoners,
whether alive or dead, are matters of such anxious care, we need not
be surprised that great precautions should be taken to guard from
harm the names of sacred kings and priests. Thus the name of the
king of Dahomey is always kept secret, lest the knowledge of it
should enable some evil-minded person to do him a mischief. The
appellations by which the different kings of Dahomey have been known
to Europeans are not their true names, but mere titles, or what the
natives call "strong names." The natives seem to think that no harm
comes of such titles being known, since they are not, like the
birth-names, vitally connected with their owners. In the Galla
kingdom of Ghera the birth-name of the sovereign may not be
pronounced by a subject under pain of death, and common words which
resemble it in sound are changed for others. Among the Bahima of
Central Africa, when the king dies, his name is abolished from the
language, and if his name was that of an animal, a new appellation
must be found for the creature at once. For example, the king is
often called a lion; hence at the death of a king named Lion a new
name for lions in general has to be coined. In Siam it used to be
difficult to ascertain the king's real name, since it was carefully
kept secret from fear of sorcery; any one who mentioned it was
clapped into gaol. The king might only be referred to under certain
high-sounding titles, such as "the august," "the perfect," "the
supreme," "the great emperor," "descendant of the angels," and so
on. In Burma it was accounted an impiety of the deepest dye to
mention the name of the reigning sovereign; Burmese subjects, even
when they were far from their country, could not be prevailed upon
to do so; after his accession to the throne the king was known by
his royal titles only.

Among the Zulus no man will mention the name of the chief of his
tribe or the names of the progenitors of the chief, so far as he can
remember them; nor will he utter common words which coincide with or
merely resemble in sound tabooed names. In the tribe of the Dwandwes
there was a chief called Langa, which means the sun; hence the name
of the sun was changed from _langa_ to _gala,_ and so remains to
this day, though Langa died more than a hundred years ago. Again, in
the Xnumayo tribe the word meaning "to herd cattle" was changed from
_alusa or ayusa_ to _kagesa,_ because u-Mayusi was the name of the
chief. Besides these taboos, which were observed by each tribe
separately, all the Zulu tribes united in tabooing the name of the
king who reigned over the whole nation. Hence, for example, when
Panda was king of Zululand, the word for "a root of a tree," which
is _impando,_ was changed to _nxabo._ Again, the word for "lies" or
"slander" was altered from _amacebo_ to _amakwata,_ because
_amacebo_ contains a syllable of the name of the famous King
Cetchwayo. These substitutions are not, however, carried so far by
the men as by the women, who omit every sound even remotely
resembling one that occurs in a tabooed name. At the king's kraal,
indeed, it is sometimes difficult to understand the speech of the
royal wives, as they treat in this fashion the names not only of the
king and his forefathers, but even of his and their brothers back
for generations. When to these tribal and national taboos we add
those family taboos on the names of connexions by marriage which
have been already described, we can easily understand how it comes
about that in Zululand every tribe has words peculiar to itself, and
that the women have a considerable vocabulary of their own. Members,
too, of one family may be debarred from using words employed by
those of another. The women of one kraal, for instance, may call a
hyaena by its ordinary name; those of the next may use the common
substitute; while in a third the substitute may also be unlawful and
another term may have to be invented to supply its place. Hence the
Zulu language at the present day almost presents the appearance of
being a double one; indeed, for multitudes of things it possesses
three or four synonyms, which through the blending of tribes are
known all over Zululand.

In Madagascar a similar custom everywhere prevails and has resulted,
as among the Zulus, in producing certain dialectic differences in
the speech of the various tribes. There are no family names in
Madagascar, and almost every personal name is drawn from the
language of daily life and signifies some common object or action or
quality, such as a bird, a beast, a tree, a plant, a colour, and so
on. Now, whenever one of these common words forms the name or part
of the name of the chief of the tribe, it becomes sacred and may no
longer be used in its ordinary signification as the name of a tree,
an insect, or what not. Hence a new name for the object must be
invented to replace the one which has been discarded. It is easy to
conceive what confusion and uncertainty may thus be introduced into
a language when it is spoken by many little local tribes each ruled
by a petty chief with his own sacred name. Yet there are tribes and
people who submit to this tyranny of words as their fathers did
before them from time immemorial. The inconvenient results of the
custom are especially marked on the western coast of the island,
where, on account of the large number of independent chieftains, the
names of things, places, and rivers have suffered so many changes
that confusion often arises, for when once common words have been
banned by the chiefs the natives will not acknowledge to have ever
known them in their old sense.

But it is not merely the names of living kings and chiefs which are
tabooed in Madagascar; the names of dead sovereigns are equally
under a ban, at least in some parts of the island. Thus among the
Sakalavas, when a king has died, the nobles and people meet in
council round the dead body and solemnly choose a new name by which
the deceased monarch shall be henceforth known. After the new name
has been adopted, the old name by which the king was known during
his life becomes sacred and may not be pronounced under pain of
death. Further, words in the common language which bear any
resemblance to the forbidden name also become sacred and have to be
replaced by others. Persons who uttered these forbidden words were
looked on not only as grossly rude, but even as felons; they had
committed a capital crime. However, these changes of vocabulary are
confined to the district over which the deceased king reigned; in
the neighbouring districts the old words continue to be employed in
the old sense.

The sanctity attributed to the persons of chiefs in Polynesia
naturally extended also to their names, which on the primitive view
are hardly separable from the personality of their owners. Hence in
Polynesia we find the same systematic prohibition to utter the names
of chiefs or of common words resembling them which we have already
met with in Zululand and Madagascar. Thus in New Zealand the name of
a chief is held so sacred that, when it happens to be a common word,
it may not be used in the language, and another has to be found to
replace it. For example, a chief of the southward of East Cape bore
the name of Maripi, which signified a knife, hence a new word
(_nekra_) for knife was introduced, and the old one became obsolete.
Elsewhere the word for water (_wai_) had to be changed, because it
chanced to be the name of the chief, and would have been desecrated
by being applied to the vulgar fluid as well as to his sacred
person. This taboo naturally produced a plentiful crop of synonyms
in the Maori language, and travellers newly arrived in the country
were sometimes puzzled at finding the same things called by quite
different names in neighbouring tribes. When a king comes to the
throne in Tahiti, any words in the language that resemble his name
in sound must be changed for others. In former times, if any man
were so rash as to disregard this custom and to use the forbidden
words, not only he but all his relations were immediately put to
death. But the changes thus introduced were only temporary; on the
death of the king the new words fell into disuse, and the original
ones were revived.

In ancient Greece the names of the priests and other high officials
who had to do with the performance of the Eleusinian mysteries might
not be uttered in their lifetime. To pronounce them was a legal
offence The pedant in Lucian tells how he fell in with these august
personages haling along to the police court a ribald fellow who had
dared to name them, though well he knew that ever since their
consecration it was unlawful to do so, because they had become
anonymous, having lost their old names and acquired new and sacred
titles. From two inscriptions found at Eleusis it appears that the
names of the priests were committed to the depths of the sea;
probably they were engraved on tablets of bronze or lead, which were
then thrown into deep water in the Gulf of Salamis. The intention
doubtless was to keep the names a profound secret; and how could
that be done more surely than by sinking them in the sea? what human
vision could spy them glimmering far down in the dim depths of the
green water? A clearer illustration of the confusion between the
incorporeal and the corporeal, between the name and its material
embodiment, could hardly be found than in this practice of civilised
Greece.



5. Names of Gods tabooed

PRIMITIVE man creates his gods in his own image. Xenophanes remarked
long ago that the complexion of negro gods was black and their noses
flat; that Thracian gods were ruddy and blue-eyed; and that if
horses, oxen, and lions only believed in gods and had hands
wherewith to portray them, they would doubtless fashion their
deities in the form of horses, and oxen, and lions. Hence just as
the furtive savage conceals his real name because he fears that
sorcerers might make an evil use of it, so he fancies that his gods
must likewise keep their true name secret, lest other gods or even
men should learn the mystic sounds and thus be able to conjure with
them. Nowhere was this crude conception of the secrecy and magical
virtue of the divine name more firmly held or more fully developed
than in ancient Egypt, where the superstitions of a dateless past
were embalmed in the hearts of the people hardly less effectually
than the bodies of cats and crocodiles and the rest of the divine
menagerie in their rock-cut tombs. The conception is well
illustrated by a story which tells how the subtle Isis wormed his
secret name from Ra, the great Egyptian god of the sun. Isis, so
runs the tale, was a woman mighty in words, and she was weary of the
world of men, and yearned after the world of the gods. And she
meditated in her heart, saying, "Cannot I by virtue of the great
name of Ra make myself a goddess and reign like him in heaven and
earth?" For Ra had many names, but the great name which gave him all
power over gods and men was known to none but himself. Now the god
was by this time grown old; he slobbered at the mouth and his
spittle fell upon the ground. So Isis gathered up the spittle and
the earth with it, and kneaded thereof a serpent and laid it in the
path where the great god passed every day to his double kingdom
after his heart's desire. And when he came forth according to his
wont, attended by all his company of gods, the sacred serpent stung
him, and the god opened his mouth and cried, and his cry went up to
heaven. And the company of gods cried, "What aileth thee?" and the
gods shouted, "Lo and behold!" But he could not answer; his jaws
rattled, his limbs shook, the poison ran through his flesh as the
Nile floweth over the land. When the great god had stilled his
heart, he cried to his followers, "Come to me, O my children,
offspring of my body. I am a prince, the son of a prince, the divine
seed of a god. My father devised my name; my father and my mother
gave me my name, and it remained hidden in my body since my birth,
that no magician might have magic power over me. I went out to
behold that which I have made, I walked in the two lands which I
have created, and lo! something stung me. What it was, I know not.
Was it fire? was it water? My heart is on fire, my flesh trembleth,
all my limbs do quake. Bring me the children of the gods with
healing words and understanding lips, whose power reacheth to
heaven." Then came to him the children of the gods, and they were
very sorrowful. And Isis came with her craft, whose mouth is full of
the breath of life, whose spells chase pain away, whose word maketh
the dead to live. She said, "What is it, divine Father? what is it?"
The holy god opened his mouth, he spake and said, "I went upon my
way, I walked after my heart's desire in the two regions which I
have made to behold that which I have created, and lo! a serpent
that I saw not stung me. Is it fire? is it water? I am colder than
water, I am hotter than fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, mine
eye is not steadfast, I behold not the sky, the moisture bedeweth my
face as in summer-time." Then spake Isis, "Tell me thy name, divine
Father, for the man shall live who is called by his name." Then
answered Ra, "I created the heavens and the earth, I ordered the
mountains, I made the great and wide sea, I stretched out the two
horizons like a curtain. I am he who openeth his eyes and it is
light, and who shutteth them and it is dark. At his command the Nile
riseth, but the gods know not his name. I am Khepera in the morning,
I am Ra at noon, I am Tum at eve." But the poison was not taken away
from him; it pierced deeper, and the great god could no longer walk.
Then said Isis to him, "That was not thy name that thou spakest unto
me. Oh tell it me, that the poison may depart; for he shall live
whose name is named." Now the poison burned like fire, it was hotter
than the flame of fire. The god said, "I consent that Isis shall
search into me, and that my name shall pass from my breast into
hers." Then the god hid himself from the gods, and his place in the
ship of eternity was empty. Thus was the name of the great god taken
from him, and Isis, the witch, spake, "Flow away, poison, depart
from Ra. It is I, even I, who overcome the poison and cast it to the
earth; for the name of the great god hath been taken away from him.
Let Ra live and let the poison die." Thus spake great Isis, the
queen of the gods, she who knows Ra and his true name.

From this story it appears that the real name of the god, with which
his power was inextricably bound up, was supposed to be lodged, in
an almost physical sense, somewhere in his breast, from which Isis
extracted it by a sort of surgical operation and transferred it with
all its supernatural powers to herself. In Egypt attempts like that
of Isis to appropriate the power of a high god by possessing herself
of his name were not mere legends told of the mythical beings of a
remote past; every Egyptian magician aspired to wield like powers by
similar means. For it was believed that he who possessed the true
name possessed the very being of god or man, and could force even a
deity to obey him as a slave obeys his master. Thus the art of the
magician consisted in obtaining from the gods a revelation of their
sacred names, and he left no stone unturned to accomplish his end.
When once a god in a moment of weakness or forgetfulness had
imparted to the wizard the wondrous lore, the deity had no choice
but to submit humbly to the man or pay the penalty of his contumacy.

The belief in the magic virtue of divine names was shared by the
Romans. When they sat down before a city, the priests addressed the
guardian deity of the place in a set form of prayer or incantation,
inviting him to abandon the beleaguered city and come over to the
Romans, who would treat him as well as or better than he had ever
been treated in his old home. Hence the name of the guardian deity
of Rome was kept a profound secret, lest the enemies of the republic
might lure him away, even as the Romans themselves had induced many
gods to desert, like rats, the falling fortunes of cities that had
sheltered them in happier days. Nay, the real name, not merely of
its guardian deity, but of the city itself, was wrapt in mystery and
might never be uttered, not even in the sacred rites. A certain
Valerius Soranus, who dared to divulge the priceless secret, was put
to death or came to a bad end. In like manner, it seems, the ancient
Assyrians were forbidden to mention the mystic names of their
cities; and down to modern times the Cheremiss of the Caucasus keep
the names of their communal villages secret from motives of
superstition.

If the reader has had the patience to follow this examination of the
superstitions attaching to personal names, he will probably agree
that the mystery in which the names of royal personages are so often
shrouded is no isolated phenomenon, no arbitrary expression of
courtly servility and adulation, but merely the particular
application of a general law of primitive thought, which includes
within its scope common folk and gods as well as kings and priests.




XXIII. Our Debt to the Savage

IT would be easy to extend the list of royal and priestly taboos,
but the instances collected in the preceding pages may suffice as
specimens. To conclude this part of our subject it only remains to
state summarily the general conclusions to which our enquiries have
thus far conducted us. We have seen that in savage or barbarous
society there are often found men to whom the superstition of their
fellows ascribes a controlling influence over the general course of
nature. Such men are accordingly adored and treated as gods. Whether
these human divinities also hold temporal sway over the lives and
fortunes of their adorers, or whether their functions are purely
spiritual and supernatural, in other words, whether they are kings
as well as gods or only the latter, is a distinction which hardly
concerns us here. Their supposed divinity is the essential fact with
which we have to deal. In virtue of it they are a pledge and
guarantee to their worshippers of the continuance and orderly
succession of those physical phenomena upon which mankind depends
for subsistence. Naturally, therefore, the life and health of such a
god-man are matters of anxious concern to the people whose welfare
and even existence are bound up with his; naturally he is
constrained by them to conform to such rules as the wit of early man
has devised for averting the ills to which flesh is heir, including
the last ill, death. These rules, as an examination of them has
shown, are nothing but the maxims with which, on the primitive view,
every man of common prudence must comply if he would live long in
the land. But while in the case of ordinary men the observance of
the rules is left to the choice of the individual, in the case of
the god-man it is enforced under penalty of dismissal from his high
station, or even of death. For his worshippers have far too great a
stake in his life to allow him to play fast and loose with it.
Therefore all the quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the
venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated
long ago, and which old women at chimney corners still impart as
treasures of great price to their descendants gathered round the
cottage fire on winter evenings--all these antique fancies
clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path
of the old king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in
the toils of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of
custom, "light as air but strong as links of iron," that crossing
and recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a
network of observances from which death or deposition alone could
release him.

Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and priests
teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for
wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after
which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model
constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a
barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem to
us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency.
Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or
soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being,
it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules
which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and
harmonious whole. The flaw--and it is a fatal one--of the system
lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its conception of
the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the conclusions which
it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise these premises as
ridiculous because we can easily detect their falseness, would be
ungrateful as well as unphilosophical. We stand upon the foundation
reared by the generations that have gone before, and we can but
dimly realise the painful and prolonged efforts which it has cost
humanity to struggle up to the point, no very exalted one after all,
which we have reached. Our gratitude is due to the nameless and
forgotten toilers, whose patient thought and active exertions have
largely made us what we are. The amount of new knowledge which one
age, certainly which one man, can add to the common store is small,
and it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to
ignore the heap while vaunting the few grains which it may have been
our privilege to add to it. There is indeed little danger at present
of undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even
classical antiquity have made to the general advancement of our
race. But when we pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt
and ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the only
recognition vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the
benefactors whom we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many,
perhaps most, were savages. For when all is said and done our
resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our
differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and
deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage
forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us
by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to
regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune
which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those
who built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being
regard it as having been an original and unalterable possession of
their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and
enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted
for much of what we thought most our own, and that their errors were
not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply
hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were
propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be
inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and
rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all,
what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work
best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder
ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their
errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give
them the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day
stand in need of: _cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi sunt._



XXIV. The Killing of the Divine King



1. The Mortality of the Gods

MAN has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he
has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad
predicament. Thus the Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill
their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he
touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God, they kept
asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not, they
were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god
indeed. In answer to the enquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North
American Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit.
Being asked which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad
one, "Oh, neither of _them,_" replied he, "the Great Spirit that
made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have lived as
long as this." A tribe in the Philippine Islands told the Spanish
conquerors that the grave of the Creator was upon the top of Mount
Cabunian. Heitsi-eibib, a god or divine hero of the Hottentots, died
several times and came to life again. His graves are generally to be
met with in narrow defiles between mountains. When the Hottentots
pass one of them, they throw a stone on it for good luck, sometimes
muttering, "Give us plenty of cattle." The grave of Zeus, the great
god of Greece, was shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the
beginning of our era. The body of Dionysus was buried at Delphi
beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the
inscription, "Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele." According
to one account, Apollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras
is said to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how
the god had been killed by the python and buried under the tripod.

The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common
lot. They too grew old and died. But when at a later time the
discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to the
souls of the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite time
from corruption, the deities were permitted to share the benefit of
an invention which held out to gods as well as to men a reasonable
hope of immortality. Every province then had the tomb and mummy of
its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis
boasted of the mummy of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the
possession of that of Toumou. The high gods of Babylon also, though
they appeared to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were
conceived to be human in their bodily shape, human in their
passions, and human in their fate; for like men they were born into
the world, and like men they loved and fought and died.



2. Kings killed when their Strength fails

IF THE HIGH gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this
earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be
expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should
escape the same fate, though we hear of African kings who have
imagined themselves immortal by virtue of their sorceries. Now
primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their
safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one
of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally,
therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard
for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the
man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His
worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to
meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the
course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what
catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of
his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one
way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as
he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his
soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been
seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus
putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old
age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the
man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to
the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his
body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been
extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or
sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to
his worshippers, and with it their prosperity is gone and their very
existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul
of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer
it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying
of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last
stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue
to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body to which it might
be transferred. Whereas by slaying him his worshippers could, in the
first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and
transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place,
by putting him to death before his natural force was abated, they
would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the
decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and
all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his
soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.

The mystic kings of Fire and Water in Cambodia are not allowed to
die a natural death. Hence when one of them is seriously ill and the
elders think that he cannot recover, they stab him to death. The
people of Congo believed, as we have seen, that if their pontiff the
Chitomé were to die a natural death, the world would perish, and the
earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would
immediately be annihilated. Accordingly when he fell ill and seemed
likely to die, the man who was destined to be his successor entered
the pontiff's house with a rope or a club and strangled or clubbed
him to death. The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods;
but whenever the priests chose, they sent a messenger to the king,
ordering him to die, and alleging an oracle of the gods as their
authority for the command. This command the kings always obeyed down
to the reign of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II., King of
Egypt. Having received a Greek education which emancipated him from
the superstitions of his countrymen, Ergamenes ventured to disregard
the command of the priests, and, entering the Golden Temple with a
body of soldiers, put the priests to the sword.

Customs of the same sort appear to have prevailed in this part of
Africa down to modern times. In some tribes of Fazoql the king had
to administer justice daily under a certain tree. If from sickness
or any other cause he was unable to discharge this duty for three
whole days, he was hanged on the tree in a noose, which contained
two razors so arranged that when the noose was drawn tight by the
weight of the king's body they cut his throat.

A custom of putting their divine kings to death at the first
symptoms of infirmity or old age prevailed until lately, if indeed
it is even now extinct and not merely dormant, among the Shilluk of
the White Nile, and in recent years it has been carefully
investigated by Dr. C. G. Seligman. The reverence which the Shilluk
pay to their king appears to arise chiefly from the conviction that
he is a reincarnation of the spirit of Nyakang, the semi-divine hero
who founded the dynasty and settled the tribe in their present
territory. It is a fundamental article of the Shilluk creed that the
spirit of the divine or semi-divine Nyakang is incarnate in the
reigning king, who is accordingly himself invested to some extent
with the character of a divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their
kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution
against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the
conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or
senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken
and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields,
and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever-increasing
numbers." To prevent these calamities it used to be the regular
custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death whenever he showed
signs of ill-health or failing strength. One of the fatal symptoms
of decay was taken to be an incapacity to satisfy the sexual
passions of his wives, of whom he has very many, distributed in a
large number of houses at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness
manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who are
popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a
white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat
of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of
death. A hut was specially built for the occasion: the king was led
into it and lay down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile
virgin: the door of the hut was then walled up; and the couple were
left without food, water, or fire to die of hunger and suffocation.
This was the old custom, but it was abolished some five generations
ago on account of the excessive sufferings of one of the kings who
perished in this way. It is said that the chiefs announce his fate
to the king, and that afterwards he is strangled in a hut which has
been specially built for the occasion.

From Dr. Seligman's enquiries it appears that not only was the
Shilluk king liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first
symptoms of incipient decay, but even while he was yet in the prime
of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival
and have to defend his crown in a combat to the death. According to
the common Shilluk tradition any son of a king had the right thus to
fight the king in possession and, if he succeeded in killing him, to
reign in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons,
the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may
well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must
have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only
take place with any prospect of success at night; for during the day
the king surrounded himself with his friends and bodyguards, and an
aspirant to the throne could hardly hope to cut his way through them
and strike home. It was otherwise at night. For then the guards were
dismissed and the king was alone in his enclosure with his favourite
wives, and there was no man near to defend him except a few
herdsmen, whose huts stood a little way off. The hours of darkness
were therefore the season of peril for the king. It is said that he
used to pass them in constant watchfulness, prowling round his huts
fully armed, peering into the blackest shadows, or himself standing
silent and alert, like a sentinel on duty, in some dark corner. When
at last his rival appeared, the fight would take place in grim
silence, broken only by the clash of spears and shields, for it was
a point of honour with the king not to call the herdsmen to his
assistance.

Like Nyakang himself, their founder, each of the Shilluk kings after
death is worshipped at a shrine, which is erected over his grave,
and the grave of a king is always in the village where he was born.
The tomb-shrine of a king resembles the shrine of Nyakang,
consisting of a few huts enclosed by a fence; one of the huts is
built over the king's grave, the others are occupied by the
guardians of the shrine. Indeed the shrines of Nyakang and the
shrines of the kings are scarcely to be distinguished from each
other, and the religious rituals observed at all of them are
identical in form and vary only in matters of detail, the variations
being due apparently to the far greater sanctity attributed to the
shrines of Nyakang. The grave-shrines of the kings are tended by
certain old men or women, who correspond to the guardians of the
shrines of Nyakang. They are usually widows or old men-servants of
the deceased king, and when they die they are succeeded in their
office by their descendants. Moreover, cattle are dedicated to the
grave-shrines of the kings and sacrifices are offered at them just
as at the shrines of Nyakang.

In general the principal element in the religion of the Shilluk
would seem to be the worship which they pay to their sacred or
divine kings, whether dead or alive. These are believed to be
animated by a single divine spirit, which has been transmitted from
the semi-mythical, but probably in substance historical, founder of
the dynasty through all his successors to the present day. Hence,
regarding their kings as incarnate divinities on whom the welfare of
men, of cattle, and of the corn implicitly depends, the Shilluk
naturally pay them the greatest respect and take every care of them;
and however strange it may seem to us, their custom of putting the
divine king to death as soon as he shows signs of ill-health or
failing strength springs directly from their profound veneration for
him and from their anxiety to preserve him, or rather the divine
spirit by which he is animated, in the most perfect state of
efficiency: nay, we may go further and say that their practice of
regicide is the best proof they can give of the high regard in which
they hold their kings. For they believe, as we have seen, that the
king's life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the
prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile
the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot
in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in
their opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put
the king to death while he is still hale and hearty, in order that
the divine spirit which he has inherited from his predecessors may
be transmitted in turn by him to his successor while it is still in
full vigour and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of disease
and old age. In this connexion the particular symptom which is
commonly said to seal the king's death-warrant is highly
significant; when he can no longer satisfy the passions of his
numerous wives, in other words, when he has ceased, whether
partially or wholly, to be able to reproduce his kind, it is time
for him to die and to make room for a more vigorous successor. Taken
along with the other reasons which are alleged for putting the king
to death, this one suggests that the fertility of men, of cattle,
and of the crops is believed to depend sympathetically on the
generative power of the king, so that the complete failure of that
power in him would involve a corresponding failure in men, animals,
and plants, and would thereby entail at no distant date the entire
extinction of all life, whether human, animal, or vegetable. No
wonder, that with such a danger before their eyes the Shilluk should
be most careful not to let the king die what we should call a
natural death of sickness or old age. It is characteristic of their
attitude towards the death of the kings that they refrain from
speaking of it as death: they do not say that a king has died but
simply that he has "gone away" like his divine ancestors Nyakang and
Dag, the two first kings of the dynasty, both of whom are reported
not to have died but to have disappeared. The similar legends of the
mysterious disappearance of early kings in other lands, for example
at Rome and in Uganda, may well point to a similar custom of putting
them to death for the purpose of preserving their life.

On the whole the theory and practice of the divine kings of the
Shilluk correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the
priests of Nemi, the Kings of the Wood, if my view of the latter is
correct. In both we see a series of divine kings on whose life the
fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to
depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or
otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to
their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and
decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the
part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a
corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops.
Some points in this explanation of the custom of putting divine
kings to death, particularly the method of transmitting their divine
souls to their successors, will be dealt with more fully in the
sequel. Meantime we pass to other examples of the general practice.

The Dinka are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of the
White Nile. They are essentially a pastoral people, passionately
devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen, though they
also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate small quantities
of millet and sesame. For their crops and above all for their
pastures they depend on the regularity of the rains: in seasons of
prolonged drought they are said to be reduced to great extremities.
Hence the rain-maker is a very important personage among them to
this day; indeed the men in authority whom travellers dub chiefs or
sheikhs are in fact the actual or potential rain-makers of the tribe
or community. Each of them is believed to be animated by the spirit
of a great rain-maker, which has come down to him through a
succession of rain-makers; and in virtue of this inspiration a
successful rain-maker enjoys very great power and is consulted on
all important matters. Yet in spite, or rather in virtue, of the
high honour in which he is held, no Dinka rain-maker is allowed to
die a natural death of sickness or old age; for the Dinka believe
that if such an untoward event were to happen, the tribe would
suffer from disease and famine, and the herds would not yield their
increase. So when a rain-maker feels that he is growing old and
infirm, he tells his children that he wishes to die. Among the Agar
Dinka a large grave is dug and the rain-maker lies down in it,
surrounded by his friends and relatives. From time to time he speaks
to the people, recalling the past history of the tribe, reminding
them how he has ruled and advised them, and instructing them how
they are to act in the future. Then, when he has concluded his
admonition, he bids them cover him up. So the earth is thrown down
on him as he lies in the grave, and he soon dies of suffocation.
Such, with minor variations, appears to be the regular end of the
honourable career of a rain-maker in all the Dinka tribes. The
Khor-Adar Dinka told Dr. Seligman that when they have dug the grave
for their rain-maker they strangle him in his house. The father and
paternal uncle of one of Dr. Seligman's informants had both been
rain-makers and both had been killed in the most regular and
orthodox fashion. Even if a rain-maker is quite young he will be put
to death should he seem likely to perish of disease. Further, every
precaution is taken to prevent a rain-maker from dying an accidental
death, for such an end, though not nearly so serious a matter as
death from illness or old age, would be sure to entail sickness on
the tribe. As soon as a rain-maker is killed, his valuable spirit is
supposed to pass to a suitable successor, whether a son or other
near blood relation.

In the Central African kingdom of Bunyoro down to recent years
custom required that as soon as the king fell seriously ill or began
to break up from age, he should die by his own hand; for, according
to an old prophecy, the throne would pass away from the dynasty if
ever the king were to die a natural death. He killed himself by
draining a poisoned cup. If he faltered or were too ill to ask for
the cup, it was his wife's duty to administer the poison. When the
king of Kibanga, on the Upper Congo, seems near his end, the
sorcerers put a rope round his neck, which they draw gradually
tighter till he dies. If the king of Gingiro happens to be wounded
in war, he is put to death by his comrades, or, if they fail to kill
him, by his kinsfolk, however hard he may beg for mercy. They say
they do it that he may not die by the hands of his enemies. The
Jukos are a heathen tribe of the Benue River, a great tributary of
the Niger. In their country "the town of Gatri is ruled by a king
who is elected by the big men of the town as follows. When in the
opinion of the big men the king has reigned long enough, they give
out that 'the king is sick'--a formula understood by all to mean
that they are going to kill him, though the intention is never put
more plainly. They then decide who is to be the next king. How long
he is to reign is settled by the influential men at a meeting; the
question is put and answered by each man throwing on the ground a
little piece of stick for each year he thinks the new king should
rule. The king is then told, and a great feast prepared, at which
the king gets drunk on guinea-corn beer. After that he is speared,
and the man who was chosen becomes king. Thus each Juko king knows
that he cannot have very many more years to live, and that he is
certain of his predecessor's fate. This, however, does not seem to
frighten candidates. The same custom of king-killing is said to
prevail at Quonde and Wukari as well as at Gatri." In the three
Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Katsina, and Daura, in Northern Nigeria, as
soon as a king showed signs of failing health or growing infirmity,
an official who bore the title of Killer of the Elephant appeared
and throttled him.

The Matiamvo is a great king or emperor in the interior of Angola.
One of the inferior kings of the country, by name Challa, gave to a
Portuguese expedition the following account of the manner in which
the Matiamvo comes by his end. "It has been customary," he said,
"for our Matiamvos to die either in war or by a violent death, and
the present Matiamvo must meet this last fate, as, in consequence of
his great exactions, he has lived long enough. When we come to this
understanding, and decide that he should be killed, we invite him to
make war with our enemies, on which occasion we all accompany him
and his family to the war, when we lose some of our people. If he
escapes unhurt, we return to the war again and fight for three or
four days. We then suddenly abandon him and his family to their
fate, leaving him in the enemy's hands. Seeing himself thus
deserted, he causes his throne to be erected, and, sitting down,
calls his family around him. He then orders his mother to approach;
she kneels at his feet; he first cuts off her head, then decapitates
his sons in succession, next his wives and relatives, and, last of
all, his most beloved wife, called Anacullo. This slaughter being
accomplished, the Matiamvo, dressed in all his pomp, awaits his own
death, which immediately follows, by an officer sent by the powerful
neighbouring chiefs, Caniquinha and Canica. This officer first cuts
off his legs and arms at the joints, and lastly he cuts off his
head; after which the head of the officer is struck off. All the
potentates retire from the encampment, in order not to witness his
death. It is my duty to remain and witness his death, and to mark
the place where the head and arms have been deposited by the two
great chiefs, the enemies of the Matiamvo. They also take possession
of all the property belonging to the deceased monarch and his
family, which they convey to their own residence. I then provide for
the funeral of the mutilated remains of the late Matiamvo, after
which I retire to his capital and proclaim the new government. I
then return to where the head, legs, and arms have been deposited,
and, for forty slaves, I ransom them, together with the merchandise
and other property belonging to the deceased, which I give up to the
new Matiamvo, who has been proclaimed. This is what has happened to
many Matiamvos, and what must happen to the present one."

It appears to have been a Zulu custom to put the king to death as
soon as he began to have wrinkles or grey hairs. At least this seems
implied in the following passage written by one who resided for some
time at the court of the notorious Zulu tyrant Chaka, in the early
part of the nineteenth century: "The extraordinary violence of the
king's rage with me was mainly occasioned by that absurd nostrum,
the hair oil, with the notion of which Mr. Farewell had impressed
him as being a specific for removing all indications of age. From
the first moment of his having heard that such a preparation was
attainable, he evinced a solicitude to procure it, and on every
occasion never forgot to remind us of his anxiety respecting it;
more especially on our departure on the mission his injunctions were
particularly directed to this object. It will be seen that it is one
of the barbarous customs of the Zoolas in their choice or election
of their kings that he must neither have wrinkles nor grey hairs, as
they are both distinguishing marks of disqualification for becoming
a monarch of a warlike people. It is also equally indispensable that
their king should never exhibit those proofs of having become unfit
and incompetent to reign; it is therefore important that they should
conceal these indications so long as they possibly can. Chaka had
become greatly apprehensive of the approach of grey hairs; which
would at once be the signal for him to prepare to make his exit from
this sublunary world, it being always followed by the death of the
monarch." The writer to whom we are indebted for this instructive
anecdote of the hair oil omits to specify the mode in which a
grey-haired and wrinkled Zulu chief used "to make his exit from this
sublunary world"; but on analogy we may conjecture that he was
killed.

The custom of putting kings to death as soon as they suffered from
any personal defect prevailed two centuries ago in the Caffre
kingdom of Sofala. We have seen that these kings of Sofala were
regarded as gods by their people, being entreated to give rain or
sunshine, according as each might be wanted. Nevertheless a slight
bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth, was considered a
sufficient cause for putting one of these god-men to death, as we
learn from the following passage of an old Portuguese historian: "It
was formerly the custom of the kings of this land to commit suicide
by taking poison when any disaster or natural physical defect fell
upon them, such as impotence, infectious disease, the loss of their
front teeth, by which they were disfigured, or any other deformity
or affliction. To put an end to such defects they killed themselves,
saying that the king should be free from any blemish, and if not, it
was better for his honour that he should die and seek another life
where he would be made whole, for there everything was perfect. But
the Quiteve (king) who reigned when I was in those parts would not
imitate his predecessors in this, being discreet and dreaded as he
was; for having lost a front tooth he caused it to be proclaimed
throughout the kingdom that all should be aware that he had lost a
tooth and should recognise him when they saw him without it, and if
his predecessors killed themselves for such things they were very
foolish, and he would not do so; on the contrary, he would be very
sorry when the time came for him to die a natural death, for his
life was very necessary to preserve his kingdom and defend it from
his enemies; and he recommended his successors to follow his
example."

The king of Sofala who dared to survive the loss of his front tooth
was thus a bold reformer like Ergamenes, king of Ethiopia. We may
conjecture that the ground for putting the Ethiopian kings to death
was, as in the case of the Zulu and Sofala kings, the appearance on
their person of any bodily defect or sign of decay; and that the
oracle which the priests alleged as the authority for the royal
execution was to the effect that great calamities would result from
the reign of a king who had any blemish on his body; just as an
oracle warned Sparta against a "lame reign," that is, the reign of a
lame king. It is some confirmation of this conjecture that the kings
of Ethiopia were chosen for their size, strength, and beauty long
before the custom of killing them was abolished. To this day the
Sultan of Wadai must have no obvious bodily defect, and the king of
Angoy cannot be crowned if he has a single blemish, such as a broken
or a filed tooth or the scar of an old wound. According to the Book
of Acaill and many other authorities no king who was afflicted with
a personal blemish might reign over Ireland at Tara. Hence, when the
great King Cormac Mac Art lost one eye by an accident, he at once
abdicated.

Many days' journey to the north-east of Abomey, the old capital of
Dahomey, lies the kingdom of Eyeo. "The Eyeos are governed by a
king, no less absolute than the king of Dahomey, yet subject to a
regulation of state, at once humiliating and extraordinary. When the
people have conceived an opinion of his ill-government, which is
sometimes insidiously infused into them by the artifice of his
discontented ministers, they send a deputation to him with a present
of parrots' eggs, as a mark of its authenticity, to represent to him
that the burden of government must have so far fatigued him that
they consider it full time for him to repose from his cares and
indulge himself with a little sleep. He thanks his subjects for
their attention to his ease, retires to his own apartment as if to
sleep, and there gives directions to his women to strangle him. This
is immediately executed, and his son quietly ascends the throne upon
the usual terms of holding the reins of government no longer than
whilst he merits the approbation of the people." About the year
1774, a king of Eyeo, whom his ministers attempted to remove in the
customary manner, positively refused to accept the proffered
parrots' eggs at their hands, telling them that he had no mind to
take a nap, but on the contrary was resolved to watch for the
benefit of his subjects. The ministers, surprised and indignant at
his recalcitrancy, raised a rebellion, but were defeated with great
slaughter, and thus by his spirited conduct the king freed himself
from the tyranny of his councillors and established a new precedent
for the guidance of his successors. However, the old custom seems to
have revived and persisted until late in the nineteenth century, for
a Catholic missionary, writing in 1884, speaks of the practice as if
it were still in vogue. Another missionary, writing in 1881, thus
describes the usage of the Egbas and the Yorubas of West Africa:
"Among the customs of the country one of the most curious is
unquestionably that of judging, and punishing the king. Should he
have earned the hatred of his people by exceeding his rights, one of
his councillors, on whom the heavy duty is laid, requires of the
prince that he shall 'go to sleep,' which means simply 'take poison
and die.' If his courage fails him at the supreme moment, a friend
renders him this last service, and quietly, without betraying the
secret, they prepare the people for the news of the king's death. In
Yoruba the thing is managed a little differently. When a son is born
to the king of Oyo, they make a model of the infant's right foot in
clay and keep it in the house of the elders (_ogboni_). If the king
fails to observe the customs of the country, a messenger, without
speaking a word, shows him his child's foot. The king knows what
that means. He takes poison and goes to sleep." The old Prussians
acknowledged as their supreme lord a ruler who governed them in the
name of the gods, and was known as "God's Mouth." When he felt
himself weak and ill, if he wished to leave a good name behind him,
he had a great heap made of thorn-bushes and straw, on which he
mounted and delivered a long sermon to the people, exhorting them to
serve the gods and promising to go to the gods and speak for the
people. Then he took some of the perpetual fire which burned in
front of the holy oak-tree, and lighting the pile with it burned
himself to death.



3. Kings killed at the End of a Fixed Term

IN THE CASES hitherto described, the divine king or priest is
suffered by his people to retain office until some outward defect,
some visible symptom of failing health or advancing age, warns them
that he is no longer equal to the discharge of his divine duties;
but not until such symptoms have made their appearance is he put to
death. Some peoples, however, appear to have thought it unsafe to
wait for even the slightest symptom of decay and have preferred to
kill the king while he was still in the full vigour of life.
Accordingly, they have fixed a term beyond which he might not reign,
and at the close of which he must die, the term fixed upon being
short enough to exclude the probability of his degenerating
physically in the interval. In some parts of Southern India the
period fixed was twelve years. Thus, according to an old traveller,
in the province of Quilacare, "there is a Gentile house of prayer,
in which there is an idol which they hold in great account, and
every twelve years they celebrate a great feast to it, whither all
the Gentiles go as to a jubilee. This temple possesses many lands
and much revenue: it is a very great affair. This province has a
king over it, who has not more than twelve years to reign from
jubilee to jubilee. His manner of living is in this wise, that is to
say: when the twelve years are completed, on the day of this feast
there assemble together innumerable people, and much money is spent
in giving food to Bramans. The king has a wooden scaffolding made,
spread over with silken hangings: and on that day he goes to bathe
at a tank with great ceremonies and sound of music, after that he
comes to the idol and prays to it, and mounts on to the scaffolding,
and there before all the people he takes some very sharp knives, and
begins to cut off his nose, and then his ears, and his lips, and all
his members, and as much flesh off himself as he can; and he throws
it away very hurriedly until so much of his blood is spilled that he
begins to faint, and then he cuts his throat himself. And he
performs this sacrifice to the idol, and whoever desires to reign
another twelve years and undertake this martyrdom for love of the
idol, has to be present looking on at this: and from that place they
raise him up as king."

The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, bears the title of
Samorin or Samory. He "pretends to be of a higher rank than the
Brahmans, and to be inferior only to the invisible gods; a
pretention that was acknowledged by his subjects, but which is held
as absurd and abominable by the Brahmans, by whom he is only treated
as a Sudra." Formerly the Samorin had to cut his throat in public at
the end of a twelve years' reign. But towards the end of the
seventeenth century the rule had been modified as follows: "Many
strange customs were observed in this country in former times, and
some very odd ones are still continued. It was an ancient custom for
the Samorin to reign but twelve years, and no longer. If he died
before his term was expired, it saved him a troublesome ceremony of
cutting his own throat, on a publick scaffold erected for the
purpose. He first made a feast for all his nobility and gentry, who
are very numerous. After the feast he saluted his guests, and went
on the scaffold, and very decently cut his own throat in the view of
the assembly, and his body was, a little while after, burned with
great pomp and ceremony, and the grandees elected a new Samorin.
Whether that custom was a religious or a civil ceremony, I know not,
but it is now laid aside. And a new custom is followed by the modern
Samorins, that jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions, at
the end of twelve years, and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious
plain, and a great feast is celebrated for ten or twelve days, with
mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so at the end of the
feast any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a crown by a
desperate action, in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his
guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him succeeds
him in his empire. In anno 1695, one of those jubilees happened, and
the tent pitched near Pennany, a seaport of his, about fifteen
leagues to the southward of Calicut. There were but three men that
would venture on that desperate action, who fell in, with sword and
target, among the guard, and, after they had killed and wounded
many, were themselves killed. One of the desperados had a nephew of
fifteen or sixteen years of age, that kept close by his uncle in the
attack on the guards, and, when he saw him fall, the youth got
through the guards into the tent, and made a stroke at his Majesty's
head, and had certainly despatched him if a large brass lamp which
was burning over his head had not marred the blow; but, before he
could make another, he was killed by the guards; and, I believe, the
same Samorin reigns yet. I chanced to come that time along the coast
and heard the guns for two or three days and nights successively."

The English traveller, whose account I have quoted, did not himself
witness the festival he describes, though he heard the sound of the
firing in the distance. Fortunately, exact records of these
festivals and of the number of men who perished at them have been
preserved in the archives of the royal family at Calicut. In the
latter part of the nineteenth century they were examined by Mr. W.
Logan, with the personal assistance of the reigning king, and from
his work it is possible to gain an accurate conception both of the
tragedy and of the scene where it was periodically enacted down to
1743, when the ceremony took place for the last time.

The festival at which the king of Calicut staked his crown and his
life on the issue of battle was known as the "Great Sacrifice." It
fell every twelfth year, when the planet Jupiter was in retrograde
motion in the sign of the Crab, and it lasted twenty-eight days,
culminating at the time of the eighth lunar asterism in the month of
Makaram. As the date of the festival was determined by the position
of Jupiter in the sky, and the interval between two festivals was
twelve years, which is roughly Jupiter's period of revolution round
the sun, we may conjecture that the splendid planet was supposed to
be in a special sense the king's star and to rule his destiny, the
period of its revolution in heaven corresponding to the period of
his reign on earth. However that may be, the ceremony was observed
with great pomp at the Tirunavayi temple, on the north bank of the
Ponnani River. The spot is close to the present railway line. As the
train rushes by, you can just catch a glimpse of the temple, almost
hidden behind a clump of trees on the river bank. From the western
gateway of the temple a perfectly straight road, hardly raised above
the level of the surrounding rice-fields and shaded by a fine
avenue, runs for half a mile to a high ridge with a precipitous
bank, on which the outlines of three or four terraces can still be
traced. On the topmost of these terraces the king took his stand on
the eventful day. The view which it commands is a fine one. Across
the flat expanse of the rice-fields, with the broad placid river
winding through them, the eye ranges eastward to high tablelands,
their lower slopes embowered in woods, while afar off looms the
great chain of the western Ghauts, and in the furthest distance the
Neilgherries or Blue Mountains, hardly distinguishable from the
azure of the sky above.

But it was not to the distant prospect that the king's eyes
naturally turned at this crisis of his fate. His attention was
arrested by a spectacle nearer at hand. For all the plain below was
alive with troops, their banners waving gaily in the sun, the white
tents of their many camps standing sharply out against the green and
gold of the ricefields. Forty thousand fighting men or more were
gathered there to defend the king. But if the plain swarmed with
soldiers, the road that cuts across it from the temple to the king's
stand was clear of them. Not a soul was stirring on it. Each side of
the way was barred by palisades, and from the palisades on either
hand a long hedge of spears, held by strong arms, projected into the
empty road, their blades meeting in the middle and forming a
glittering arch of steel. All was now ready. The king waved his
sword. At the same moment a great chain of massy gold, enriched with
bosses, was placed on an elephant at his side. That was the signal.
On the instant a stir might be seen half a mile away at the gate of
the temple. A group of swordsmen, decked with flowers and smeared
with ashes, has stepped out from the crowd. They have just partaken
of their last meal on earth, and they now receive the last blessings
and farewells of their friends. A moment more and they are coming
down the lane of spears, hewing and stabbing right and left at the
spearmen, winding and turning and writhing among the blades as if
they had no bones in their bodies. It is all in vain. One after the
other they fall, some nearer the king, some farther off, content to
die, not for the shadow of a crown, but for the mere sake of
approving their dauntless valour and swordsmanship to the world. On
the last days of the festival the same magnificent display of
gallantry, the same useless sacrifice of life was repeated again and
again. Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves that
there are men who prefer honour to life.

"It is a singular custom in Bengal," says an old native historian of
India, "that there is little of hereditary descent in succession to
the sovereignty. . . . Whoever kills the king, and succeeds in
placing himself on that throne, is immediately acknowledged as king;
all the _amirs, wazirs,_ soldiers, and peasants instantly obey and
submit to him, and consider him as being as much their sovereign as
they did their former prince, and obey his orders implicitly. The
people of Bengal say, 'We are faithful to the throne; whoever fills
the throne we are obedient and true to it.'" A custom of the same
sort formerly prevailed in the little kingdom of Passier, on the
northern coast of Sumatra. The old Portuguese historian De Barros,
who informs us of it, remarks with surprise that no wise man would
wish to be king of Passier, since the monarch was not allowed by his
subjects to live long. From time to time a sort of fury seized the
people, and they marched through the streets of the city chanting
with loud voices the fatal words, "The king must die!" When the king
heard that song of death he knew that his hour had come. The man who
struck the fatal blow was of the royal lineage, and as soon as he
had done the deed of blood and seated himself on the throne he was
regarded as the legitimate king, provided that he contrived to
maintain his seat peaceably for a single day. This, however, the
regicide did not always succeed in doing. When Fernão Peres
d'Andrade, on a voyage to China, put in at Passier for a cargo of
spices, two kings were massacred, and that in the most peaceable and
orderly manner, without the smallest sign of tumult or sedition in
the city, where everything went on in its usual course, as if the
murder or execution of a king were a matter of everyday occurrence.
Indeed, on one occasion three kings were raised to the dangerous
elevation and followed each other in the dusty road of death in a
single day. The people defended the custom, which they esteemed very
laudable and even of divine institution, by saying that God would
never allow so high and mighty a being as a king, who reigned as his
vicegerent on earth, to perish by violence unless for his sins he
thoroughly deserved it. Far away from the tropical island of Sumatra
a rule of the same sort appears to have obtained among the old
Slavs. When the captives Gunn and Jarmerik contrived to slay the
king and queen of the Slavs and made their escape, they were pursued
by the barbarians, who shouted after them that if they would only
come back they would reign instead of the murdered monarch, since by
a public statute of the ancients the succession to the throne fell
to the king's assassin. But the flying regicides turned a deaf ear
to promises which they regarded as mere baits to lure them back to
destruction; they continued their flight, and the shouts and clamour
of the barbarians gradually died away in the distance.

When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at their own hands or
at the hands of others, on the expiration of a fixed term of years,
it was natural that they should seek to delegate the painful duty,
along with some of the privileges of sovereignty, to a substitute
who should suffer vicariously in their stead. This expedient appears
to have been resorted to by some of the princes of Malabar. Thus we
are informed by a native authority on that country that "in some
places all powers both executive and judicial were delegated for a
fixed period to natives by the sovereign. This institution was
styled _Thalavettiparothiam_ or authority obtained by decapitation.
. . . It was an office tenable for five years during which its bearer
was invested with supreme despotic powers within his jurisdiction.
On the expiry of the five years the man's head was cut off and
thrown up in the air amongst a large concourse of villagers, each of
whom vied with the other in trying to catch it in its course down.
He who succeeded was nominated to the post for the next five years."

When once kings, who had hitherto been bound to die a violent death
at the end of a term of years, conceived the happy thought of dying
by deputy in the persons of others, they would very naturally put it
in practice; and accordingly we need not wonder at finding so
popular an expedient, or traces of it, in many lands. Scandinavian
traditions contain some hints that of old the Swedish kings reigned
only for periods of nine years, after which they were put to death
or had to find a substitute to die in their stead. Thus Aun or On,
king of Sweden, is said to have sacrificed to Odin for length of
days and to have been answered by the god that he should live so
long as he sacrificed one of his sons every ninth year. He
sacrificed nine of them in this manner, and would have sacrificed
the tenth and last, but the Swedes would not allow him. So he died
and was buried in a mound at Upsala. Another indication of a similar
tenure of the crown occurs in a curious legend of the deposition and
banishment of Odin. Offended at his misdeeds, the other gods
outlawed and exiled him, but set up in his place a substitute, Oller
by name, a cunning wizard, to whom they accorded the symbols both of
royalty and of godhead. The deputy bore the name of Odin, and
reigned for nearly ten years, when he was driven from the throne,
while the real Odin came to his own again. His discomfited rival
retired to Sweden and was afterwards slain in an attempt to repair
his shattered fortunes. As gods are often merely men who loom large
through the mists of tradition, we may conjecture that this Norse
legend preserves a confused reminiscence of ancient Swedish kings
who reigned for nine or ten years together, then abdicated,
delegating to others the privilege of dying for their country. The
great festival which was held at Upsala every nine years may have
been the occasion on which the king or his deputy was put to death.
We know that human sacrifices formed part of the rites.

There are some grounds for believing that the reign of many ancient
Greek kings was limited to eight years, or at least that at the end
of every period of eight years a new consecration, a fresh
outpouring of the divine grace, was regarded as necessary in order
to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus
it was a rule of the Spartan constitution that every eighth year the
ephors should choose a clear and moonless night and sitting down
observe the sky in silence. If during their vigil they saw a meteor
or shooting star, they inferred that the king had sinned against the
deity, and they suspended him from his functions until the Delphic
or Olympic oracle should reinstate him in them. This custom, which
has all the air of great antiquity, was not suffered to remain a
dead letter even in the last period of the Spartan monarchy; for in
the third century before our era a king, who had rendered himself
obnoxious to the reforming party, was actually deposed on various
trumped-up charges, among which the allegation that the ominous sign
had been seen in the sky took a prominent place.

If the tenure of the regal office was formerly limited among the
Spartans to eight years, we may naturally ask, why was that precise
period selected as the measure of a king's reign? The reason is
probably to be found in those astronomical considerations which
determined the early Greek calendar. The difficulty of reconciling
lunar with solar time is one of the standing puzzles which has taxed
the ingenuity of men who are emerging from barbarism. Now an
octennial cycle is the shortest period at the end of which sun and
moon really mark time together after overlapping, so to say,
throughout the whole of the interval. Thus, for example, it is only
once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the
longest or shortest day; and as this coincidence can be observed
with the aid of a simple dial, the observation is naturally one of
the first to furnish a base for a calendar which shall bring lunar
and solar times into tolerable, though not exact, harmony. But in
early days the proper adjustment of the calendar is a matter of
religious concern, since on it depends a knowledge of the right
seasons for propitiating the deities whose favour is indispensable
to the welfare of the community. No wonder, therefore, that the
king, as the chief priest of the state, or as himself a god, should
be liable to deposition or death at the end of an astronomical
period. When the great luminaries had run their course on high, and
were about to renew the heavenly race, it might well be thought that
the king should renew his divine energies, or prove them unabated,
under pain of making room for a more vigorous successor. In Southern
India, as we have seen, the king's reign and life terminated with
the revolution of the planet Jupiter round the sun. In Greece, on
the other hand, the king's fate seems to have hung in the balance at
the end of every eight years, ready to fly up and kick the beam as
soon as the opposite scale was loaded with a falling star.

Whatever its origin may have been, the cycle of eight years appears
to have coincided with the normal length of the king's reign in
other parts of Greece besides Sparta. Thus Minos, king of Cnossus in
Crete, whose great palace has been unearthed in recent years, is
said to have held office for periods of eight years together. At the
end of each period he retired for a season to the oracular cave on
Mount Ida, and there communed with his divine father Zeus, giving
him an account of his kingship in the years that were past, and
receiving from him instructions for his guidance in those which were
to come. The tradition plainly implies that at the end of every
eight years the king's sacred powers needed to be renewed by
intercourse with the godhead, and that without such a renewal he
would have forfeited his right to the throne.

Without being unduly rash we may surmise that the tribute of seven
youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were bound to send to
Minos every eight years had some connexion with the renewal of the
king's power for another octennial cycle. Traditions varied as to
the fate which awaited the lads and damsels on their arrival in
Crete; but the common view appears to have been that they were shut
up in the labyrinth, there to be devoured by the Minotaur, or at
least to be imprisoned for life. Perhaps they were sacrificed by
being roasted alive in a bronze image of a bull, or of a bull-headed
man, in order to renew the strength of the king and of the sun, whom
he personated. This at all events is suggested by the legend of
Talos, a bronze man who clutched people to his breast and leaped
with them into the fire, so that they were roasted alive. He is said
to have been given by Zeus to Europa, or by Hephaestus to Minos, to
guard the island of Crete, which he patrolled thrice daily.
According to one account he was a bull, according to another he was
the sun. Probably he was identical with the Minotaur, and stripped
of his mythical features was nothing but a bronze image of the sun
represented as a man with a bull's head. In order to renew the solar
fires, human victims may have been sacrificed to the idol by being
roasted in its hollow body or placed on its sloping hands and
allowed to roll into a pit of fire. It was in the latter fashion
that the Carthaginians sacrificed their offspring to Moloch. The
children were laid on the hands of a calf-headed image of bronze,
from which they slid into a fiery oven, while the people danced to
the music of flutes and timbrels to drown the shrieks of the burning
victims. The resemblance which the Cretan traditions bear to the
Carthaginian practice suggests that the worship associated with the
names of Minos and the Minotaur may have been powerfully influenced
by that of a Semitic Baal. In the tradition of Phalaris, tyrant of
Agrigentum, and his brazen bull we may have an echo of similar rites
in Sicily, where the Carthaginian power struck deep roots.

In the province of Lagos, the Ijebu tribe of the Yoruba race is
divided into two branches, which are known respectively as the Ijebu
Ode and the Ijebu Remon. The Ode branch of the tribe is ruled by a
chief who bears the title of Awujale and is surrounded by a great
deal of mystery. Down to recent times his face might not be seen
even by his own subjects, and if circumstances obliged him to
communicate with them he did so through a screen which hid him from
view. The other or Remon branch of the Ijebu tribe is governed by a
chief, who ranks below the Awujale. Mr. John Parkinson was informed
that in former times this subordinate chief used to be killed with
ceremony after a rule of three years. As the country is now under
British protection the custom of putting the chief to death at the
end of a three years' reign has long been abolished, and Mr.
Parkinson was unable to ascertain any particulars on the subject.

At Babylon, within historical times, the tenure of the kingly office
was in practice lifelong, yet in theory it would seem to have been
merely annual. For every year at the festival of Zagmuk the king had
to renew his power by seizing the hands of the image of Marduk in
his great temple of Esagil at Babylon. Even when Babylon passed
under the power of Assyria, the monarchs of that country were
expected to legalise their claim to the throne every year by coming
to Babylon and performing the ancient ceremony at the New Year
festival, and some of them found the obligation so burdensome that
rather than discharge it they renounced the title of king altogether
and contented themselves with the humbler one of Governor. Further,
it would appear that in remote times, though not within the
historical period, the kings of Babylon or their barbarous
predecessors forfeited not merely their crown but their life at the
end of a year's tenure of office. At least this is the conclusion to
which the following evidence seems to point. According to the
historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample
knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival
called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous,
and lasted for five days, during which masters and servants changed
places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A
prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king's robes, seated
on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased,
to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king's
concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his
royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. During his brief term
of office he bore the title of Zoganes. This custom might perhaps
have been explained as merely a grim jest perpetrated in a season of
jollity at the expense of an unhappy criminal. But one
circumstance--the leave given to the mock king to enjoy the king's
concubines--is decisive against this interpretation. Considering the
jealous seclusion of an oriental despot's harem we may be quite
certain that permission to invade it would never have been granted
by the despot, least of all to a condemned criminal, except for the
very gravest cause. This cause could hardly be other than that the
condemned man was about to die in the king's stead, and that to make
the substitution perfect it was necessary he should enjoy the full
rights of royalty during his brief reign. There is nothing
surprising in this substitution. The rule that the king must be put
to death either on the appearance of any symptom of bodily decay or
at the end of a fixed period is certainly one which, sooner or
later, the kings would seek to abolish or modify. We have seen that
in Ethiopia, Sofala, and Eyeo the rule was boldly set aside by
enlightened monarchs; and that in Calicut the old custom of killing
the king at the end of twelve years was changed into a permission
granted to any one at the end of the twelve years' period to attack
the king, and, in the event of killing him, to reign in his stead;
though, as the king took care at these times to be surrounded by his
guards, the permission was little more than a form. Another way of
modifying the stern old rule is seen in the Babylonian custom just
described. When the time drew near for the king to be put to death
(in Babylon this appears to have been at the end of a single year's
reign) he abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king
reigned and suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may
have been an innocent person, possibly a member of the king's own
family; but with the growth of civilisation the sacrifice of an
innocent person would be revolting to the public sentiment, and
accordingly a condemned criminal would be invested with the brief
and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we shall find other examples of
a dying criminal representing a dying god. For we must not forget
that, as the case of the Shilluk kings clearly shows, the king is
slain in his character of a god or a demigod, his death and
resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life
unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people
and the world.

A vestige of a practice of putting the king to death at the end of a
year's reign appears to have survived in the festival called
Macahity, which used to be celebrated in Hawaii during the last
month of the year. About a hundred years ago a Russian voyager
described the custom as follows: "The taboo Macahity is not unlike
to our festival of Christmas. It continues a whole month, during
which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and
sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival wherever
he is. On this occasion his majesty dresses himself in his richest
cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the shore,
followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks early, and
must finish his excursion at sunrise. The strongest and most expert
of the warriors is chosen to receive him on his landing. This
warrior watches the canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king
lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from
a distance of about thirty paces, and the king must either catch the
spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there is no jesting in the
business. Having caught it, he carries it under his arm, with the
sharp end downwards, into the temple or _heavoo._ On his entrance,
the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and immediately the
air is obscured by clouds of spears, made for the occasion with
blunted ends. Hamamea [the king] has been frequently advised to
abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in which he risks his life every
year; but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to
catch a spear as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During
the Macahity, all punishments are remitted throughout the country;
and no person can leave the place in which he commences these
holidays, let the affair be ever so important."

That a king should regularly have been put to death at the close of
a year's reign will hardly appear improbable when we learn that to
this day there is still a kingdom in which the reign and the life of
the sovereign are limited to a single day. In Ngoio, a province of
the ancient kingdom of Congo, the rule obtains that the chief who
assumes the cap of sovereignty is always killed on the night after
his coronation. The right of succession lies with the chief of the
Musurongo; but we need not wonder that he does not exercise it, and
that the throne stands vacant. "No one likes to lose his life for a
few hours' glory on the Ngoio throne."




XXV. Temporary Kings

IN SOME places the modified form of the old custom of regicide which
appears to have prevailed at Babylon has been further softened down.
The king still abdicates annually for a short time and his place is
filled by a more or less nominal sovereign; but at the close of his
short reign the latter is no longer killed, though sometimes a mock
execution still survives as a memorial of the time when he was
actually put to death. To take examples. In the month of Méac
(February) the king of Cambodia annually abdicated for three days.
During this time he performed no act of authority, he did not touch
the seals, he did not even receive the revenues which fell due. In
his stead there reigned a temporary king called Sdach Méac, that is,
King February. The office of temporary king was hereditary in a
family distantly connected with the royal house, the sons succeeding
the fathers and the younger brothers the elder brothers just as in
the succession to the real sovereignty. On a favourable day fixed by
the astrologers the temporary king was conducted by the mandarins in
triumphal procession. He rode one of the royal elephants, seated in
the royal palanquin, and escorted by soldiers who, dressed in
appropriate costumes, represented the neighbouring peoples of Siam,
Annam, Laos, and so on. In place of the golden crown he wore a
peaked white cap, and his regalia, instead of being of gold
encrusted with diamonds, were of rough wood. After paying homage to
the real king, from whom he received the sovereignty for three days,
together with all the revenues accruing during that time (though
this last custom has been omitted for some time), he moved in
procession round the palace and through the streets of the capital.
On the third day, after the usual procession, the temporary king
gave orders that the elephants should trample under foot the
"mountain of rice," which was a scaffold of bamboo surrounded by
sheaves of rice. The people gathered up the rice, each man taking
home a little with him to secure a good harvest. Some of it was also
taken to the king, who had it cooked and presented to the monks.

In Siam on the sixth day of the moon in the sixth month (the end of
April) a temporary king is appointed, who for three days enjoys the
royal prerogatives, the real king remaining shut up in his palace.
This temporary king sends his numerous satellites in all directions
to seize and confiscate whatever they can find in the bazaar and
open shops; even the ships and junks which arrive in harbour during
the three days are forfeited to him and must be redeemed. He goes to
a field in the middle of the city, whither they bring a gilded
plough drawn by gaily-decked oxen. After the plough has been
anointed and the oxen rubbed with incense, the mock king traces nine
furrows with the plough, followed by aged dames of the palace
scattering the first seed of the season. As soon as the nine furrows
are drawn, the crowd of spectators rushes in and scrambles for the
seed which has just been sown, believing that, mixed with the
seed-rice, it will ensure a plentiful crop. Then the oxen are
unyoked, and rice, maize, sesame, sago, bananas, sugar-cane, melons,
and so on, are set before them; whatever they eat first will, it is
thought, be dear in the year following, though some people interpret
the omen in the opposite sense. During this time the temporary king
stands leaning against a tree with his right foot resting on his
left knee. From standing thus on one foot he is popularly known as
King Hop; but his official title is Phaya Phollathep "Lord of the
Heavenly Hosts." He is a sort of Minister of Agriculture; all
disputes about fields, rice, and so forth, are referred to him.
There is moreover another ceremony in which he personates the king.
It takes place in the second month (which falls in the cold season)
and lasts three days. He is conducted in procession to an open place
opposite the Temple of the Brahmans, where there are a number of
poles dressed like May-poles, upon which the Brahmans swing. All the
while that they swing and dance, the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has
to stand on one foot upon a seat which is made of bricks plastered
over, covered with a white cloth, and hung with tapestry. He is
supported by a wooden frame with a gilt canopy, and two Brahmans
stand one on each side of him. The dancing Brahmans carry buffalo
horns with which they draw water from a large copper caldron and
sprinkle it on the spectators; this is supposed to bring good luck,
causing the people to dwell in peace and quiet, health and
prosperity. The time during which the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts has
to stand on one foot is about three hours. This is thought "to prove
the dispositions of the Devattas and spirits." If he lets his foot
down "he is liable to forfeit his property and have his family
enslaved by the king, as it is believed to be a bad omen, portending
destruction to the state, and instability to the throne. But if he
stand firm he is believed to have gained a victory over evil
spirits, and he has moreover the privilege, ostensibly at least, of
seizing any ship which may enter the harbour during these three
days, and taking its contents, and also of entering any open shop in
the town and carrying away what he chooses."

Such were the duties and privileges of the Siamese King Hop down to
about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. Under the reign
of the late enlightened monarch this quaint personage was to some
extent both shorn of the glories and relieved of the burden of his
office. He still watches, as of old, the Brahmans rushing through
the air in a swing suspended between two tall masts, each some
ninety feet high; but he is allowed to sit instead of stand, and,
although public opinion still expects him to keep his right foot on
his left knee during the whole of the ceremony, he would incur no
legal penalty were he, to the great chagrin of the people, to put
his weary foot to the ground. Other signs, too, tell of the invasion
of the East by the ideas and civilisation of the West. The
thoroughfares that lead to the scene of the performance are blocked
with carriages: lamp-posts and telegraph posts, to which eager
spectators cling like monkeys, rise above the dense crowd; and,
while a tatterdemalion band of the old style, in gaudy garb of
vermilion and yellow, bangs and tootles away on drums and trumpets
of an antique pattern, the procession of barefooted soldiers in
brilliant uniforms steps briskly along to the lively strains of a
modern military band playing "Marching through Georgia."

On the first day of the sixth month, which was regarded as the
beginning of the year, the king and people of Samarcand used to put
on new clothes and cut their hair and beards. Then they repaired to
a forest near the capital where they shot arrows on horseback for
seven days. On the last day the target was a gold coin, and he who
hit it had the right to be king for one day. In Upper Egypt on the
first day of the solar year by Coptic reckoning, that is, on the
tenth of September, when the Nile has generally reached its highest
point, the regular government is suspended for three days and every
town chooses its own ruler. This temporary lord wears a sort of tall
fool's cap and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange
mantle. With a wand of office in his hand and attended by men
disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the
Governor's house. The latter allows himself to be deposed; and the
mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to the decisions
of which even the governor and his officials must bow. After three
days the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in
which he was encased is committed to the flames, and from its ashes
the Fellah creeps forth. The custom perhaps points to an old
practice of burning a real king in grim earnest. In Uganda the
brothers of the king used to be burned, because it was not lawful to
shed the royal blood.

The Mohammedan students of Fez, in Morocco, are allowed to appoint a
sultan of their own, who reigns for a few weeks, and is known as
_Sultan t-tulba,_ "the Sultan of the Scribes." This brief authority
is put up for auction and knocked down to the highest bidder. It
brings some substantial privileges with it, for the holder is freed
from taxes thenceforward, and he has the right of asking a favour
from the real sultan. That favour is seldom refused; it usually
consists in the release of a prisoner. Moreover, the agents of the
student-sultan levy fines on the shopkeepers and householders,
against whom they trump up various humorous charges. The temporary
sultan is surrounded with the pomp of a real court, and parades the
streets in state with music and shouting, while a royal umbrella is
held over his head. With the so-called fines and free-will
offerings, to which the real sultan adds a liberal supply of
provisions, the students have enough to furnish forth a magnificent
banquet; and altogether they enjoy themselves thoroughly, indulging
in all kinds of games and amusements. For the first seven days the
mock sultan remains in the college; then he goes about a mile out of
the town and encamps on the bank of the river, attended by the
students and not a few of the citizens. On the seventh day of his
stay outside the town he is visited by the real sultan, who grants
him his request and gives him seven more days to reign, so that the
reign of "the Sultan of the Scribes" nominally lasts three weeks.
But when six days of the last week have passed the mock sultan runs
back to the town by night. This temporary sultanship always falls in
spring, about the beginning of April. Its origin is said to have
been as follows. When Mulai Rasheed II. was fighting for the throne
in 1664 or 1665, a certain Jew usurped the royal authority at Taza.
But the rebellion was soon suppressed through the loyalty and
devotion of the students. To effect their purpose they resorted to
an ingenious stratagem. Forty of them caused themselves to be packed
in chests which were sent as a present to the usurper. In the dead
of night, while the unsuspecting Jew was slumbering peacefully among
the packing-cases, the lids were stealthily raised, the brave forty
crept forth, slew the usurper, and took possession of the city in
the name of the real sultan, who, to mark his gratitude for the help
thus rendered him in time of need, conferred on the students the
right of annually appointing a sultan of their own. The narrative
has all the air of a fiction devised to explain an old custom, of
which the real meaning and origin had been forgotten.

A custom of annually appointing a mock king for a single day was
observed at Lostwithiel in Cornwall down to the sixteenth century.
On "little Easter Sunday" the freeholders of the town and manor
assembled together, either in person or by their deputies, and one
among them, as it fell to his lot by turn, gaily attired and
gallantly mounted, with a crown on his head, a sceptre in his hand,
and a sword borne before him, rode through the principal street to
the church, dutifully attended by all the rest on horseback. The
clergyman in his best robes received him at the churchyard stile and
conducted him to hear divine service. On leaving the church he
repaired, with the same pomp, to a house provided for his reception.
Here a feast awaited him and his suite, and being set at the head of
the table he was served on bended knees, with all the rites due to
the estate of a prince. The ceremony ended with the dinner, and
every man returned home.

Sometimes the temporary king occupies the throne, not annually, but
once for all at the beginning of each reign. Thus in the kingdom of
Jambi in Sumatra it is the custom that at the beginning of a new
reign a man of the people should occupy the throne and exercise the
royal prerogatives for a single day. The origin of the custom is
explained by a tradition that there were once five royal brothers,
the four elder of whom all declined the throne on the ground of
various bodily defects, leaving it to their youngest brother. But
the eldest occupied the throne for one day, and reserved for his
descendants a similar privilege at the beginning of every reign.
Thus the office of temporary king is hereditary in a family akin to
the royal house. In Bilaspur it seems to be the custom, after the
death of a Rajah, for a Brahman to eat rice out of the dead Rajah's
hand, and then to occupy the throne for a year. At the end of the
year the Brahman receives presents and is dismissed from the
territory, being forbidden apparently to return. "The idea seems to
be that the spirit of the Rájá enters into the Bráhman who eats the
_khir_ (rice and milk) out of his hand when he is dead, as the
Brahman is apparently carefully watched during the whole year, and
not allowed to go away." The same or a similar custom is believed to
obtain among the hill states about Kangra. The custom of banishing
the Brahman who represents the king may be a substitute for putting
him to death. At the installation of a prince of Carinthia a
peasant, in whose family the office was hereditary, ascended a
marble stone which stood surrounded by meadows in a spacious valley;
on his right stood a black mother-cow, on his left a lean ugly mare.
A rustic crowd gathered about him. Then the future prince, dressed
as a peasant and carrying a shepherd's staff, drew near, attended by
courtiers and magistrates. On perceiving him the peasant called out,
"Who is this whom I see coming so proudly along?" The people
answered, "The prince of the land." The peasant was then prevailed
on to surrender the marble seat to the prince on condition of
receiving sixty pence, the cow and mare, and exemption from taxes.
But before yielding his place he gave the prince a light blow on the
cheek.

Some points about these temporary kings deserve to be specially
noticed before we pass to the next branch of the evidence. In the
first place, the Cambodian and Siamese examples show clearly that it
is especially the divine or magical functions of the king which are
transferred to his temporary substitute. This appears from the
belief that by keeping up his foot the temporary king of Siam gained
a victory over the evil spirits, whereas by letting it down he
imperilled the existence of the state. Again, the Cambodian ceremony
of trampling down the "mountain of rice," and the Siamese ceremony
of opening the ploughing and sowing, are charms to produce a
plentiful harvest, as appears from the belief that those who carry
home some of the trampled rice, or of the seed sown, will thereby
secure a good crop. Moreover, when the Siamese representative of the
king is guiding the plough, the people watch him anxiously, not to
see whether he drives a straight furrow, but to mark the exact point
on his leg to which the skirt of his silken robe reaches; for on
that is supposed to hang the state of the weather and the crops
during the ensuing season. If the Lord of the Heavenly Hosts hitches
up his garment above his knee, the weather will be wet and heavy
rains will spoil the harvest. If he lets it trail to his ankle, a
drought will be the consequence. But fine weather and heavy crops
will follow if the hem of his robe hangs exactly half-way down the
calf of his leg. So closely is the course of nature, and with it the
weal or woe of the people, dependent on the minutest act or gesture
of the king's representative. But the task of making the crops grow,
thus deputed to the temporary kings, is one of the magical functions
regularly supposed to be discharged by kings in primitive society.
The rule that the mock king must stand on one foot upon a raised
seat in the rice-field was perhaps originally meant as a charm to
make the crop grow high; at least this was the object of a similar
ceremony observed by the old Prussians. The tallest girl, standing
on one foot upon a seat, with her lap full of cakes, a cup of brandy
in her right hand and a piece of elm-bark or linden-bark in her
left, prayed to the god Waizganthos that the flax might grow as high
as she was standing. Then, after draining the cup, she had it
refilled, and poured the brandy on the ground as an offering to
Waizganthos, and threw down the cakes for his attendant sprites. If
she remained steady on one foot throughout the ceremony, it was an
omen that the flax crop would be good; but if she let her foot down,
it was feared that the crop might fail. The same significance
perhaps attaches to the swinging of the Brahmans, which the Lord of
the Heavenly Hosts had formerly to witness standing on one foot. On
the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic it might be
thought that the higher the priests swing the higher will grow the
rice. For the ceremony is described as a harvest festival, and
swinging is practised by the Letts of Russia with the avowed
intention of influencing the growth of the crops. In the spring and
early summer, between Easter and St. John's Day (the summer
solstice), every Lettish peasant is said to devote his leisure hours
to swinging diligently; for the higher he rises in the air the
higher will his flax grow that season.

In the foregoing cases the temporary king is appointed annually in
accordance with a regular custom. But in other cases the appointment
is made only to meet a special emergency, such as to relieve the
real king from some actual or threatened evil by diverting it to a
substitute, who takes his place on the throne for a short time. The
history of Persia furnishes instances of such occasional substitutes
for the Shah. Thus Shah Abbas the Great, being warned by his
astrologers in the year 1591 that a serious danger impended over
him, attempted to avert the omen by abdicating the throne and
appointing a certain unbeliever named Yusoofee, probably a
Christian, to reign in his stead. The substitute was accordingly
crowned, and for three days, if we may trust the Persian historians,
he enjoyed not only the name and the state but the power of the
king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to death: the decree
of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and Abbas, who
reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was promised by his
astrologers a long and glorious reign.



XXVI. Sacrifice of the King's Son

A POINT to notice about the temporary kings described in the
foregoing chapter is that in two places (Cambodia and Jambi) they
come of a stock which is believed to be akin to the royal family. If
the view here taken of the origin of these temporary kingships is
correct, we can easily understand why the king's substitute should
sometimes be of the same race as the king. When the king first
succeeded in getting the life of another accepted as a sacrifice
instead of his own, he would have to show that the death of that
other would serve the purpose quite as well as his own would have
done. Now it was as a god or demigod that the king had to die;
therefore the substitute who died for him had to be invested, at
least for the occasion, with the divine attributes of the king.
This, as we have just seen, was certainly the case with the
temporary kings of Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with the
supernatural functions, which in an earlier stage of society were
the special attributes of the king. But no one could so well
represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be
supposed to share the divine afflatus of his father. No one,
therefore, could so appropriately die for the king and, through him,
for the whole people, as the king's son.

We have seen that according to tradition, Aun or On, King of Sweden,
sacrificed nine of his sons to Odin at Upsala in order that his own
life might be spared. After he had sacrificed his second son he
received from the god an answer that he should live so long as he
gave him one of his sons every ninth year. When he had sacrificed
his seventh son, he still lived, but was so feeble that he could not
walk but had to be carried in a chair. Then he offered up his eighth
son, and lived nine years more, lying in his bed. After that he
sacrificed his ninth son, and lived another nine years, but so that
he drank out of a horn like a weaned child. He now wished to
sacrifice his only remaining son to Odin, but the Swedes would not
allow him. So he died and was buried in a mound at Upsala.

In ancient Greece there seems to have been at least one kingly house
of great antiquity of which the eldest sons were always liable to be
sacrificed in room of their royal sires. When Xerxes was marching
through Thessaly at the head of his mighty host to attack the
Spartans at Thermopylae, he came to the town of Alus. Here he was
shown the sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, about which his guides told
him a strange tale. It ran somewhat as follows. Once upon a time the
king of the country, by name Athamas, married a wife Nephele, and
had by her a son called Phrixus and a daughter named Helle.
Afterwards he took to himself a second wife called Ino, by whom he
had two sons, Learchus and Melicertes. But his second wife was
jealous of her stepchildren, Phrixus and Helle, and plotted their
death. She went about very cunningly to compass her bad end. First
of all she persuaded the women of the country to roast the seed corn
secretly before it was committed to the ground. So next year no
crops came up and the people died of famine. Then the king sent
messengers to the oracle at Delphi to enquire the cause of the
dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the messenger to give out
as the answer of the god that the dearth would never cease till the
children of Athamas by his first wife had been sacrificed to Zeus.
When Athamas heard that, he sent for the children, who were with the
sheep. But a ram with a fleece of gold opened his lips, and speaking
with the voice of a man warned the children of their danger. So they
mounted the ram and fled with him over land and sea. As they flew
over the sea, the girl slipped from the animal's back, and falling
into water was drowned. But her brother Phrixus was brought safe to
the land of Colchis, where reigned a child of the sun. Phrixus
married the king's daughter, and she bore him a son Cytisorus. And
there he sacrificed the ram with the golden fleece to Zeus the God
of Flight; but some will have it that he sacrificed the animal to
Laphystian Zeus. The golden fleece itself he gave to his wife's
father, who nailed it to an oak tree, guarded by a sleepless dragon
in a sacred grove of Ares. Meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded
that King Athamas himself should be sacrificed as an expiatory
offering for the whole country. So the people decked him with
garlands like a victim and led him to the altar, where they were
just about to sacrifice him when he was rescued either by his
grandson Cytisorus, who arrived in the nick of time from Colchis, or
by Hercules, who brought tidings that the king's son Phrixus was yet
alive. Thus Athamas was saved, but afterward he went mad, and
mistaking his son Learchus for a wild beast, shot him dead. Next he
attempted the life of his remaining son Melicertes, but the child
was rescued by his mother Ino, who ran and threw herself and him
from a high rock into the sea. Mother and son were changed into
marine divinities, and the son received special homage in the isle
of Tenedos, where babes were sacrificed to him. Thus bereft of wife
and children the unhappy Athamas quitted his country, and on
enquiring of the oracle where he should dwell was told to take up
his abode wherever he should be entertained by wild beasts. He fell
in with a pack of wolves devouring sheep, and when they saw him they
fled and left him the bleeding remnants of their prey. In this way
the oracle was fulfilled. But because King Athamas had not been
sacrificed as a sin-offering for the whole country, it was divinely
decreed that the eldest male scion of his family in each generation
should be sacrificed without fail, if ever he set foot in the
town-hall, where the offerings were made to Laphystian Zeus by one
of the house of Athamas. Many of the family, Xerxes was informed,
had fled to foreign lands to escape this doom; but some of them had
returned long afterwards, and being caught by the sentinels in the
act of entering the town-hall were wreathed as victims, led forth in
procession, and sacrificed. These instances appear to have been
notorious, if not frequent; for the writer of a dialogue attributed
to Plato, after speaking of the immolation of human victims by the
Carthaginians, adds that such practices were not unknown among the
Greeks, and he refers with horror to the sacrifices offered on Mount
Lycaeus and by the descendants of Athamas.

The suspicion that this barbarous custom by no means fell into
disuse even in later days is strengthened by a case of human
sacrifice which occurred in Plutarch's time at Orchomenus, a very
ancient city of Boeotia, distant only a few miles across the plain
from the historian's birthplace. Here dwelt a family of which the
men went by the name of Psoloeis or "Sooty," and the women by the
name of Oleae or "Destructive." Every year at the festival of the
Agrionia the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn
sword, and if he overtook one of them he had the right to slay her.
In Plutarch's lifetime the right was actually exercised by a priest
Zoilus. The family thus liable to furnish at least one human victim
every year was of royal descent, for they traced their lineage to
Minyas, the famous old king of Orchomenus, the monarch of fabulous
wealth, whose stately treasury, as it is called, still stands in
ruins at the point where the long rocky hill of Orchomenus melts
into the vast level expanse of the Copaic plain. Tradition ran that
the king's three daughters long despised the other women of the
country for yielding to the Bacchic frenzy, and sat at home in the
king's house scornfully plying the distaff and the loom, while the
rest, wreathed with flowers, their dishevelled locks streaming to
the wind, roamed in ecstasy the barren mountains that rise above
Orchomenus, making the solitude of the hills to echo to the wild
music of cymbals and tambourines. But in time the divine fury
infected even the royal damsels in their quiet chamber; they were
seized with a fierce longing to partake of human flesh, and cast
lots among themselves which should give up her child to furnish a
cannibal feast. The lot fell on Leucippe, and she surrendered her
son Hippasus, who was torn limb from limb by the three. From these
misguided women sprang the Oleae and the Psoloeis, of whom the men
were said to be so called because they wore sad-coloured raiment in
token of their mourning and grief.

Now this practice of taking human victims from a family of royal
descent at Orchomenus is all the more significant because Athamas
himself is said to have reigned in the land of Orchomenus even
before the time of Minyas, and because over against the city there
rises Mount Laphystius, on which, as at Alus in Thessaly, there was
a sanctuary of Laphystian Zeus, where, according to tradition,
Athamas purposed to sacrifice his two children Phrixus and Helle. On
the whole, comparing the traditions about Athamas with the custom
that obtained with regard to his descendants in historical times, we
may fairly infer that in Thessaly and probably in Boeotia there
reigned of old a dynasty of which the kings were liable to be
sacrificed for the good of the country to the god called Laphystian
Zeus, but that they contrived to shift the fatal responsibility to
their offspring, of whom the eldest son was regularly destined to
the altar. As time went on, the cruel custom was so far mitigated
that a ram was accepted as a vicarious sacrifice in room of the
royal victim, provided always that the prince abstained from setting
foot in the town-hall where the sacrifices were offered to
Laphystian Zeus by one of his kinsmen. But if he were rash enough to
enter the place of doom, to thrust himself wilfully, as it were, on
the notice of the god who had good-naturedly winked at the
substitution of a ram, the ancient obligation which had been
suffered to lie in abeyance recovered all its force, and there was
no help for it but he must die. The tradition which associated the
sacrifice of the king or his children with a great dearth points
clearly to the belief, so common among primitive folk, that the king
is responsible for the weather and the crops, and that he may justly
pay with his life for the inclemency of the one or the failure of
the other. Athamas and his line, in short, appear to have united
divine or magical with royal functions; and this view is strongly
supported by the claims to divinity which Salmoneus, the brother of
Athamas, is said to have set up. We have seen that this presumptuous
mortal professed to be no other than Zeus himself, and to wield the
thunder and lightning, of which he made a trumpery imitation by the
help of tinkling kettles and blazing torches. If we may judge from
analogy, his mock thunder and lightning were no mere scenic
exhibition designed to deceive and impress the beholders; they were
enchantments practised by the royal magician for the purpose of
bringing about the celestial phenomena which they feebly mimicked.

Among the Semites of Western Asia the king, in a time of national
danger, sometimes gave his own son to die as a sacrifice for the
people. Thus Philo of Byblus, in his work on the Jews, says: "It was
an ancient custom in a crisis of great danger that the ruler of a
city or nation should give his beloved son to die for the whole
people, as a ransom offered to the avenging demons; and the children
thus offered were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus, whom the
Phoenicians call Israel, being king of the land and having an
only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the Phoenician tongue Jeoud
signifies 'only begotten'), dressed him in royal robes and
sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war, when the country was
in great danger from the enemy." When the king of Moab was besieged
by the Israelites and hard beset, he took his eldest son, who should
have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering on
the wall.



XXVII. Succession to the Soul

TO THE VIEW that in early times, and among barbarous races, kings
have frequently been put to death at the end of a short reign, it
may be objected that such a custom would tend to the extinction of
the royal family. The objection may be met by observing, first, that
the kingship is often not confined to one family, but may be shared
in turn by several; second, that the office is frequently not
hereditary, but is open to men of any family, even to foreigners,
who may fulfil the requisite conditions, such as marrying a princess
or vanquishing the king in battle; and, third, that even if the
custom did tend to the extinction of a dynasty, that is not a
consideration which would prevent its observance among people less
provident of the future and less heedful of human life than
ourselves. Many races, like many individuals, have indulged in
practices which must in the end destroy them. The Polynesians seem
regularly to have killed two-thirds of their children. In some parts
of East Africa the proportion of infants massacred at birth is said
to be the same. Only children born in certain presentations are
allowed to live. The Jagas, a conquering tribe in Angola, are
reported to have put to death all their children, without exception,
in order that the women might not be cumbered with babies on the
march. They recruited their numbers by adopting boys and girls of
thirteen or fourteen years of age, whose parents they had killed and
eaten. Among the Mbaya Indians of South America the women used to
murder all their children except the last, or the one they believed
to be the last. If one of them had another child afterwards, she
killed it. We need not wonder that this practice entirely destroyed
a branch of the Mbaya nation, who had been for many years the most
formidable enemies of the Spaniards. Among the Lengua Indians of the
Gran Chaco, the missionaries discovered what they describe as "a
carefully planned system of racial suicide, by the practice of
infanticide by abortion, and other methods." Nor is infanticide the
only mode in which a savage tribe commits suicide. A lavish use of
the poison ordeal may be equally effective. Some time ago a small
tribe named Uwet came down from the hill country, and settled on the
left branch of the Calabar River in West Africa. When the
missionaries first visited the place, they found the population
considerable, distributed into three villages. Since then the
constant use of the poison ordeal has almost extinguished the tribe.
On one occasion the whole population took poison to prove their
innocence. About half perished on the spot, and the remnant, we are
told, still continuing their superstitious practice, must soon
become extinct. With such examples before us we need not hesitate to
believe that many tribes have felt no scruple or delicacy in
observing a custom which tends to wipe out a single family. To
attribute such scruples to them is to commit the common, the
perpetually repeated mistake of judging the savage by the standard
of European civilisation. If any of my readers set out with the
notion that all races of men think and act much in the same way as
educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom
collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so
erroneous a prepossession.

The explanation here given of the custom of killing divine persons
assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the
soul of the slain divinity is transmitted to his successor. Of this
transmission I have no direct proof except in the case of the
Shilluk, among whom the practice of killing the divine king prevails
in a typical form, and with whom it is a fundamental article of
faith that the soul of the divine founder of the dynasty is immanent
in every one of his slain successors. But if this is the only actual
example of such a belief which I can adduce, analogy seems to render
it probable that a similar succession to the soul of the slain god
has been supposed to take place in other instances, though direct
evidence of it is wanting. For it has been already shown that the
soul of the incarnate deity is often supposed to transmigrate at
death into another incarnation; and if this takes place when the
death is a natural one, there seems no reason why it should not take
place when the death has been brought about by violence. Certainly
the idea that the soul of a dying person may be transmitted to his
successor is perfectly familiar to primitive peoples. In Nias the
eldest son usually succeeds his father in the chieftainship. But if
from any bodily or mental defect the eldest son is disqualified for
ruling, the father determines in his lifetime which of his sons
shall succeed him. In order, however, to establish his right of
succession, it is necessary that the son upon whom his father's
choice falls shall catch in his mouth or in a bag the last breath,
and with it the soul, of the dying chief. For whoever catches his
last breath is chief equally with the appointed successor. Hence the
other brothers, and sometimes also strangers, crowd round the dying
man to catch his soul as it passes. The houses in Nias are raised
above the ground on posts, and it has happened that when the dying
man lay with his face on the floor, one of the candidates has bored
a hole in the floor and sucked in the chief's last breath through a
bamboo tube. When the chief has no son, his soul is caught in a bag,
which is fastened to an image made to represent the deceased; the
soul is then believed to pass into the image.

Sometimes it would appear that the spiritual link between a king and
the souls of his predecessors is formed by the possession of some
part of their persons. In southern Celebes the regalia often consist
of corporeal portions of deceased rajahs, which are treasured as
sacred relics and confer the right to the throne. Similarly among
the Sakalavas of southern Madagascar a vertebra of the neck, a nail,
and a lock of hair of a deceased king are placed in a crocodile's
tooth and carefully kept along with the similar relics of his
predecessors in a house set apart for the purpose. The possession of
these relics constitutes the right to the throne. A legitimate heir
who should be deprived of them would lose all his authority over the
people, and on the contrary a usurper who should make himself master
of the relics would be acknowledged king without dispute. When the
Alake or king of Abeokuta in West Africa dies, the principal men
decapitate his body, and placing the head in a large earthen vessel
deliver it to the new sovereign; it becomes his fetish and he is
bound to pay it honours. Sometimes, in order apparently that the new
sovereign may inherit more surely the magical and other virtues of
the royal line, he is required to eat a piece of his dead
predecessor. Thus at Abeokuta not only was the head of the late king
presented to his successor, but the tongue was cut out and given him
to eat. Hence, when the natives wish to signify that the sovereign
reigns, they say, "He has eaten the king." A custom of the same sort
is still practised at Ibadan, a large town in the interior of Lagos,
West Africa. When the king dies his head is cut off and sent to his
nominal suzerain, the Alafin of Oyo, the paramount king of Yoruba
land; but his heart is eaten by his successor. This ceremony was
performed not very many years ago at the accession of a new king of
Ibadan.

Taking the whole of the preceding evidence into account, we may
fairly suppose that when the divine king or priest is put to death
his spirit is believed to pass into his successor. In point of fact,
among the Shilluk of the White Nile, who regularly kill their divine
kings, every king on his accession has to perform a ceremony which
appears designed to convey to him the same sacred and worshipful
spirit which animated all his predecessors, one after the other, on
the throne.



XXVIII. The Killing of the Tree-Spirit



1. The Whitsuntide Mummers

IT remains to ask what light the custom of killing the divine king
or priest sheds upon the special subject to our enquiry. In an
earlier part of this work we saw reason to suppose that the King of
the Wood at Nemi was regarded as an incarnation of a tree-spirit or
of the spirit of vegetation, and that as such he would be endowed,
in the belief of his worshippers, with a magical power of making the
trees to bear fruit, the crops to grow, and so on. His life must
therefore have been held very precious by his worshippers, and was
probably hedged in by a system of elaborate precautions or taboos
like those by which, in so many places, the life of the man-god has
been guarded against the malignant influence of demons and
sorcerers. But we have seen that the very value attached to the life
of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only means of
preserving it from the inevitable decay of age. The same reasoning
would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be killed in
order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be transferred
in its integrity to his successor. The rule that he held office till
a stronger should slay him might be supposed to secure both the
preservation of his divine life in full vigour and its transference
to a suitable successor as soon as that vigour began to be impaired.
For so long as he could maintain his position by the strong hand, it
might be inferred that his natural force was not abated; whereas his
defeat and death at the hands of another proved that his strength
was beginning to fail and that it was time his divine life should be
lodged in a less dilapidated tabernacle. This explanation of the
rule that the King of the Wood had to be slain by his successor at
least renders that rule perfectly intelligible. It is strongly
supported by the theory and practice of the Shilluk, who put their
divine king to death at the first signs of failing health, lest his
decrepitude should entail a corresponding failure of vital energy on
the corn, the cattle, and men. Moreover, it is countenanced by the
analogy of the Chitomé, upon whose life the existence of the world
was supposed to hang, and who was therefore slain by his successor
as soon as he showed signs of breaking up. Again, the terms on which
in later times the King of Calicut held office are identical with
those attached to the office of King of the Wood, except that
whereas the former might be assailed by a candidate at any time, the
King of Calicut might only be attacked once every twelve years. But
as the leave granted to the King of Calicut to reign so long as he
could defend himself against all comers was a mitigation of the old
rule which set a fixed term to his life, so we may conjecture that
the similar permission granted to the King of the Wood was a
mitigation of an older custom of putting him to death at the end of
a definite period. In both cases the new rule gave to the god-man at
least a chance for his life, which under the old rule was denied
him; and people probably reconciled themselves to the change by
reflecting that so long as the god-man could maintain himself by the
sword against all assaults, there was no reason to apprehend that
the fatal decay had set in.

The conjecture that the King of the Wood was formerly put to death
at the expiry of a fixed term, without being allowed a chance for
his life, will be confirmed if evidence can be adduced of a custom
of periodically killing his counterparts, the human representatives
of the tree-spirit, in Northern Europe. Now in point of fact such a
custom has left unmistakable traces of itself in the rural festivals
of the peasantry. To take examples.

At Niederpöring, in Lower Bavaria, the Whitsuntide representative of
the tree-spirit--the _Pfingstl_ as he was called--was clad from top
to toe in leaves and flowers. On his head he wore a high pointed
cap, the ends of which rested on his shoulders, only two holes being
left in it for his eyes. The cap was covered with water-flowers and
surmounted with a nosegay of peonies. The sleeves of his coat were
also made of water-plants, and the rest of his body was enveloped in
alder and hazel leaves. On each side of him marched a boy holding up
one of the _Pfingstl's_ arms. These two boys carried drawn swords,
and so did most of the others who formed the procession. They
stopped at every house where they hoped to receive a present; and
the people, in hiding, soused the leaf-clad boy with water. All
rejoiced when he was well drenched. Finally he waded into the brook
up to his middle; whereupon one of the boys, standing on the bridge,
pretended to cut off his head. At Wurmlingen, in Swabia, a score of
young fellows dress themselves on Whit-Monday in white shirts and
white trousers, with red scarves round their waists and swords
hanging from the scarves. They ride on horseback into the wood, led
by two trumpeters blowing their trumpets. In the wood they cut down
leafy oak branches, in which they envelop from head to foot him who
was the last of their number to ride out of the village. His legs,
however, are encased separately, so that he may be able to mount his
horse again. Further, they give him a long artificial neck, with an
artificial head and a false face on the top of it. Then a May-tree
is cut, generally an aspen or beech about ten feet high; and being
decked with coloured handkerchiefs and ribbons it is entrusted to a
special "May-bearer." The cavalcade then returns with music and song
to the village. Amongst the personages who figure in the procession
are a Moorish king with a sooty face and a crown on his head, a Dr.
Iron-Beard, a corporal, and an executioner. They halt on the village
green, and each of the characters makes a speech in rhyme. The
executioner announces that the leaf-clad man has been condemned to
death, and cuts off his false head. Then the riders race to the
May-tree, which has been set up a little way off. The first man who
succeeds in wrenching it from the ground as he gallops past keeps it
with all its decorations. The ceremony is observed every second or
third year.

In Saxony and Thüringen there is a Whitsuntide ceremony called
"chasing the Wild Man out of the bush," or "fetching the Wild Man
out of the wood." A young fellow is enveloped in leaves or moss and
called the Wild Man. He hides in the wood and the other lads of the
village go out to seek him. They find him, lead him captive out of
the wood, and fire at him with blank muskets. He falls like dead to
the ground, but a lad dressed as a doctor bleeds him, and he comes
to life again. At this they rejoice, and, binding him fast on a
waggon, take him to the village, where they tell all the people how
they have caught the Wild Man. At every house they receive a gift.
In the Erzgebirge the following custom was annually observed at
Shrovetide about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Two men
disguised as Wild Men, the one in brushwood and moss, the other in
straw, were led about the streets, and at last taken to the
market-place, where they were chased up and down, shot and stabbed.
Before falling they reeled about with strange gestures and spirted
blood on the people from bladders which they carried. When they were
down, the huntsmen placed them on boards and carried them to the
ale-house, the miners marching beside them and winding blasts on
their mining tools as if they had taken a noble head of game. A very
similar Shrovetide custom is still observed near Schluckenau in
Bohemia. A man dressed up as a Wild Man is chased through several
streets till he comes to a narrow lane across which a cord is
stretched. He stumbles over the cord and, falling to the ground, is
overtaken and caught by his pursuers. The executioner runs up and
stabs with his sword a bladder filled with blood which the Wild Man
wears round his body; so the Wild Man dies, while a stream of blood
reddens the ground. Next day a straw-man, made up to look like the
Wild Man, is placed on a litter, and, accompanied by a great crowd,
is taken to a pool into which it is thrown by the executioner. The
ceremony is called "burying the Carnival."

In Semic (Bohemia) the custom of beheading the King is observed on
Whit-Monday. A troop of young people disguise themselves; each is
girt with a girdle of bark and carries a wooden sword and a trumpet
of willow-bark. The King wears a robe of tree-bark adorned with
flowers, on his head is a crown of bark decked with flowers and
branches, his feet are wound about with ferns, a mask hides his
face, and for a sceptre he has a hawthorn switch in his hand. A lad
leads him through the village by a rope fastened to his foot, while
the rest dance about, blow their trumpets, and whistle. In every
farmhouse the King is chased round the room, and one of the troop,
amid much noise and outcry, strikes with his sword a blow on the
King's robe of bark till it rings again. Then a gratuity is
demanded. The ceremony of decapitation, which is here somewhat
slurred over, is carried out with a greater semblance of reality in
other parts of Bohemia. Thus in some villages of the Königgrätz
district on Whit-Monday the girls assemble under one lime-tree and
the young men under another, all dressed in their best and tricked
out with ribbons. The young men twine a garland for the Queen, and
the girls another for the King. When they have chosen the King and
Queen they all go in procession two and two, to the ale-house, from
the balcony of which the crier proclaims the names of the King and
Queen. Both are then invested with the insignia of their office and
are crowned with the garlands, while the music plays up. Then some
one gets on a bench and accuses the King of various offences, such
as ill-treating the cattle. The King appeals to witnesses and a
trial ensues, at the close of which the judge, who carries a white
wand as his badge of office, pronounces a verdict of "Guilty," or
"Not guilty." If the verdict is "Guilty," the judge breaks his wand,
the King kneels on a white cloth, all heads are bared, and a soldier
sets three or four hats, one above the other, on his Majesty's head.
The judge then pronounces the word "Guilty" thrice in a loud voice,
and orders the crier to behead the King. The crier obeys by striking
off the King's hats with the wooden sword.

But perhaps, for our purpose, the most instructive of these mimic
executions is the following Bohemian one. In some places of the
Pilsen district (Bohemia) on Whit-Monday the King is dressed in
bark, ornamented with flowers and ribbons; he wears a crown of gilt
paper and rides a horse, which is also decked with flowers. Attended
by a judge, an executioner, and other characters, and followed by a
train of soldiers, all mounted, he rides to the village square,
where a hut or arbour of green boughs has been erected under the
May-trees, which are firs, freshly cut, peeled to the top, and
dressed with flowers and ribbons. After the dames and maidens of the
village have been criticised and a frog beheaded, the cavalcade
rides to a place previously determined upon, in a straight, broad
street. Here they draw up in two lines and the King takes to flight.
He is given a short start and rides off at full speed, pursued by
the whole troop. If they fail to catch him he remains King for
another year, and his companions must pay his score at the ale-house
in the evening. But if they overtake and catch him he is scourged
with hazel rods or beaten with the wooden swords and compelled to
dismount. Then the executioner asks, "Shall I behead this King?" The
answer is given, "Behead him"; the executioner brandishes his axe,
and with the words, "One, two, three, let the King headless be!" he
strikes off the King's crown. Amid the loud cries of the bystanders
the King sinks to the ground; then he is laid on a bier and carried
to the nearest farmhouse.

In most of the personages who are thus slain in mimicry it is
impossible not to recognise representatives of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation, as he is supposed to manifest himself in
spring. The bark, leaves, and flowers in which the actors are
dressed, and the season of the year at which they appear, show that
they belong to the same class as the Grass King, King of the May,
Jack-in-the-Green, and other representatives of the vernal spirit of
vegetation which we examined in an earlier part of this work. As if
to remove any possible doubt on this head, we find that in two cases
these slain men are brought into direct connexion with May-trees,
which are the impersonal, as the May King, Grass King, and so forth,
are the personal representatives of the tree-spirit. The drenching
of the _Pfingstl_ with water and his wading up to the middle into
the brook are, therefore, no doubt rain-charms like those which have
been already described.

But if these personages represent, as they certainly do, the spirit
of vegetation in spring, the question arises, Why kill them? What is
the object of slaying the spirit of vegetation at any time and above
all in spring, when his services are most wanted? The only probable
answer to this question seems to be given in the explanation already
proposed of the custom of killing the divine king or priest. The
divine life, incarnate in a material and mortal body, is liable to
be tainted and corrupted by the weakness of the frail medium in
which it is for a time enshrined; and if it is to be saved from the
increasing enfeeblement which it must necessarily share with its
human incarnation as he advances in years, it must be detached from
him before, or at least as soon as, he exhibits signs of decay, in
order to be transferred to a vigorous successor. This is done by
killing the old representative of the god and conveying the divine
spirit from him to a new incarnation. The killing of the god, that
is, of his human incarnation, is therefore merely a necessary step
to his revival or resurrection in a better form. Far from being an
extinction of the divine spirit, it is only the beginning of a purer
and stronger manifestation of it. If this explanation holds good of
the custom of killing divine kings and priests in general, it is
still more obviously applicable to the custom of annually killing
the representative of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation in
spring. For the decay of plant life in winter is readily interpreted
by primitive man as an enfeeblement of the spirit of vegetation; the
spirit has, he thinks, grown old and weak and must therefore be
renovated by being slain and brought to life in a younger and
fresher form. Thus the killing of the representative of the
tree-spirit in spring is regarded as a means to promote and quicken
the growth of vegetation. For the killing of the tree-spirit is
associated always (we must suppose) implicitly, and sometimes
explicitly also, with a revival or resurrection of him in a more
youthful and vigorous form. So in the Saxon and Thüringen custom,
after the Wild Man has been shot he is brought to life again by a
doctor; and in the Wurmlingen ceremony there figures a Dr.
Iron-Beard, who probably once played a similar part; certainly in
another spring ceremony, which will be described presently, Dr.
Iron-Beard pretends to restore a dead man to life. But of this
revival or resurrection of the god we shall have more to say anon.

The points of similarity between these North European personages and
the subject of our enquiry--the King of the Wood or priest of
Nemi--are sufficiently striking. In these northern maskers we see
kings, whose dress of bark and leaves along with the hut of green
boughs and the fir-trees, under which they hold their court,
proclaim them unmistakably as, like their Italian counterpart, Kings
of the Wood. Like him they die a violent death, but like him they
may escape from it for a time by their bodily strength and agility;
for in several of these northern customs the flight and pursuit of
the king is a prominent part of the ceremony, and in one case at
least if the king can outrun his pursuers he retains his life and
his office for another year. In this last case the king in fact
holds office on condition of running for his life once a year, just
as the King of Calicut in later times held office on condition of
defending his life against all comers once every twelve years, and
just as the priest of Nemi held office on condition of defending
himself against any assault at any time. In every one of these
instances the life of the god-man is prolonged on condition of his
showing, in a severe physical contest of fight or flight, that his
bodily strength is not decayed, and that, therefore, the violent
death, which sooner or later is inevitable, may for the present be
postponed. With regard to flight it is noticeable that flight
figured conspicuously both in the legend and in the practice of the
King of the Wood. He had to be a runaway slave in memory of the
flight of Orestes, the traditional founder of the worship; hence the
Kings of the Wood are described by an ancient writer as "both strong
of hand and fleet of foot." Perhaps if we knew the ritual of the
Arician grove fully we might find that the king was allowed a chance
for his life by flight, like his Bohemian brother. I have already
conjectured that the annual flight of the priestly king at Rome
(_regifugium_) was at first a flight of the same kind; in other
words, that he was originally one of those divine kings who are
either put to death after a fixed period or allowed to prove by the
strong hand or the fleet foot that their divinity is vigorous and
unimpaired. One more point of resemblance may be noted between the
Italian King of the Wood and his northern counterparts. In Saxony
and Thüringen the representative of the tree-spirit, after being
killed, is brought to life again by a doctor. This is exactly what
legend affirmed to have happened to the first King of the Wood at
Nemi, Hippolytus or Virbius, who after he had been killed by his
horses was restored to life by the physician Aesculapius. Such a
legend tallies well with the theory that the slaying of the King of
the Wood was only a step to his revival or resurrection in his
successor.



2. Burying the Carnival

THUS far I have offered an explanation of the rule which required
that the priest of Nemi should be slain by his successor. The
explanation claims to be no more than probable; our scanty knowledge
of the custom and of its history forbids it to be more. But its
probability will be augmented in proportion to the extent to which
the motives and modes of thought which it assumes can be proved to
have operated in primitive society. Hitherto the god with whose
death and resurrection we have been chiefly concerned has been the
tree-god. But if I can show that the custom of killing the god and
the belief in his resurrection originated, or at least existed, in
the hunting and pastoral stage of society, when the slain god was an
animal, and that it survived into the agricultural stage, when the
slain god was the corn or a human being representing the corn, the
probability of my explanation will have been considerably increased.
This I shall attempt to do in the sequel, and in the course of the
discussion I hope to clear up some obscurities which still remain,
and to answer some objections which may have suggested themselves to
the reader.

We start from the point at which we left off--the spring customs of
European peasantry. Besides the ceremonies already described there
are two kindred sets of observances in which the simulated death of
a divine or supernatural being is a conspicuous feature. In one of
them the being whose death is dramatically represented is a
personification of the Carnival; in the other it is Death himself.
The former ceremony falls naturally at the end of the Carnival,
either on the last day of that merry season, namely Shrove Tuesday,
or on the first day of Lent, namely Ash Wednesday. The date of the
other ceremony--the Carrying or Driving out of Death, as it is
commonly called--is not so uniformly fixed. Generally it is the
fourth Sunday in Lent, which hence goes by the name of Dead Sunday;
but in some places the celebration falls a week earlier, in others,
as among the Czechs of Bohemia, a week later, while in certain
German villages of Moravia it is held on the first Sunday after
Easter. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the date may originally have
been variable, depending on the appearance of the first swallow or
some other herald of the spring. Some writers regard the ceremony as
Slavonic in its origin. Grimm thought it was a festival of the New
Year with the old Slavs, who began their year in March. We shall
first take examples, of the mimic death of the Carnival, which
always falls before the other in the calendar.

At Frosinone, in Latium, about half-way between Rome and Naples, the
dull monotony of life in a provincial Italian town is agreeably
broken on the last day of the Carnival by the ancient festival known
as the _Radica._ About four o'clock in the afternoon the town band,
playing lively tunes and followed by a great crowd, proceeds to the
Piazza del Plebiscito, where is the Sub-Prefecture as well as the
rest of the Government buildings. Here, in the middle of the square,
the eyes of the expectant multitude are greeted by the sight of an
immense car decked with many-coloured festoons and drawn by four
horses. Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned
the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet
high with a rubicund and smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin
helmet like those which grace the heads of officers of the Italian
marine, and a coat of many colours embellished with strange devices,
adorn the outward man of this stately personage. His left hand rests
on the arm of the chair, while with his right he gracefully salutes
the crowd, being moved to this act of civility by a string which is
pulled by a man who modestly shrinks from publicity under the
mercy-seat. And now the crowd, surging excitedly round the car,
gives vent to its feelings in wild cries of joy, gentle and simple
being mixed up together and all dancing furiously the _Saltarello._
A special feature of the festival is that every one must carry in
his hand what is called a _radica_ ( "root"), by which is meant a
huge leaf of the aloe or rather the agave. Any one who ventured into
the crowd without such a leaf would be unceremoniously hustled out
of it, unless indeed he bore as a substitute a large cabbage at the
end of a long stick or a bunch of grass curiously plaited. When the
multitude, after a short turn, has escorted the slow-moving car to
the gate of the Sub-Prefecture, they halt, and the car, jolting over
the uneven ground, rumbles into the courtyard. A hush now falls on
the crowd, their subdued voices sounding, according to the
description of one who has heard them, like the murmur of a troubled
sea. All eyes are turned anxiously to the door from which the
Sub-Prefect himself and the other representatives of the majesty of
the law are expected to issue and pay their homage to the hero of
the hour. A few moments of suspense and then a storm of cheers and
hand-clapping salutes the appearance of the dignitaries, as they
file out and, descending the staircase, take their place in the
procession. The hymn of the Carnival is now thundered out, after
which, amid a deafening roar, aloe leaves and cabbages are whirled
aloft and descend impartially on the heads of the just and the
unjust, who lend fresh zest to the proceedings by engaging in a free
fight. When these preliminaries have been concluded to the
satisfaction of all concerned, the procession gets under weigh. The
rear is brought up by a cart laden with barrels of wine and
policemen, the latter engaged in the congenial task of serving out
wine to all who ask for it, while a most internecine struggle,
accompanied by a copious discharge of yells, blows, and blasphemy,
goes on among the surging crowd at the cart's tail in their anxiety
not to miss the glorious opportunity of intoxicating themselves at
the public expense. Finally, after the procession has paraded the
principal streets in this majestic manner, the effigy of Carnival is
taken to the middle of a public square, stripped of his finery, laid
on a pile of wood, and burnt amid the cries of the multitude, who
thundering out once more the song of the Carnival fling their
so-called "roots" on the pyre and give themselves up without
restraint to the pleasures of the dance.

In the Abruzzi a pasteboard figure of the Carnival is carried by
four grave-diggers with pipes in their mouths and bottles of wine
slung at their shoulder-belts. In front walks the wife of the
Carnival, dressed in mourning and dissolved in tears. From time to
time the company halts, and while the wife addresses the
sympathising public, the grave-diggers refresh the inner man with a
pull at the bottle. In the open square the mimic corpse is laid on a
pyre, and to the roll of drums, the shrill screams of the women, and
the gruffer cries of the men a light is set to it. While the figure
burns, chestnuts are thrown about among the crowd. Sometimes the
Carnival is represented by a straw-man at the top of a pole which is
borne through the town by a troop of mummers in the course of the
afternoon. When evening comes on, four of the mummers hold out a
quilt or sheet by the corners, and the figure of the Carnival is
made to tumble into it. The procession is then resumed, the
performers weeping crocodile tears and emphasising the poignancy of
their grief by the help of saucepans and dinner bells. Sometimes,
again, in the Abruzzi the dead Carnival is personified by a living
man who lies in a coffin, attended by another who acts the priest
and dispenses holy water in great profusion from a bathing tub.

At Lerida, in Catalonia, the funeral of the Carnival was witnessed
by an English traveller in 1877. On the last Sunday of the Carnival
a grand procession of infantry, cavalry, and maskers of many sorts,
some on horseback and some in carriages, escorted the grand car of
His Grace Pau Pi, as the effigy was called, in triumph through the
principal streets. For three days the revelry ran high, and then at
midnight on the last day of the Carnival the same procession again
wound through the streets, but under a different aspect and for a
different end. The triumphal car was exchanged for a hearse, in
which reposed the effigy of his dead Grace: a troop of maskers, who
in the first procession had played the part of Students of Folly
with many a merry quip and jest, now, robed as priests and bishops,
paced slowly along holding aloft huge lighted tapers and singing a
dirge. All the mummers wore crape, and all the horsemen carried
blazing flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty,
many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every
balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of spectators,
all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the procession
took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and played the
shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving torches: red and
blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again; and above the
trampling of the horses and the measured tread of the marching
multitude rose the voices of the priests chanting the requiem, while
the military bands struck in with the solemn roll of the muffled
drums. On reaching the principal square the procession halted, a
burlesque funeral oration was pronounced over the defunct Pau Pi,
and the lights were extinguished. Immediately the devil and his
angels darted from the crowd, seized the body and fled away with it,
hotly pursued by the whole multitude, yelling, screaming, and
cheering. Naturally the fiends were overtaken and dispersed; and the
sham corpse, rescued from their clutches, was laid in a grave that
had been made ready for its reception. Thus the Carnival of 1877 at
Lerida died and was buried.

A ceremony of the same sort is observed in Provence on Ash
Wednesday. An effigy called Caramantran, whimsically attired, is
drawn in a chariot or borne on a litter, accompanied by the populace
in grotesque costumes, who carry gourds full of wine and drain them
with all the marks, real or affected, of intoxication. At the head
of the procession are some men disguised as judges and barristers,
and a tall gaunt personage who masquerades as Lent; behind them
follow young people mounted on miserable hacks and attired as
mourners who pretend to bewail the fate that is in store for
Caramantran. In the principal square the procession halts, the
tribunal is constituted, and Caramantran placed at the bar. After a
formal trial he is sentenced to death amid the groans of the mob:
the barrister who defended him embraces his client for the last
time: the officers of justice do their duty: the condemned is set
with his back to a wall and hurried into eternity under a shower of
stones. The sea or a river receives his mangled remains. Throughout
nearly the whole of the Ardennes it was and still is customary on
Ash Wednesday to burn an effigy which is supposed to represent the
Carnival, while appropriate verses are sung round about the blazing
figure. Very often an attempt is made to fashion the effigy in the
likeness of the husband who is reputed to be least faithful to his
wife of any in the village. As might perhaps have been anticipated,
the distinction of being selected for portraiture under these
painful circumstances has a slight tendency to breed domestic jars,
especially when the portrait is burnt in front of the house of the
gay deceiver whom it represents, while a powerful chorus of
caterwauls, groans, and other melodious sounds bears public
testimony to the opinion which his friends and neighbours entertain
of his private virtues. In some villages of the Ardennes a young man
of flesh and blood, dressed up in hay and straw, used to act the
part of Shrove Tuesday (_Mardi Gras_), as the personification of the
Carnival is often called in France after the last day of the period
which he personates. He was brought before a mock tribunal, and
being condemned to death was placed with his back to a wall, like a
soldier at a military execution, and fired at with blank cartridges.
At Vrigne-aux-Bois one of these harmless buffoons, named Thierry,
was accidentally killed by a wad that had been left in a musket of
the firing-party. When poor Shrove Tuesday dropped under the fire,
the applause was loud and long, he did it so naturally; but when he
did not get up again, they ran to him and found him a corpse. Since
then there have been no more of these mock executions in the
Ardennes.

In Normandy on the evening of Ash Wednesday it used to be the custom
to hold a celebration called the Burial of Shrove Tuesday. A squalid
effigy scantily clothed in rags, a battered old hat crushed down on
his dirty face, his great round paunch stuffed with straw,
represented the disreputable old rake who, after a long course of
dissipation, was now about to suffer for his sins. Hoisted on the
shoulders of a sturdy fellow, who pretended to stagger under the
burden, this popular personification of the Carnival promenaded the
streets for the last time in a manner the reverse of triumphal.
Preceded by a drummer and accompanied by a jeering rabble, among
whom the urchins and all the tag-rag and bobtail of the town
mustered in great force, the figure was carried about by the
flickering light of torches to the discordant din of shovels and
tongs, pots and pans, horns and kettles, mingled with hootings,
groans, and hisses. From time to time the procession halted, and a
champion of morality accused the broken-down old sinner of all the
excesses he had committed and for which he was now about to be
burned alive. The culprit, having nothing to urge in his own
defence, was thrown on a heap of straw, a torch was put to it, and a
great blaze shot up, to the delight of the children who frisked
round it screaming out some old popular verses about the death of
the Carnival. Sometimes the effigy was rolled down the slope of a
hill before being burnt. At Saint-Lô the ragged effigy of Shrove
Tuesday was followed by his widow, a big burly lout dressed as a
woman with a crape veil, who emitted sounds of lamentation and woe
in a stentorian voice. After being carried about the streets on a
litter attended by a crowd of maskers, the figure was thrown into
the River Vire. The final scene has been graphically described by
Madame Octave Feuillet as she witnessed it in her childhood some
sixty years ago. "My parents invited friends to see, from the top of
the tower of Jeanne Couillard, the funeral procession passing. It
was there that, quaffing lemonade--the only refreshment allowed
because of the fast--we witnessed at nightfall a spectacle of which
I shall always preserve a lively recollection. At our feet flowed
the Vire under its old stone bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay
the figure of Shrove Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by
scores of maskers dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of
them in their motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The
rest, worn out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon
the dancing stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set
fire to the effigy, after which they flung it into the river with
redoubled shouts and clamour. The man of straw, soaked with resin,
floated away burning down the stream of the Vire, lighting up with
its funeral fires the woods on the bank and the battlements of the
old castle in which Louis XI. and Francis I. had slept. When the
last glimmer of the blazing phantom had vanished, like a falling
star, at the end of the valley, every one withdrew, crowd and
maskers alike, and we quitted the ramparts with our guests."

In the neighbourhood of Tübingen on Shrove Tuesday a straw-man,
called the Shrovetide Bear, is made up; he is dressed in a pair of
old trousers, and a fresh black-pudding or two squirts filled with
blood are inserted in his neck. After a formal condemnation he is
beheaded, laid in a coffin, and on Ash Wednesday is buried in the
churchyard. This is called "Burying the Carnival." Amongst some of
the Saxons of Transylvania the Carnival is hanged. Thus at Braller
on Ash Wednesday or Shrove Tuesday two white and two chestnut horses
draw a sledge on which is placed a straw-man swathed in a white
cloth; beside him is a cart-wheel which is kept turning round. Two
lads disguised as old men follow the sledge lamenting. The rest of
the village lads, mounted on horseback and decked with ribbons,
accompany the procession, which is headed by two girls crowned with
evergreen and drawn in a waggon or sledge. A trial is held under a
tree, at which lads disguised as soldiers pronounce sentence of
death. The two old men try to rescue the straw-man and to fly with
him, but to no purpose; he is caught by the two girls and handed
over to the executioner, who hangs him on a tree. In vain the old
men try to climb up the tree and take him down; they always tumble
down, and at last in despair they throw themselves on the ground and
weep and howl for the hanged man. An official then makes a speech in
which he declares that the Carnival was condemned to death because
he had done them harm, by wearing out their shoes and making them
tired and sleepy. At the "Burial of Carnival" in Lechrain, a man
dressed as a woman in black clothes is carried on a litter or bier
by four men; he is lamented over by men disguised as women in black
clothes, then thrown down before the village dung-heap, drenched
with water, buried in the dung-heap, and covered with straw. On the
evening of Shrove Tuesday the Esthonians make a straw figure called
_metsik_ or "wood-spirit"; one year it is dressed with a man's coat
and hat, next year with a hood and a petticoat. This figure is stuck
on a long pole, carried across the boundary of the village with loud
cries of joy, and fastened to the top of a tree in the wood. The
ceremony is believed to be a protection against all kinds of
misfortune.

Sometimes at these Shrovetide or Lenten ceremonies the resurrection
of the pretended dead person is enacted. Thus, in some parts of
Swabia on Shrove Tuesday Dr. Iron-Beard professes to bleed a sick
man, who thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but the doctor at
last restores him to life by blowing air into him through a tube. In
the Harz Mountains, when Carnival is over, a man is laid on a
baking-trough and carried with dirges to the grave; but in the grave
a glass of brandy is buried instead of the man. A speech is
delivered and then the people return to the village-green or
meeting-place, where they smoke the long clay pipes which are
distributed at funerals. On the morning of Shrove Tuesday in the
following year the brandy is dug up and the festival begins by every
one tasting the spirit which, as the phrase goes, has come to life
again.



3. Carrying out Death

THE CEREMONY of "Carrying out Death" presents much the same features
as "Burying the Carnival"; except that the carrying out of Death is
generally followed by a ceremony, or at least accompanied by a
profession, of bringing in Summer, Spring, or Life. Thus in Middle
Franken, a province of Bavaria, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, the
village urchins used to make a straw effigy of Death, which they
carried about with burlesque pomp through the streets, and
afterwards burned with loud cries beyond the bounds. The Frankish
custom is thus described by a writer of the sixteenth century: "At
Mid-Lent, the season when the church bids us rejoice, the young
people of my native country make a straw image of Death, and
fastening it to a pole carry it with shouts to the neighbouring
villages. By some they are kindly received, and after being
refreshed with milk, peas, and dried pears, the usual food of that
season, are sent home again. Others, however, treat them with
anything but hospitality; for, looking on them as harbingers of
misfortune, to wit of death, they drive them from their boundaries
with weapons and insults." In the villages near Erlangen, when the
fourth Sunday in Lent came around, the peasant girls used to dress
themselves in all their finery with flowers in their hair. Thus
attired they repaired to the neighbouring town, carrying puppets
which were adorned with leaves and covered with white cloths. These
they took from house to house in pairs, stopping at every door where
they expected to receive something, and singing a few lines in which
they announced that it was Mid-Lent and that they were about to
throw Death into the water. When they had collected some trifling
gratuities they went to the river Regnitz and flung the puppets
representing Death into the stream. This was done to ensure a
fruitful and prosperous year; further, it was considered a safeguard
against pestilence and sudden death. At Nuremberg girls of seven to
eighteen years of age go through the streets bearing a little open
coffin, in which is a doll hidden under a shroud. Others carry a
beech branch, with an apple fastened to it for a head, in an open
box. They sing, "We carry Death into the water, it is well," or "We
carry Death into the water, carry him in and out again." In some
parts of Bavaria down to 1780 it was believed that a fatal epidemic
would ensue if the custom of "Carrying out Death" were not observed.

In some villages of Thüringen, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the
children used to carry a puppet of birchen twigs through the
village, and then threw it into a pool, while they sang, "We carry
the old Death out behind the herdman's old house; we have got
Summer, and Kroden's (?) power is destroyed." At Debschwitz or
Dobschwitz, near Gera, the ceremony of "Driving out Death" is or was
annually observed on the first of March. The young people make up a
figure of straw or the like materials, dress it in old clothes,
which they have begged from houses in the village, and carry it out
and throw it into the river. On returning to the village they break
the good news to the people, and receive eggs and other victuals as
a reward. The ceremony is or was supposed to purify the village and
to protect the inhabitants from sickness and plague. In other
villages of Thüringen, in which the population was originally
Slavonic, the carrying out of the puppet is accompanied with the
singing of a song, which begins, "Now we carry Death out of the
village and Spring into the village." At the end of the seventeenth
and beginning of the eighteenth century the custom was observed in
Thüringen as follows. The boys and girls made an effigy of straw or
the like materials, but the shape of the figure varied from year to
year. In one year it would represent an old man, in the next an old
woman, in the third a young man, and in the fourth a maiden, and the
dress of the figure varied with the character it personated. There
used to be a sharp contest as to where the effigy was to be made,
for the people thought that the house from which it was carried
forth would not be visited with death that year. Having been made,
the puppet was fastened to a pole and carried by a girl if it
represented an old man, but by a boy if it represented an old woman.
Thus it was borne in procession, the young people holding sticks in
their hands and singing that they were driving out Death. When they
came to water they threw the effigy into it and ran hastily back,
fearing that it might jump on their shoulders and wring their necks.
They also took care not to touch it, lest it should dry them up. On
their return they beat the cattle with the sticks, believing that
this would make the animals fat or fruitful. Afterwards they visited
the house or houses from which they had carried the image of Death;
where they received a dole of half-boiled peas. The custom of
"Carrying out Death" was practised also in Saxony. At Leipsic the
bastards and public women used to make a straw effigy of Death every
year at Mid-Lent. This they carried through all the streets with
songs and showed it to the young married women. Finally they threw
it into the river Parthe. By this ceremony they professed to make
the young wives fruitful, to purify the city, and to protect the
inhabitants for that year from plague and other epidemics.

Ceremonies of the same sort are observed at Mid-Lent in Silesia.
Thus in many places the grown girls with the help of the young men
dress up a straw figure with women's clothes and carry it out of the
village towards the setting sun. At the boundary they strip it of
its clothes, tear it in pieces, and scatter the fragments about the
fields. This is called "Burying Death." As they carry the image out,
they sing that they are about to bury Death under an oak, that he
may depart from the people. Sometimes the song runs that they are
bearing Death over hill and dale to return no more. In the Polish
neighbourhood of Gross-Strehlitz the puppet is called Goik. It is
carried on horseback and thrown into the nearest water. The people
think that the ceremony protects them from sickness of every sort in
the coming year. In the districts of Wohlau and Guhrau the image of
Death used to be thrown over the boundary of the next village. But
as the neighbours feared to receive the ill-omened figure, they were
on the look-out to repel it, and hard knocks were often exchanged
between the two parties. In some Polish parts of Upper Silesia the
effigy, representing an old woman, goes by the name of Marzana, the
goddess of death. It is made in the house where the last death
occurred, and is carried on a pole to the boundary of the village,
where it is thrown into a pond or burnt. At Polkwitz the custom of
"Carrying out Death" fell into abeyance; but an outbreak of fatal
sickness which followed the intermission of the ceremony induced the
people to resume it.

In Bohemia the children go out with a straw-man, representing Death,
to the end of the village, where they burn it, singing--


   "Now carry we Death out of the village,
    The new Summer into the village,
    Welcome, dear Summer,
    Green little corn."


At Tabor in Bohemia the figure of Death is carried out of the town
and flung from a high rock into the water, while they sing--


   "Death swims on the water,
    Summer will soon be here,
    We carried Death away for you
    We brought the Summer.
    And do thou, O holy Marketa,
    Give us a good year
    For wheat and for rye."


In other parts of Bohemia they carry Death to the end of the
village, singing--


   "We carry Death out of the village,
    And the New Year into the village.
    Dear Spring, we bid you welcome,
    Green grass, we bid you welcome."


Behind the village they erect a pyre, on which they burn the straw
figure, reviling and scoffing at it the while. Then they return,
singing--


   "We have carried away Death,
    And brought Life back.
    He has taken up his quarters in the village,
    Therefore sing joyous songs."


In some German villages of Moravia, as in Jassnitz and Seitendorf,
the young folk assemble on the third Sunday in Lent and fashion a
straw-man, who is generally adorned with a fur cap and a pair of old
leathern hose, if such are to be had. The effigy is then hoisted on
a pole and carried by the lads and lasses out into the open fields.
On the way they sing a song, in which it is said that they are
carrying Death away and bringing dear Summer into the house, and
with Summer the May and the flowers. On reaching an appointed place
they dance in a circle round the effigy with loud shouts and
screams, then suddenly rush at it and tear it to pieces with their
hands. Lastly, the pieces are thrown together in a heap, the pole is
broken, and fire is set to the whole. While it burns the troop
dances merrily round it, rejoicing at the victory won by Spring; and
when the fire has nearly died out they go to the householders to beg
for a present of eggs wherewith to hold a feast, taking care to give
as a reason for the request that they have carried Death out and
away.

The preceding evidence shows that the effigy of Death is often
regarded with fear and treated with marks of hatred and abhorrence.
Thus the anxiety of the villagers to transfer the figure from their
own to their neighbours' land, and the reluctance of the latter to
receive the ominous guest, are proof enough of the dread which it
inspires. Further, in Lusatia and Silesia the puppet is sometimes
made to look in at the window of a house, and it is believed that
some one in the house will die within the year unless his life is
redeemed by the payment of money. Again, after throwing the effigy
away, the bearers sometimes run home lest Death should follow them,
and if one of them falls in running, it is believed that he will die
within the year. At Chrudim, in Bohemia, the figure of Death is made
out of a cross, with a head and mask stuck at the top, and a shirt
stretched out on it. On the fifth Sunday in Lent the boys take this
effigy to the nearest brook or pool, and standing in a line throw it
into the water. Then they all plunge in after it; but as soon as it
is caught no one more may enter the water. The boy who did not enter
the water or entered it last will die within the year, and he is
obliged to carry the Death back to the village. The effigy is then
burned. On the other hand, it is believed that no one will die
within the year in the house out of which the figure of Death has
been carried; and the village out of which Death has been driven is
sometimes supposed to be protected against sickness and plague. In
some villages of Austrian Silesia on the Saturday before Dead Sunday
an effigy is made of old clothes, hay, and straw, for the purpose of
driving Death out of the village. On Sunday the people, armed with
sticks and straps, assemble before the house where the figure is
lodged. Four lads then draw the effigy by cords through the village
amid exultant shouts, while all the others beat it with their sticks
and straps. On reaching a field which belongs to a neighbouring
village they lay down the figure, cudgel it soundly, and scatter the
fragments over the field. The people believe that the village from
which Death has been thus carried out will be safe from any
infectious disease for the whole year.



4. Bringing in Summer

IN THE PRECEDING ceremonies the return of Spring, Summer, or Life,
as a sequel to the expulsion of Death, is only implied or at most
announced. In the following ceremonies it is plainly enacted. Thus
in some parts of Bohemia the effigy of Death is drowned by being
thrown into the water at sunset; then the girls go out into the wood
and cut down a young tree with a green crown, hang a doll dressed as
a woman on it, deck the whole with green, red, and white ribbons,
and march in procession with their _Líto_ (Summer) into the village,
collecting gifts and singing--


   "Death swims in the water,
    Spring comes to visit us,
    With eggs that are red,
    With yellow pancakes.
    We carried Death out of the village,
    We are carrying Summer into the village."


In many Silesian villages the figure of Death, after being treated
with respect, is stript of its clothes and flung with curses into
the water, or torn to pieces in a field. Then the young folk repair
to a wood, cut down a small fir-tree, peel the trunk, and deck it
with festoons of evergreens, paper roses, painted egg-shells, motley
bits of cloth, and so forth. The tree thus adorned is called Summer
or May. Boys carry it from house to house singing appropriate songs
and begging for presents. Among their songs is the following:


   "We have carried Death out,
    We are bringing the dear Summer back,
    The Summer and the May
    And all the flowers gay."


Sometimes they also bring back from the wood a prettily adorned
figure, which goes by the name of Summer, May, or the Bride; in the
Polish districts it is called Dziewanna, the goddess of spring.

At Eisenach on the fourth Sunday in Lent young people used to fasten
a straw-man, representing Death, to a wheel, which they trundled to
the top of a hill. Then setting fire to the figure they allowed it
and the wheel to roll down the slope. Next day they cut a tall
fir-tree, tricked it out with ribbons, and set it up in the plain.
The men then climbed the tree to fetch down the ribbons. In Upper
Lusatia the figure of Death, made of straw and rags, is dressed in a
veil furnished by the last bride and a shirt provided by the house
in which the last death took place. Thus arrayed the figure is stuck
on the end of a long pole and carried at full speed by the tallest
and strongest girl, while the rest pelt the effigy with sticks and
stones. Whoever hits it will be sure to live through the year. In
this way Death is carried out of the village and thrown into the
water or over the boundary of the next village. On their way home
each one breaks a green branch and carries it gaily with him till he
reaches the village, when he throws it away. Sometimes the young
people of the next village, upon whose land the figure has been
thrown, run after them and hurl it back, not wishing to have Death
among them. Hence the two parties occasionally come to blows.

In these cases Death is represented by the puppet which is thrown
away, Summer or Life by the branches or trees which are brought
back. But sometimes a new potency of life seems to be attributed to
the image of Death itself, and by a kind of resurrection it becomes
the instrument of the general revival. Thus in some parts of Lusatia
women alone are concerned in carrying out Death, and suffer no male
to meddle with it. Attired in mourning, which they wear the whole
day, they make a puppet of straw, clothe it in a white shirt, and
give it a broom in one hand and a scythe in the other. Singing songs
and pursued by urchins throwing stones, they carry the puppet to the
village boundary, where they tear it in pieces. Then they cut down a
fine tree, hang the shirt on it, and carry it home singing. On the
Feast of Ascension the Saxons of Braller, a village of Transylvania,
not far from Hermannstadt, observe the ceremony of "Carrying out
Death" in the following manner. After morning service all the
school-girls repair to the house of one of their number, and there
dress up the Death. This is done by tying a threshed-out sheaf of
corn into a rough semblance of a head and body, while the arms are
simulated by a broomstick thrust through it horizontally. The figure
is dressed in the holiday attire of a young peasant woman, with a
red hood, silver brooches, and a profusion of ribbons at the arms
and breast. The girls bustle at their work, for soon the bells will
be ringing to vespers, and the Death must be ready in time to be
placed at the open window, that all the people may see it on their
way to church. When vespers are over, the longed-for moment has come
for the first procession with the Death to begin; it is a privilege
that belongs to the school-girls alone. Two of the older girls seize
the figure by the arms and walk in front: all the rest follow two
and two. Boys may take no part in the procession, but they troop
after it gazing with open-mouthed admiration at the "beautiful
Death." So the procession goes through all the streets of the
village, the girls singing the old hymn that begins--


    "Gott mein Vater, deine Liebe
     Reicht so weit der Himmel ist,"


to a tune that differs from the ordinary one. When the procession
has wound its way through every street, the girls go to another
house, and having shut the door against the eager prying crowd of
boys who follow at their heels, they strip the Death and pass the
naked truss of straw out of the window to the boys, who pounce on
it, run out of the village with it without singing, and fling the
dilapidated effigy into the neighbouring brook. This done, the
second scene of the little drama begins. While the boys were
carrying away the Death out of the village, the girls remained in
the house, and one of them is now dressed in all the finery which
had been worn by the effigy. Thus arrayed she is led in procession
through all the streets to the singing of the same hymn as before.
When the procession is over they all betake themselves to the house
of the girl who played the leading part. Here a feast awaits them
from which also the boys are excluded. It is a popular belief that
the children may safely begin to eat gooseberries and other fruit
after the day on which Death has thus been carried out; for Death,
which up to that time lurked especially in gooseberries, is now
destroyed. Further, they may now bathe with impunity out of doors.
Very similar is the ceremony which, down to recent years, was
observed in some of the German villages of Moravia. Boys and girls
met on the afternoon of the first Sunday after Easter, and together
fashioned a puppet of straw to represent Death. Decked with
bright-coloured ribbons and cloths, and fastened to the top of a
long pole, the effigy was then borne with singing and clamour to the
nearest height, where it was stript of its gay attire and thrown or
rolled down the slope. One of the girls was next dressed in the
gauds taken from the effigy of Death, and with her at its head the
procession moved back to the village. In some villages the practice
is to bury the effigy in the place that has the most evil reputation
of all the country-side: others throw it into running water.

In the Lusatian ceremony described above, the tree which is brought
home after the destruction of the figure of Death is plainly
equivalent to the trees or branches which, in the preceding customs,
were brought back as representatives of Summer or Life, after Death
had been thrown away or destroyed. But the transference of the shirt
worn by the effigy of Death to the tree clearly indicates that the
tree is a kind of revivification, in a new form, of the destroyed
effigy. This comes out also in the Transylvanian and Moravian
customs: the dressing of a girl in the clothes worn by the Death,
and the leading her about the village to the same song which had
been sung when the Death was being carried about, show that she is
intended to be a kind of resuscitation of the being whose effigy has
just been destroyed. These examples therefore suggest that the Death
whose demolition is represented in these ceremonies cannot be
regarded as the purely destructive agent which we understand by
Death. If the tree which is brought back as an embodiment of the
reviving vegetation of spring is clothed in the shirt worn by the
Death which has just been destroyed, the object certainly cannot be
to check and counteract the revival of vegetation: it can only be to
foster and promote it. Therefore the being which has just been
destroyed--the so-called Death--must be supposed to be endowed with
a vivifying and quickening influence, which it can communicate to
the vegetable and even the animal world. This ascription of a
life-giving virtue to the figure of Death is put beyond a doubt by
the custom, observed in some places, of taking pieces of the straw
effigy of Death and placing them in the fields to make the crops
grow, or in the manger to make the cattle thrive. Thus in
Spachendorf, a village of Austrian Silesia, the figure of Death,
made of straw, brushwood, and rags, is carried with wild songs to an
open place outside the village and there burned, and while it is
burning a general struggle takes place for the pieces, which are
pulled out of the flames with bare hands. Each one who secures a
fragment of the effigy ties it to a branch of the largest tree in
his garden, or buries it in his field, in the belief that this
causes the crops to grow better. In the Troppau district of Austrian
Silesia the straw figure which the boys make on the fourth Sunday in
Lent is dressed by the girls in woman's clothes and hung with
ribbons, necklace, and garlands. Attached to a long pole it is
carried out of the village, followed by a troop of young people of
both sexes, who alternately frolic, lament, and sing songs. Arrived
at its destination--a field outside the village--the figure is
stripped of its clothes and ornaments; then the crowd rushes at it
and tears it to bits, scuffling for the fragments. Every one tries
to get a wisp of the straw of which the effigy was made, because
such a wisp, placed in the manger, is believed to make the cattle
thrive. Or the straw is put in the hens' nest, it being supposed
that this prevents the hens from carrying away their eggs, and makes
them brood much better. The same attribution of a fertilising power
to the figure of Death appears in the belief that if the bearers of
the figure, after throwing it away, beat cattle with their sticks,
this will render the beasts fat or prolific. Perhaps the sticks had
been previously used to beat the Death, and so had acquired the
fertilising power ascribed to the effigy. We have seen, too, that at
Leipsic a straw effigy of Death was shown to young wives to make
them fruitful.

It seems hardly possible to separate from the May-trees the trees or
branches which are brought into the village after the destruction of
the Death. The bearers who bring them in profess to be bringing in
the Summer, therefore the trees obviously represent the Summer;
indeed in Silesia they are commonly called the Summer or the May,
and the doll which is sometimes attached to the Summer-tree is a
duplicate representative of the Summer, just as the May is sometimes
represented at the same time by a May-tree and a May Lady. Further,
the Summer-trees are adorned like May-trees with ribbons and so on;
like May-trees, when large, they are planted in the ground and
climbed up; and like May-trees, when small, they are carried from
door to door by boys or girls singing songs and collecting money.
And as if to demonstrate the identity of the two sets of customs the
bearers of the Summer-tree sometimes announce that they are bringing
in the Summer and the May. The customs, therefore, of bringing in
the May and bringing in the Summer are essentially the same; and the
Summer-tree is merely another form of the May-tree, the only
distinction (besides that of name) being in the time at which they
are respectively brought in; for while the May-tree is usually
fetched in on the first of May or at Whitsuntide, the Summer-tree is
fetched in on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Therefore, if the May-tree
is an embodiment of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation, the
Summer-tree must likewise be an embodiment of the tree-spirit or
spirit of vegetation. But we have seen that the Summer-tree is in
some cases a revivification of the effigy of Death. It follows,
therefore, that in these cases the effigy called Death must be an
embodiment of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation. This
inference is confirmed, first, by the vivifying and fertilising
influence which the fragments of the effigy of Death are believed to
exercise both on vegetable and on animal life; for this influence,
as we saw in an earlier part of this work, is supposed to be a
special attribute of the tree-spirit. It is confirmed, secondly, by
observing that the effigy of Death is sometimes decked with leaves
or made of twigs, branches, hemp, or a threshed-out sheaf of corn;
and that sometimes it is hung on a little tree and so carried about
by girls collecting money, just as is done with the May-tree and the
May Lady, and with the Summer-tree and the doll attached to it. In
short we are driven to regard the expulsion of Death and the
bringing in of Summer as, in some cases at least, merely another
form of that death and revival of the spirit of vegetation in spring
which we saw enacted in the killing and resurrection of the Wild
Man. The burial and resurrection of the Carnival is probably another
way of expressing the same idea. The interment of the representative
of the Carnival under a dung-heap is natural, if he is supposed to
possess a quickening and fertilising influence like that ascribed to
the effigy of Death. The Esthonians, indeed, who carry the straw
figure out of the village in the usual way on Shrove Tuesday, do not
call it the Carnival, but the Wood-spirit (_Metsik_), and they
clearly indicate the identity of the effigy with the wood-spirit by
fixing it to the top of a tree in the wood, where it remains for a
year, and is besought almost daily with prayers and offerings to
protect the herds; for like a true wood-spirit the _Metsik_ is a
patron of cattle. Sometimes the _Metsik_ is made of sheaves of corn.

Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and
Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the
beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have
been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern
origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the
Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not
primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a
dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in
their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and
concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind
of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even
of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis
from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of
a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of
vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it
manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May
for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and
natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or dying
vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide into a
notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying out the
dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its revival,
would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in general
from the village or district. The view that in these spring
ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of
winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by
the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe
corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as
dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or
the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest,
which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is
called "the Dead One": children are warned against entering the
corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a game played by
Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest, Death is
represented by a child completely covered with maize leaves.



5. Battle of Summer and Winter

SOMETIMES in the popular customs of the peasantry the contrast
between the dormant powers of vegetation in winter and their
awakening vitality in spring takes the form of a dramatic contest
between actors who play the parts respectively of Winter and Summer.
Thus in the towns of Sweden on May Day two troops of young men on
horseback used to meet as if for mortal combat. One of them was led
by a representative of Winter clad in furs, who threw snowballs and
ice in order to prolong the cold weather. The other troop was
commanded by a representative of Summer covered with fresh leaves
and flowers. In the sham fight which followed the party of Summer
came off victorious, and the ceremony ended with a feast. Again, in
the region of the middle Rhine, a representative of Summer clad in
ivy combats a representative of Winter clad in straw or moss and
finally gains a victory over him. The vanquished foe is thrown to
the ground and stripped of his casing of straw, which is torn to
pieces and scattered about, while the youthful comrades of the two
champions sing a song to commemorate the defeat of Winter by Summer.
Afterwards they carry about a summer garland or branch and collect
gifts of eggs and bacon from house to house. Sometimes the champion
who acts the part of Summer is dressed in leaves and flowers and
wears a chaplet of flowers on his head. In the Palatinate this mimic
conflict takes place on the fourth Sunday in Lent. All over Bavaria
the same drama used to be acted on the same day, and it was still
kept up in some places down to the middle of the nineteenth century
or later. While Summer appeared clad all in green, decked with
fluttering ribbons, and carrying a branch in blossom or a little
tree hung with apples and pears, Winter was muffled up in cap and
mantle of fur and bore in his hand a snow-shovel or a flail.
Accompanied by their respective retinues dressed in corresponding
attire, they went through all the streets of the village, halting
before the houses and singing staves of old songs, for which they
received presents of bread, eggs, and fruit. Finally, after a short
struggle, Winter was beaten by Summer and ducked in the village well
or driven out of the village with shouts and laughter into the
forest.

At Goepfritz in Lower Austria, two men personating Summer and Winter
used to go from house to house on Shrove Tuesday, and were
everywhere welcomed by the children with great delight. The
representative of Summer was clad in white and bore a sickle; his
comrade, who played the part of Winter, had a fur-cap on his head,
his arms and legs were swathed in straw, and he carried a flail. In
every house they sang verses alternately. At Drömling in Brunswick,
down to the present time, the contest between Summer and Winter is
acted every year at Whitsuntide by a troop of boys and a troop of
girls. The boys rush singing, shouting, and ringing bells from house
to house to drive Winter away; after them come the girls singing
softly and led by a May Bride, all in bright dresses and decked with
flowers and garlands to represent the genial advent of spring.
Formerly the part of Winter was played by a straw-man which the boys
carried with them; now it is acted by a real man in disguise.

Among the Central Esquimaux of North America the contest between
representatives of summer and winter, which in Europe has long
degenerated into a mere dramatic performance, is still kept up as a
magical ceremony of which the avowed intention is to influence the
weather. In autumn, when storms announce the approach of the dismal
Arctic winter, the Esquimaux divide themselves into two parties
called respectively the ptarmigans and the ducks, the ptarmigans
comprising all persons born in winter, and the ducks all persons
born in summer. A long rope of sealskin is then stretched out, and
each party laying hold of one end of it seeks by tugging with might
and main to drag the other party over to its side. If the ptarmigans
get the worst of it, then summer has won the game and fine weather
may be expected to prevail through the winter.



6. Death and Resurrection of Kostrubonko

I RUSSIA funeral ceremonies like those of "Burying the Carnival" and
"Carrying out Death" are celebrated under the names, not of Death or
the Carnival, but of certain mythic figures, Kostrubonko, Kostroma,
Kupalo, Lada, and Yarilo. These Russian ceremonies are observed both
in spring and at midsummer. Thus "in Little Russia it used to be the
custom at Eastertide to celebrate the funeral of a being called
Kostrubonko, the deity of the spring. A circle was formed of singers
who moved slowly around a girl who lay on the ground as if dead, and
as they went they sang:


    'Dead, dead is our Kostrubonko!
     Dead, dead is our dear one!'


until the girl suddenly sprang up, on which the chorus joyfully
exclaimed:


    'Come to life, come to life has our Kostrubonko!
     Come to life, come to life has our dear one!'"


On the Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve) a figure of Kupalo is made of
straw and "is dressed in woman's clothes, with a necklace and a
floral crown. Then a tree is felled, and, after being decked with
ribbons, is set up on some chosen spot. Near this tree, to which
they give the name of Marena [Winter or Death], the straw figure is
placed, together with a table, on which stand spirits and viands.
Afterwards a bonfire is lit, and the young men and maidens jump over
it in couples, carrying the figure with them. On the next day they
strip the tree and the figure of their ornaments, and throw them
both into a stream." On St. Peter's Day, the twenty-ninth of June,
or on the following Sunday, "the Funeral of Kostroma" or of Lada or
of Yarilo is celebrated in Russia. In the Governments of Penza and
Simbirsk the funeral used to be represented as follows. A bonfire
was kindled on the twenty-eighth of June, and on the next day the
maidens chose one of their number to play the part of Kostroma. Her
companions saluted her with deep obeisances, placed her on a board,
and carried her to the bank of a stream. There they bathed her in
the water, while the oldest girl made a basket of lime-tree bark and
beat it like a drum. Then they returned to the village and ended the
day with processions, games, and dances. In the Murom district
Kostroma was represented by a straw figure dressed in woman's
clothes and flowers. This was laid in a trough and carried with
songs to the bank of a lake or river. Here the crowd divided into
two sides, of which the one attacked and the other defended the
figure. At last the assailants gained the day, stripped the figure
of its dress and ornaments, tore it in pieces, trod the straw of
which it was made under foot, and flung it into the stream; while
the defenders of the figure hid their faces in their hands and
pretended to bewail the death of Kostroma. In the district of
Kostroma the burial of Yarilo was celebrated on the twenty-ninth or
thirtieth of June. The people chose an old man and gave him a small
coffin containing a Priapus-like figure representing Yarilo. This he
carried out of the town, followed by women chanting dirges and
expressing by their gestures grief and despair. In the open fields a
grave was dug, and into it the figure was lowered amid weeping and
wailing, after which games and dances were begun, "calling to mind
the funeral games celebrated in old times by the pagan Slavonians."
In Little Russia the figure of Yarilo was laid in a coffin and
carried through the streets after sunset surrounded by drunken
women, who kept repeating mournfully, "He is dead! he is dead!" The
men lifted and shook the figure as if they were trying to recall the
dead man to life. Then they said to the women, "Women, weep not. I
know what is sweeter than honey." But the women continued to lament
and chant, as they do at funerals. "Of what was he guilty? He was so
good. He will arise no more. O how shall we part from thee? What is
life without thee? Arise, if only for a brief hour. But he rises
not, he not." At last the Yarilo was buried in a grave.



7. Death and Revival of Vegetation

THESE Russian customs are plainly of the same nature as those which
in Austria and Germany are known as "Carrying out Death." Therefore
if the interpretation here adopted of the latter is right, the
Russian Kostrubonko, Yarilo, and the rest must also have been
originally embodiments of the spirit of vegetation, and their death
must have been regarded as a necessary preliminary to their revival.
The revival as a sequel to the death is enacted in the first of the
ceremonies described, the death and resurrection of Kostrubonko. The
reason why in some of these Russian ceremonies the death of the
spirit of vegetation is celebrated at midsummer may be that the
decline of summer is dated from Midsummer Day, after which the days
begin to shorten, and the sun sets out on his downward journey:


   "To the darksome hollows
    Where the frosts of winter lie."


Such a turning-point of the year, when vegetation might be thought
to share the incipient though still almost imperceptible decay of
summer, might very well be chosen by primitive man as a fit moment
for resorting to those magic rites by which he hopes to stay the
decline, or at least to ensure the revival, of plant life.

But while the death of vegetation appears to have been represented
in all, and its revival in some, of these spring and midsummer
ceremonies, there are features in some of them which can hardly be
explained on this hypothesis alone. The solemn funeral, the
lamentations, and the mourning attire, which often characterise
these rites, are indeed appropriate at the death of the beneficent
spirit of vegetation. But what shall we say of the glee with which
the effigy is often carried out, of the sticks and stones with which
it is assailed, and the taunts and curses which are hurled at it?
What shall we say of the dread of the effigy evinced by the haste
with which the bearers scamper home as soon as they have thrown it
away, and by the belief that some one must soon die in any house
into which it has looked? This dread might perhaps be explained by a
belief that there is a certain infectiousness in the dead spirit of
vegetation which renders its approach dangerous. But this
explanation, besides being rather strained, does not cover the
rejoicings which often attend the carrying out of Death. We must
therefore recognise two distinct and seemingly opposite features in
these ceremonies: on the one hand, sorrow for the death, and
affection and respect for the dead; on the other hand, fear and
hatred of the dead, and rejoicings at his death. How the former of
these features is to be explained I have attempted to show: how the
latter came to be so closely associated with the former is a
question which I shall try to answer in the sequel.



8. Analogous Rites in India

IN THE KANAGRA district of India there is a custom observed by young
girls in spring which closely resembles some of the European spring
ceremonies just described. It is called the _Ralî Ka melâ,_ or fair
of Ralî, the _Ralî_ being a small painted earthen image of Siva or
Pârvatî. The custom is in vogue all over the Kanagra district, and
its celebration, which is entirely confined to young girls, lasts
through most of Chet (March-April) up to the Sankrânt of Baisâkh
(April). On a morning in March all the young girls of the village
take small baskets of _dûb_ grass and flowers to an appointed place,
where they throw them in a heap. Round this heap they stand in a
circle and sing. This goes on every day for ten days, till the heap
of grass and flowers has reached a fair height. Then they cut in the
jungle two branches, each with three prongs at one end, and place
them, prongs downwards, over the heap of flowers, so as to make two
tripods or pyramids. On the single uppermost points of these
branches they get an image-maker to construct two clay images, one
to represent Siva, and the other Pârvatî. The girls then divide
themselves into two parties, one for Siva and one for Pârvatî, and
marry the images in the usual way, leaving out no part of the
ceremony. After the marriage they have a feast, the cost of which is
defrayed by contributions solicited from their parents. Then at the
next Sankrânt (Baisâkh) they all go together to the river-side,
throw the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place, as
though they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the
neighbourhood often tease them by diving after the images, bringing
them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over them.
The object of the fair is said to be to secure a good husband.

That in this Indian ceremony the deities Siva and Pârvatî are
conceived as spirits of vegetation seems to be proved by the placing
of their images on branches over a heap of grass and flowers. Here,
as often in European folk-custom, the divinities of vegetation are
represented in duplicate, by plants and by puppets. The marriage of
these Indian deities in spring corresponds to the European
ceremonies in which the marriage of the vernal spirits of vegetation
is represented by the King and Queen of May, the May Bride,
Bridegroom of the May, and so forth. The throwing of the images into
the water, and the mourning for them, are the equivalents of the
European customs of throwing the dead spirit of vegetation under the
name of Death, Yarilo, Kostroma, and the rest, into the water and
lamenting over it. Again, in India, as often in Europe, the rite is
performed exclusively by females. The notion that the ceremony helps
to procure husbands for the girls can be explained by the quickening
and fertilising influence which the spirit of vegetation is believed
to exert upon the life of man as well as of plants.



9. The Magic Spring

THE GENERAL explanation which we have been led to adopt of these and
many similar ceremonies is that they are, or were in their origin,
magical rites intended to ensure the revival of nature in spring.
The means by which they were supposed to effect this end were
imitation and sympathy. Led astray by his ignorance of the true
causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce
the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only
to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic
influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or
mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken
up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied
that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth
to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and
burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth
the path for the footsteps of returning spring. If we find it hard
to throw ourselves even in fancy into a mental condition in which
such things seem possible, we can more easily picture to ourselves
the anxiety which the savage, when he first began to lift his
thoughts above the satisfaction of his merely animal wants, and to
meditate on the causes of things, may have felt as to the continued
operation of what we now call the laws of nature. To us, familiar as
we are with the conception of the uniformity and regularity with
which the great cosmic phenomena succeed each other, there seems
little ground for apprehension that the causes which produce these
effects will cease to operate, at least within the near future. But
this confidence in the stability of nature is bred only by the
experience which comes of wide observation and long tradition; and
the savage, with his narrow sphere of observation and his
short-lived tradition, lacks the very elements of that experience
which alone could set his mind at rest in face of the ever-changing
and often menacing aspects of nature. No wonder, therefore, that he
is thrown into a panic by an eclipse, and thinks that the sun or the
moon would surely perish, if he did not raise a clamour and shoot
his puny shafts into the air to defend the luminaries from the
monster who threatens to devour them. No wonder he is terrified when
in the darkness of night a streak of sky is suddenly illumined by
the flash of a meteor, or the whole expanse of the celestial arch
glows with the fitful light of the Northern Streamers. Even
phenomena which recur at fixed and uniform intervals may be viewed
by him with apprehension, before he has come to recognise the
orderliness of their recurrence. The speed or slowness of his
recognition of such periodic or cyclic changes in nature will depend
largely on the length of the particular cycle. The cycle, for
example, of day and night is everywhere, except in the polar
regions, so short and hence so frequent that men probably soon
ceased to discompose themselves seriously as to the chance of its
failing to recur, though the ancient Egyptians, as we have seen,
daily wrought enchantments to bring back to the east in the morning
the fiery orb which had sunk at evening in the crimson west. But it
was far otherwise with the annual cycle of the seasons. To any man a
year is a considerable period, seeing that the number of our years
is but few at the best. To the primitive savage, with his short
memory and imperfect means of marking the flight of time, a year may
well have been so long that he failed to recognise it as a cycle at
all, and watched the changing aspects of earth and heaven with a
perpetual wonder, alternately delighted and alarmed, elated and cast
down, according as the vicissitudes of light and heat, of plant and
animal life, ministered to his comfort or threatened his existence.
In autumn when the withered leaves were whirled about the forest by
the nipping blast, and he looked up at the bare boughs, could he
feel sure that they would ever be green again? As day by day the sun
sank lower and lower in the sky, could he be certain that the
luminary would ever retrace his heavenly road? Even the waning moon,
whose pale sickle rose thinner and thinner every night over the rim
of the eastern horizon, may have excited in his mind a fear lest,
when it had wholly vanished, there should be moons no more.

These and a thousand such misgivings may have thronged the fancy and
troubled the peace of the man who first began to reflect on the
mysteries of the world he lived in, and to take thought for a more
distant future than the morrow. It was natural, therefore, that with
such thoughts and fears he should have done all that in him lay to
bring back the faded blossom to the bough, to swing the low sun of
winter up to his old place in the summer sky, and to restore its
orbed fulness to the silver lamp of the waning moon. We may smile at
his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long
series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed
to failure, that man learned from experience the futility of some of
his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all,
magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and
which continue to be repeated merely because, for reasons which have
already been indicated, the operator is unaware of their failure.
With the advance of knowledge these ceremonies either cease to be
performed altogether or are kept up from force of habit long after
the intention with which they were instituted has been forgotten.
Thus fallen from their high estate, no longer regarded as solemn
rites on the punctual performance of which the welfare and even the
life of the community depend, they sink gradually to the level of
simple pageants, mummeries, and pastimes, till in the final stage of
degeneration they are wholly abandoned by older people, and, from
having once been the most serious occupation of the sage, become at
last the idle sport of children. It is in this final stage of decay
that most of the old magical rites of our European forefathers
linger on at the present day, and even from this their last retreat
they are fast being swept away by the rising tide of those
multitudinous forces, moral, intellectual, and social, which are
bearing mankind onward to a new and unknown goal. We may feel some
natural regret at the disappearance of quaint customs and
picturesque ceremonies, which have preserved to an age often deemed
dull and prosaic something of the flavour and freshness of the olden
time, some breath of the springtime of the world; yet our regret
will be lessened when we remember that these pretty pageants, these
now innocent diversions, had their origin in ignorance and
superstition; that if they are a record of human endeavour, they are
also a monument of fruitless ingenuity, of wasted labour, and of
blighted hopes; and that for all their gay trappings--their flowers,
their ribbons, and their music--they partake far more of tragedy
than of farce.

The interpretation which, following in the footsteps of W.
Mannhardt, I have attempted to give of these ceremonies has been not
a little confirmed by the discovery, made since this book was first
written, that the natives of Central Australia regularly practise
magical ceremonies for the purpose of awakening the dormant energies
of nature at the approach of what may be called the Australian
spring. Nowhere apparently are the alternations of the seasons more
sudden and the contrasts between them more striking than in the
deserts of Central Australia, where at the end of a long period of
drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over which the silence and
desolation of death appear to brood, is suddenly, after a few days
of torrential rain, transformed into a landscape smiling with
verdure and peopled with teeming multitudes of insects and lizards,
of frogs and birds. The marvellous change which passes over the face
of nature at such times has been compared even by European observers
to the effect of magic; no wonder, then, that the savage should
regard it as such in very deed. Now it is just when there is promise
of the approach of a good season that the natives of Central
Australia are wont especially to perform those magical ceremonies of
which the avowed intention is to multiply the plants and animals
they use as food. These ceremonies, therefore, present a close
analogy to the spring customs of our European peasantry not only in
the time of their celebration, but also in their aim; for we can
hardly doubt that in instituting rites designed to assist the
revival of plant life in spring our primitive forefathers were
moved, not by any sentimental wish to smell at early violets, or
pluck the rathe primrose, or watch yellow daffodils dancing in the
breeze, but by the very practical consideration, certainly not
formulated in abstract terms, that the life of man is inextricably
bound up with that of plants, and that if they were to perish he
could not survive. And as the faith of the Australian savage in the
efficacy of his magic rites is confirmed by observing that their
performance is invariably followed, sooner or later, by that
increase of vegetable and animal life which it is their object to
produce, so, we may suppose, it was with European savages in the
olden time. The sight of the fresh green in brake and thicket, of
vernal flowers blowing on mossy banks, of swallows arriving from the
south, and of the sun mounting daily higher in the sky, would be
welcomed by them as so many visible signs that their enchantments
were indeed taking effect, and would inspire them with a cheerful
confidence that all was well with a world which they could thus
mould to suit their wishes. Only in autumn days, as summer slowly
faded, would their confidence again be dashed by doubts and
misgivings at symptoms of decay, which told how vain were all their
efforts to stave off for ever the approach of winter and of death.




XXIX. The Myth of Adonis

THE SPECTACLE of the great changes which annually pass over the face
of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all ages,
and stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations so
vast and wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely
disinterested; for even the savage cannot fail to perceive how
intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and how
the same processes which freeze the stream and strip the earth of
vegetation menace him with extinction. At a certain stage of
development men seem to have imagined that the means of averting the
threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they could
hasten or retard the flight of the seasons by magic art. Accordingly
they performed ceremonies and recited spells to make the rain to
fall, the sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the fruits of the
earth to grow. In course of time the slow advance of knowledge,
which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least
the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alternations of
summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result
of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some
mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.
They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation,
the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the waxing or
waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who were
born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of
human life.

Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather
supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed
the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in
their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical
rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his
struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that
they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the
dead. The ceremonies which they observed for this purpose were in
substance a dramatic representation of the natural processes which
they wished to facilitate; for it is a familiar tenet of magic that
you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it. And as
they now explained the fluctuations of growth and decay, of
reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage, the death, and the
rebirth or revival of the gods, their religious or rather magical
dramas turned in great measure on these themes. They set forth the
fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of one at
least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a
religious theory was blended with a magical practice. The
combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few religions have ever
succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from the old trammels of
magic. The inconsistency of acting on two opposite principles,
however it may vex the soul of the philosopher, rarely troubles the
common man; indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His affair is to
act, not to analyse the motives of his action. If mankind had always
been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of
folly and crime.

Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most striking
within the temperate zone are those which affect vegetation. The
influence of the seasons on animals, though great, is not nearly so
manifest. Hence it is natural that in the magical dramas designed to
dispel winter and bring back spring the emphasis should be laid on
vegetation, and that trees and plants should figure in them more
prominently than beasts and birds. Yet the two sides of life, the
vegetable and the animal, were not dissociated in the minds of those
who observed the ceremonies. Indeed they commonly believed that the
tie between the animal and the vegetable world was even closer than
it really is; hence they often combined the dramatic representation
of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for
the purpose of furthering at the same time and by the same act the
multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To them the
principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was
one and indivisible. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and
to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in the past,
and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as
the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify
human life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity
itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and
children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance
of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.

Nowhere, apparently, have these rites been more widely and solemnly
celebrated than in the lands which border the Eastern Mediterranean.
Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of
Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of
life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god
who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail
the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the
same. The supposed death and resurrection of this oriental deity, a
god of many names but of essentially one nature, is now to be
examined. We begin with Tammuz or Adonis.

The worship of Adonis was practised by the Semitic peoples of
Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as early
as the seventh century before Christ. The true name of the deity was
Tammuz: the appellation of Adonis is merely the Semitic _Adon,_
"lord," a title of honour by which his worshippers addressed him.
But the Greeks through a misunderstanding converted the title of
honour into a proper name. In the religious literature of Babylonia
Tammuz appears as the youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the great
mother goddess, the embodiment of the reproductive energies of
nature. The references to their connexion with each other in myth
and ritual are both fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them
that every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the
cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year
his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him "to the land from
which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust
lies on door and bolt." During her absence the passion of love
ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their
kinds: all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound
up with the goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal
kingdom that without her presence they could not be discharged. A
messenger of the great god Ea was accordingly despatched to rescue
the goddess on whom so much depended. The stern queen of the
infernal regions, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal by name, reluctantly allowed
Ishtar to be sprinkled with the Water of Life and to depart, in
company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two might return
together to the upper world, and that with their return all nature
might revive.

Laments for the departed Tammuz are contained in several Babylonian
hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He is


   "A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water,
    Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom.
    A willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse,
    A willow whose roots were torn up.
    A herb that in the garden had drunk no water."


His death appears to have been annually mourned, to the shrill music
of flutes, by men and women about midsummer in the month named after
him, the month of Tammuz. The dirges were seemingly chanted over an
effigy of the dead god, which was washed with pure water, anointed
with oil, and clad in a red robe, while the fumes of incense rose
into the air, as if to stir his dormant senses by their pungent
fragrance and wake him from the sleep of death. In one of these
dirges, inscribed _Lament of the Flutes for Tammuz,_ we seem still
to hear the voices of the singers chanting the sad refrain and to
catch, like far-away music, the wailing notes of the flutes:


   "At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,
    'Oh my child!' at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament;
    'My Damu!' at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament.
    'My enchanter and priest!' at his vanishing away
            she lifts up a lament,
    At the shining cedar, rooted in a spacious place,
    In Eanna, above and below, she lifts up a lament.
    Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master,
            lifts she up a lament,
    Like the lament that a city lifts up for its lord,
            lifts she up a lament.
    Her lament is the lament for a herb that grows not in the bed,
    Her lament is the lament for the corn that grows not in the ear.
    Her chamber is a possession that brings not forth a possession,
    A weary woman, a weary child, forspent.
    Her lament is for a great river, where no willows grow,
    Her lament is for a field, where corn and herbs grow not.
    Her lament is for a pool, where fishes grow not.
    Her lament is for a thickest of reeds, where no reeds grow.
    Her lament is for woods, where tamarisks grow not.
    Her lament is for a wilderness where no cypresses (?) grow.
    Her lament is for the depth of a garden of trees,
            where honey and wine grow not.
    Her lament is for meadows, where no plants grow.
    Her lament is for a palace, where length of life grows not."


The tragical story and the melancholy rites of Adonis are better
known to us from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the
fragments of Babylonian literature or the brief reference of the
prophet Ezekiel, who saw the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz
at the north gate of the temple. Mirrored in the glass of Greek
mythology, the oriental deity appears as a comely youth beloved by
Aphrodite. In his infancy the goddess hid him in a chest, which she
gave in charge to Persephone, queen of the nether world. But when
Persephone opened the chest and beheld the beauty of the babe, she
refused to give him back to Aphrodite, though the goddess of love
went down herself to hell to ransom her dear one from the power of
the grave. The dispute between the two goddesses of love and death
was settled by Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should abide with
Persephone in the under world for one part of the year, and with
Aphrodite in the upper world for another part. At last the fair
youth was killed in hunting by a wild boar, or by the jealous Ares,
who turned himself into the likeness of a boar in order to compass
the death of his rival. Bitterly did Aphrodite lament her loved and
lost Adonis. In this form of the myth, the contest between Aphrodite
and Persephone for the possession of Adonis clearly reflects the
struggle between Ishtar and Allatu in the land of the dead, while
the decision of Zeus that Adonis is to spend one part of the year
under ground and another part above ground is merely a Greek version
of the annual disappearance and reappearance of Tammuz.



XXX. Adonis in Syria

THE MYTH of Adonis was localised and his rites celebrated with much
solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was Byblus on
the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both were great
seats of the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her Semitic
counterpart, Astarte; and of both, if we accept the legends,
Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was king. Of the two cities Byblus
was the more ancient; indeed it claimed to be the oldest city in
Phoenicia, and to have been founded in the early ages of the world
by the great god El, whom Greeks and Romans identified with Cronus
and Saturn respectively. However that may have been, in historical
times it ranked as a holy place, the religious capital of the
country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city stood
on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary of
Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded by
cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall cone
or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary the
rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to
him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little
to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of Adonis. This
was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest to the latest times
the city appears to have been ruled by kings, assisted perhaps by a
senate or council of elders.

The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was
beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His
legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of
Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant
a day's journey from the capital. The spot was probably Aphaca, at
the source of the river Adonis, half-way between Byblus and Baalbec;
for at Aphaca there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astarte
which Constantine destroyed on account of the flagitious character
of the worship. The site of the temple has been discovered by modern
travellers near the miserable village which still bears the name of
Afka at the head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis.
The hamlet stands among groves of noble walnut-trees on the brink of
the lyn. A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot
of a mighty amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of
cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends,
the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from
the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over
the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There
is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of
these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain
air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark
the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and
commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar of
the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the
sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats which
creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to
the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is especially
impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light,
revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its
mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the
woods which clothe its depths. It was here that, according to the
legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time, and
here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene could hardly be
imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as
the valley is and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted.
A convent or a village may be observed here and there standing out
against the sky on the top of some beetling crag, or clinging to the
face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the din
of the river; and at evening the lights that twinkle through the
gloom betray the presence of human habitations on slopes which might
seem inaccessible to man. In antiquity the whole of the lovely vale
appears to have been dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it is
haunted by his memory; for the heights which shut it in are crested
at various points by ruined monuments of his worship, some of them
overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns the head dizzy to
look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests far below. One
such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above a
roughly hewn recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and
Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack
of a bear, while she is seated in an attitude of sorrow. Her
grief-stricken figure may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the
Lebanon described by Macrobius, and the recess in the rock is
perhaps her lover's tomb. Every year, in the belief of his
worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains, and every
year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So
year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while
the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon,
and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the
blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous
band of crimson.



XXXI. Adonis in Cyprus

THE ISLAND of Cyprus lies but one day's sail from the coast of
Syria. Indeed, on fine summer evenings its mountains may be descried
looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset. With its rich
mines of copper and its forests of firs and stately cedars, the
island naturally attracted a commercial and maritime people like the
Phoenicians; while the abundance of its corn, its wine, and its oil
must have rendered it in their eyes a Land of Promise by comparison
with the niggardly nature of their own rugged coast, hemmed in
between the mountains and the sea. Accordingly they settled in
Cyprus at a very early date and remained there long after the Greeks
had also established themselves on its shores; for we know from
inscriptions and coins that Phoenician kings reigned at Citium, the
Chittim of the Hebrews, down to the time of Alexander the Great.
Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their gods with them from
the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the Lebanon, who may well
have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south coast they instituted
the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather Astarte. Here, as at
Byblus, these rites resembled the Egyptian worship of Osiris so
closely that some people even identified the Adonis of Amathus with
Osiris.

But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in Cyprus
was Paphos on the south-western side of the island. Among the petty
kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest times until
the end of the fourth century before our era Paphos must have ranked
with the best. It is a land of hills and billowy ridges, diversified
by fields and vineyards and intersected by rivers, which in the
course of ages have carved for themselves beds of such tremendous
depth that travelling in the interior is difficult and tedious. The
lofty range of Mount Olympus (the modern Troodos), capped with snow
the greater part of the year, screens Paphos from the northerly and
easterly winds and cuts it off from the rest of the island. On the
slopes of the range the last pine-woods of Cyprus linger, sheltering
here and there monasteries in scenery not unworthy of the Apennines.
The old city of Paphos occupied the summit of a hill about a mile
from the sea; the newer city sprang up at the harbour some ten miles
off. The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern Kuklia)
was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.
According to Herodotus, it was founded by Phoenician colonists from
Ascalon; but it is possible that a native goddess of fertility was
worshipped on the spot before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and
that the newcomers identified her with their own Baalath or Astarte,
whom she may have closely resembled. If two deities were thus fused
in one, we may suppose that they were both varieties of that great
goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have
been spread all over Western Asia from a very early time. The
supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image
as by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and
those rites were shared by her with other Asiatic deities. Her image
was simply a white cone or pyramid. In like manner, a cone was the
emblem of Astarte at Byblus, of the native goddess whom the Greeks
called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia, and of the sun-god
Heliogabalus at Emesa in Syria. Conical stones, which apparently
served as idols, have also been found at Golgi in Cyprus, and in the
Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone came to light at
the shrine of the "Mistress of Torquoise" among the barren hills and
frowning precipices of Sinai.

In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly
obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the
sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite,
Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of
Western Asia. Whatever its motive, the practice was clearly
regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty
performed in the service of that great Mother Goddess of Western
Asia whose name varied, while her type remained constant, from place
to place. Thus at Babylon every woman, whether rich or poor, had
once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger at the
temple of Mylitta, that is, of Ishtar or Astarte, and to dedicate to
the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry. The sacred
precinct was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some
of them had to wait there for years. At Heliopolis or Baalbec in
Syria, famous for the imposing grandeur of its ruined temples, the
custom of the country required that every maiden should prostitute
herself to a stranger at the temple of Astarte, and matrons as well
as maids testified their devotion to the goddess in the same manner.
The emperor Constantine abolished the custom, destroyed the temple,
and built a church in its stead. In Phoenician temples women
prostituted themselves for hire in the service of religion,
believing that by this conduct they propitiated the goddess and won
her favour. "It was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to
marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate." At Byblus
the people shaved their heads in the annual mourning for Adonis.
Women who refused to sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up
to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money which
they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription
found at Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious
prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century
of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name,
not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a harlot
at his express command, but that her mother and other female
ancestors had done the same before her; and the publicity of the
record, engraved on a marble column which supported a votive
offering, shows that no stain attached to such a life and such a
parentage. In Armenia the noblest families dedicated their daughters
to the service of the goddess Anaitis in her temple of Acilisena,
where the damsels acted as prostitutes for a long time before they
were given in marriage. Nobody scrupled to take one of these girls
to wife when her period of service was over. Again, the goddess Ma
was served by a multitude of sacred harlots at Comana in Pontus, and
crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from the
neighbouring cities and country to attend the biennial festivals or
to pay their vows to the goddess.

If we survey the whole of the evidence on this subject, some of
which has still to be laid before the reader, we may conclude that a
great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive
energies of nature, was worshipped under different names but with a
substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of Western
Asia; that associated with her was a lover, or rather series of
lovers, divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their
commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of animals and
plants, each in their several kind; and further, that the fabulous
union of the divine pair was simulated and, as it were, multiplied
on earth by the real, though temporary, union of the human sexes at
the sanctuary of the goddess for the sake of thereby ensuring the
fruitfulness of the ground and the increase of man and beast.

At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been
instituted by King Cinyras, and to have been practised by his
daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who, having incurred the wrath of
Aphrodite, mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt. In
this form of the tradition the wrath of Aphrodite is probably a
feature added by a later authority, who could only regard conduct
which shocked his own moral sense as a punishment inflicted by the
goddess instead of as a sacrifice regularly enjoined by her on all
her devotees. At all events the story indicates that the princesses
of Paphos had to conform to the custom as well as women of humble
birth.

Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of the
priestly kings of Paphos and the father of Adonis, there are some
that deserve our attention. In the first place, he is said to have
begotten his son Adonis in incestuous intercourse with his daughter
Myrrha at a festival of the corn-goddess, at which women robed in
white were wont to offer corn-wreaths as first-fruits of the harvest
and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of
incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems
unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps
equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of
unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice
actually observed for a definite reason in certain special
circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced
through women only, and where consequently the king held office
merely in virtue of his marriage with an hereditary princess, who
was the real sovereign, it appears to have often happened that a
prince married his own sister, the princess royal, in order to
obtain with her hand the crown which otherwise would have gone to
another man, perhaps to a stranger. May not the same rule of descent
have furnished a motive for incest with a daughter? For it seems a
natural corollary from such a rule that the king was bound to vacate
the throne on the death of his wife, the queen, since he occupied it
only by virtue of his marriage with her. When that marriage
terminated, his right to the throne terminated with it and passed at
once to his daughter's husband. Hence if the king desired to reign
after his wife's death, the only way in which he could legitimately
continue to do so was by marrying his daughter, and thus prolonging
through her the title which had formerly been his through her
mother.

Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty and to
have been wooed by Aphrodite herself. Thus it would appear, as
scholars have already observed, that Cinyras was in a sense a
duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable
goddess also lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of
Aphrodite for two members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly be
dissociated from the corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, a
Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with
an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed. When we consider that
Pygmalion was the father-in-law of Cinyras, that the son of Cinyras
was Adonis, and that all three, in successive generations, are said
to have been concerned in a love-intrigue with Aphrodite, we can
hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician kings of Paphos, or
their sons, regularly claimed to be not merely the priests of the
goddess but also her lovers, in other words, that in their official
capacity they personated Adonis. At all events Adonis is said to
have reigned in Cyprus, and it appears to be certain that the title
of Adonis was regularly borne by the sons of all the Phoenician
kings of the island. It is true that the title strictly signified no
more than "lord"; yet the legends which connect these Cyprian
princes with the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed
the divine nature as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story
of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the
king wedded the image of Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that
was so, the tale was in a sense true, not of a single man only, but
of a whole series of men, and it would be all the more likely to be
told of Pygmalion, if that was a common name of Semitic kings in
general, and of Cyprian kings in particular. Pygmalion, at all
events, is known as the name of the king of Tyre from whom his
sister Dido fled; and a king of Citium and Idalium in Cyprus, who
reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called
Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the
Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further, it deserves to be noted
that the names Pygmalion and Astarte occur together in a Punic
inscription on a gold medallion which was found in a grave at
Carthage; the characters of the inscription are of the earliest
type. As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to
have been founded by king Cinyras and observed by his daughters, we
may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine
bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the form of marriage with a
statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each of them had to mate
with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who played
Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has
commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by the Christian fathers
that the Aphrodite worshipped by Cinyras was a common whore. The
fruit of their union would rank as sons and daughters of the deity,
and would in time become the parents of gods and goddesses, like
their fathers and mothers before them. In this manner Paphos, and
perhaps all sanctuaries of the great Asiatic goddess where sacred
prostitution was practised, might be well stocked with human
deities, the offspring of the divine king by his wives, concubines,
and temple harlots. Any one of these might probably succeed his
father on the throne or be sacrificed in his stead whenever stress
of war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes did, for
the death of a royal victim. Such a tax, levied occasionally on the
king's numerous progeny for the good of the country, would neither
extinguish the divine stock nor break the father's heart, who
divided his paternal affection among so many. At all events, if, as
there seems reason to believe, Semitic kings were often regarded at
the same time as hereditary deities, it is easy to understand the
frequency of Semitic personal names which imply that the bearers of
them were the sons or daughters, the brothers or sisters, the
fathers or mothers of a god, and we need not resort to the shifts
employed by some scholars to evade the plain sense of the words.
This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel Egyptian usage; for
in Egypt, where the kings were worshipped as divine, the queen was
called "the wife of the god" or "the mother of the god," and the
title "father of the god" was borne not only by the king's real
father but also by his father-in-law. Similarly, perhaps, among the
Semites any man who sent his daughter to swell the royal harem may
have been allowed to call himself "the father of the god."

If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name of
Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras is
clearly connected with the Greek _cinyra,_ "a lyre," which in its
turn comes from the Semitic _kinnor,_ "a lyre," the very word
applied to the instrument on which David played before Saul. We
shall probably not err in assuming that at Paphos as at Jerusalem
the music of the lyre or harp was not a mere pastime designed to
while away an idle hour, but formed part of the service of religion,
the moving influence of its melodies being perhaps set down, like
the effect of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity. Certainly
at Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the
music of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals; and it appears that
the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on
some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took
for immediate converse with the divinity. Thus we read of a band of
prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel, a
pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went. Again,
when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing the
wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water
for three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the beasts
of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the
army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence
of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy
bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They
did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that
had drained down into them underground from the desolate, forbidding
mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in
the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers,
though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he rendered
another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from
their lairs among the rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected
in the water, and taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an
omen of the blood, of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack
the camp and were defeated with great slaughter.

Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time
darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from
the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the
harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts, may well
have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his
good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious
writer, himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music, has said
that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt
the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more; no, they
have escaped from some higher sphere, they are outpourings of
eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the Magnificat of saints. It
is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured
and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the
musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the
development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic
study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and
affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to
express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply
the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to
minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet and
the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its
appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might
almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example,
which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of
the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs the
dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies
of Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the
difference of the music.



XXXII. The Ritual of Adonis

AT THE FESTIVALS of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and in
Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a
bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble
corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown into the sea
or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on
the following day. But at different places the ceremonies varied
somewhat in the manner and apparently also in the season of their
celebration. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis were
displayed on two couches; beside them were set ripe fruits of all
kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and green bowers twined
with anise. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and
on the morrow women attired as mourners, with streaming hair and
bared breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonis to the sea-shore
and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope,
for they sang that the lost one would come back again. The date at
which this Alexandrian ceremony was observed is not expressly
stated; but from the mention of the ripe fruits it has been inferred
that it took place in late summer. In the great Phoenician sanctuary
of Astarte at Byblus the death of Adonis was annually mourned, to
the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation,
and beating of the breast; but next day he was believed to come to
life again and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his
worshippers. The disconsolate believers, left behind on earth,
shaved their heads as the Egyptians did on the death of the divine
bull Apis; women who could not bring themselves to sacrifice their
beautiful tresses had to give themselves up to strangers on a
certain day of the festival, and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of
their shame.

This Phoenician festival appears to have been a vernal one, for its
date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis, and
this has been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring. At
that season the red earth washed down from the mountains by the rain
tinges the water of the river, and even the sea, for a great way
with a blood-red hue, and the crimson stain was believed to be the
blood of Adonis, annually wounded to death by the boar on Mount
Lebanon. Again, the scarlet anemone is said to have sprung from the
blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; and as the anemone
blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be thought to show that the
festival of Adonis, or at least one of his festivals, was held in
spring. The name of the flower is probably derived from Naaman
("darling"), which seems to have been an epithet of Adonis. The
Arabs still call the anemone "wounds of the Naaman." The red rose
also was said to owe its hue to the same sad occasion; for
Aphrodite, hastening to her wounded lover, trod on a bush of white
roses; the cruel thorns tore her tender flesh, and her sacred blood
dyed the white roses for ever red. It would be idle, perhaps, to lay
much weight on evidence drawn from the calendar of flowers, and in
particular to press an argument so fragile as the bloom of the rose.
Yet so far as it counts at all, the tale which links the damask rose
with the death of Adonis points to a summer rather than to a spring
celebration of his passion. In Attica, certainly, the festival fell
at the height of summer. For the fleet which Athens fitted out
against Syracuse, and by the destruction of which her power was
permanently crippled, sailed at midsummer, and by an ominous
coincidence the sombre rites of Adonis were being celebrated at the
very time. As the troops marched down to the harbour to embark, the
streets through which they passed were lined with coffins and
corpse-like effigies, and the air was rent with the noise of women
wailing for the dead Adonis. The circumstance cast a gloom over the
sailing of the most splendid armament that Athens ever sent to sea.
Many ages afterwards, when the Emperor Julian made his first entry
into Antioch, he found in like manner the gay, the luxurious capital
of the East plunged in mimic grief for the annual death of Adonis;
and if he had any presentiment of coming evil, the voices of
lamentation which struck upon his ear must have seemed to sound his
knell.

The resemblance of these ceremonies to the Indian and European
ceremonies which I have described elsewhere is obvious. In
particular, apart from the somewhat doubtful date of its
celebration, the Alexandrian ceremony is almost identical with the
Indian. In both of them the marriage of two divine beings, whose
affinity with vegetation seems indicated by the fresh plants with
which they are surrounded, is celebrated in effigy, and the effigies
are afterwards mourned over and thrown into the water. From the
similarity of these customs to each other and to the spring and
midsummer customs of modern Europe we should naturally expect that
they all admit of a common explanation. Hence, if the explanation
which I have adopted of the latter is correct, the ceremony of the
death and resurrection of Adonis must also have been a dramatic
representation of the decay and revival of plant life. The inference
thus based on the resemblance of the customs is confirmed by the
following features in the legend and ritual of Adonis. His affinity
with vegetation comes out at once in the common story of his birth.
He was said to have been born from a myrrh-tree, the bark of which
bursting, after a ten months' gestation, allowed the lovely infant
to come forth. According to some, a boar rent the bark with his tusk
and so opened a passage for the babe. A faint rationalistic colour
was given to the legend by saying that his mother was a woman named
Myrrh, who had been turned into a myrrh-tree soon after she had
conceived the child. The use of myrrh as incense at the festival of
Adonis may have given rise to the fable. We have seen that incense
was burnt at the corresponding Babylonian rites, just as it was
burnt by the idolatrous Hebrews in honour of the Queen of Heaven,
who was no other than Astarte. Again, the story that Adonis spent
half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world
and the rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and
naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially
the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and reappears
above ground the other half. Certainly of the annual phenomena of
nature there is none which suggests so obviously the idea of death
and resurrection as the disappearance and reappearance of vegetation
in autumn and spring. Adonis has been taken for the sun; but there
is nothing in the sun's annual course within the temperate and
tropical zones to suggest that he is dead for half or a third of the
year and alive for the other half or two-thirds. He might, indeed,
be conceived as weakened in winter, but dead he could not be thought
to be; his daily reappearance contradicts the supposition. Within
the Arctic Circle, where the sun annually disappears for a
continuous period which varies from twenty-four hours to six months
according to the latitude, his yearly death and resurrection would
certainly be an obvious idea; but no one except the unfortunate
astronomer Bailly has maintained that the Adonis worship came from
the Arctic regions. On the other hand, the annual death and revival
of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men
in every stage of savagery and civilisation; and the vastness of the
scale on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes
place, together with man's intimate dependence on it for
subsistence, combine to render it the most impressive annual
occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate zones. It is no
wonder that a phenomenon so important, so striking, and so universal
should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to similar
rites in many lands. We may, therefore, accept as probable an
explanation of the Adonis worship which accords so well with the
facts of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other
lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable
body of opinion amongst the ancients themselves, who again and again
interpreted the dying and reviving god as the reaped and sprouting
grain.

The character of Tammuz or Adonis as a corn-spirit comes out plainly
in an account of his festival given by an Arabic writer of the tenth
century. In describing the rites and sacrifices observed at the
different seasons of the year by the heathen Syrians of Harran, he
says: "Tammuz (July). In the middle of this month is the festival of
el-Bûgât, that is, of the weeping women, and this is the Tâ-uz
festival, which is celebrated in honour of the god Tâ-uz. The women
bewail him, because his lord slew him so cruelly, ground his bones
in a mill, and then scattered them to the wind. The women (during
this festival) eat nothing which has been ground in a mill, but
limit their diet to steeped wheat, sweet vetches, dates, raisins,
and the like." Tâ-uz, who is no other than Tammuz, is here like
Burns's John Barleycorn:


   "They wasted o'er a scorching flame
    The marrow of his bones;
    But a miller us'd him worst of all--
    For he crush'd him between two stones."


This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the
cereal crops is characteristic of the stage of culture reached by
his worshippers in historical times. They had left the nomadic life
of the wandering hunter and herdsman far behind them; for ages they
had been settled on the land, and had depended for their subsistence
mainly on the products of tillage. The berries and roots of the
wilderness, the grass of the pastures, which had been matters of
vital importance to their ruder forefathers, were now of little
moment to them: more and more their thoughts and energies were
engrossed by the staple of their life, the corn; more and more
accordingly the propitiation of the deities of fertility in general
and of the corn-spirit in particular tended to become the central
feature of their religion. The aim they set before themselves in
celebrating the rites was thoroughly practical. It was no vague
poetical sentiment which prompted them to hail with joy the rebirth
of vegetation and to mourn its decline. Hunger, felt or feared, was
the mainspring of the worship of Adonis.

It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for
Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the
corngod, who was then either perishing under the sickles of the
reapers, or being trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on
the threshing-floor. While the men slew him, the women wept
crocodile tears at home to appease his natural indignation by a show
of grief for his death. The theory fits in well with the dates of
the festivals, which fell in spring or summer; for spring and
summer, not autumn, are the seasons of the barley and wheat harvests
in the lands which worshipped Adonis. Further, the hypothesis is
confirmed by the practice of the Egyptian reapers, who lamented,
calling upon Isis, when they cut the first corn; and it is
recommended by the analogous customs of many hunting tribes, who
testify great respect for the animals which they kill and eat.

Thus interpreted the death of Adonis is not the natural decay of
vegetation in general under the summer heat or the winter cold; it
is the violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on
the field, stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds it
to powder in the mill. That this was indeed the principal aspect in
which Adonis presented himself in later times to the agricultural
peoples of the Levant, may be admitted; but whether from the
beginning he had been the corn and nothing but the corn, may be
doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the herdsman,
above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain, offering
rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still he may
have embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the autumn
woods yield to the savage hunter and his squaw. And just as the
husband-man must propitiate the spirit of the corn which he
consumes, so the herdsman must appease the spirit of the grass and
leaves which his cattle munch, and the hunter must soothe the spirit
of the roots which he digs, and of the fruits which he gathers from
the bough. In all cases the propitiation of the injured and angry,
sprite would naturally comprise elaborate excuses and apologies,
accompanied by loud lamentations at his decease whenever, through
some deplorable accident or necessity, he happened to be murdered as
well as robbed. Only we must bear in mind that the savage hunter and
herdsman of those early days had probably not yet attained to the
abstract idea of vegetation in general; and that accordingly, so far
as Adonis existed for them at all, he must have been the _Adon_ or
lord of each individual tree and plant rather than a personification
of vegetable life as a whole. Thus there would be as many Adonises
as there were trees and shrubs, and each of them might expect to
receive satisfaction for any damage done to his person or property.
And year by year, when the trees were deciduous, every Adonis would
seem to bleed to death with the red leaves of autumn and to come to
life again with the fresh green of spring.

There is some reason to think that in early times Adonis was
sometimes personated by a living man who died a violent death in the
character of the god. Further, there is evidence which goes to show
that among the agricultural peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean,
the corn-spirit, by whatever name he was known, was often
represented, year by year, by human victims slain on the
harvest-field. If that was so, it seems likely that the propitiation
of the corn-spirit would tend to fuse to some extent with the
worship of the dead. For the spirits of these victims might be
thought to return to life in the ears which they had fattened with
their blood, and to die a second death at the reaping of the corn.
Now the ghosts of those who have perished by violence are surly and
apt to wreak their vengeance on their slayers whenever an
opportunity offers. Hence the attempt to appease the souls of the
slaughtered victims would naturally blend, at least in the popular
conception, with the attempt to pacify the slain corn-spirit. And as
the dead came back in the sprouting corn, so they might be thought
to return in the spring flowers, waked from their long sleep by the
soft vernal airs. They had been laid to their rest under the sod.
What more natural than to imagine that the violets and the
hyacinths, the roses and the anemones, sprang from their dust, were
empurpled or incarnadined by their blood, and contained some portion
of their spirit?


   "I sometimes think that never blows so red
    The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
    That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
    Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.

   "And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
    Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean--
    Ah, lean upon it lightly, for who knows
    From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen?"


In the summer after the battle of Landen, the most sanguinary battle
of the seventeenth century in Europe, the earth, saturated with the
blood of twenty thousand slain, broke forth into millions of
poppies, and the traveller who passed that vast sheet of scarlet
might well fancy that the earth had indeed given up her dead. At
Athens the great Commemoration of the Dead fell in spring about the
middle of March, when the early flowers are in bloom. Then the dead
were believed to rise from their graves and go about the streets,
vainly endeavouring to enter the temples and dwellings, which were
barred against these perturbed spirits with ropes, buckthorn, and
pitch. The name of the festival, according to the most obvious and
natural interpretation, means the Festival of Flowers, and the title
would fit well with the substance of the ceremonies if at that
season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to creep from the narrow
house with the opening flowers. There may therefore be a measure of
truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis worship a dreamy
voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the King of Terrors, but
as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to himself and lulls
them into an eternal sleep. The infinite charm of nature in the
Lebanon, he thought, lends itself to religious emotions of this
sensuous, visionary sort, hovering vaguely between pain and
pleasure, between slumber and tears. It would doubtless be a mistake
to attribute to Syrian peasants the worship of a conception so
purely abstract as that of death in general. Yet it may be true that
in their simple minds the thought of the reviving spirit of
vegetation was blent with the very concrete notion of the ghosts of
the dead, who come to life again in spring days with the early
flowers, with the tender green of the corn and the many-tinted
blossoms of the trees. Thus their views of the death and
resurrection of nature would be coloured by their views of the death
and resurrection of man, by their personal sorrows and hopes and
fears. In like manner we cannot doubt that Renan's theory of Adonis
was itself deeply tinged by passionate memories, memories of the
slumber akin to death which sealed his own eyes on the slopes of the
Lebanon, memories of the sister who sleeps in the land of Adonis
never again to wake with the anemones and the roses.



XXXIII. The Gardens of Adonis

PERHAPS the best proof that Adonis was a deity of vegetation, and
especially of the corn, is furnished by the gardens of Adonis, as
they were called. These were baskets or pots filled with earth, in
which wheat, barley, lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of flowers
were sown and tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively by
women. Fostered by the sun's heat, the plants shot up rapidly, but
having no root they withered as rapidly away, and at the end of
eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis, and
flung with them into the sea or into springs.

These gardens of Adonis are most naturally interpreted as
representatives of Adonis or manifestations of his power; they
represented him, true to his original nature, in vegetable form,
while the images of him, with which they were carried out and cast
into the water, portrayed him in his later human shape. All these
Adonis ceremonies, if I am right, were originally intended as charms
to promote the growth or revival of vegetation; and the principle by
which they were supposed to produce this effect was homoeopathic or
imitative magic. For ignorant people suppose that by mimicking the
effect which they desire to produce they actually help to produce
it; thus by sprinkling water they make rain, by lighting a fire they
make sunshine, and so on. Similarly, by mimicking the growth of
crops they hope to ensure a good harvest. The rapid growth of the
wheat and barley in the gardens of Adonis was intended to make the
corn shoot up; and the throwing of the gardens and of the images
into the water was a charm to secure a due supply of fertilising
rain. The same, I take it, was the object of throwing the effigies
of Death and the Carnival into water in the corresponding ceremonies
of modern Europe. Certainly the custom of drenching with water a
leaf-clad person, who undoubtedly personifies vegetation, is still
resorted to in Europe for the express purpose of producing rain.
Similarly the custom of throwing water on the last corn cut at
harvest, or on the person who brings it home (a custom observed in
Germany and France, and till lately in England and Scotland), is in
some places practised with the avowed intent to procure rain for the
next year's crops. Thus in Wallachia and amongst the Roumanians in
Transylvania, when a girl is bringing home a crown made of the last
ears of corn cut at harvest, all who meet her hasten to throw water
on her, and two farm-servants are placed at the door for the
purpose; for they believe that if this were not done, the crops next
year would perish from drought. At the spring ploughing in Prussia,
when the ploughmen and sowers returned in the evening from their
work in the fields, the farmer's wife and the servants used to
splash water over them. The ploughmen and sowers retorted by seizing
every one, throwing them into the pond, and ducking them under the
water. The farmer's wife might claim exemption on payment of a
forfeit, but every one else had to be ducked. By observing this
custom they hoped to ensure a due supply of rain for the seed.

The opinion that the gardens of Adonis are essentially charms to
promote the growth of vegetation, especially of the crops, and that
they belong to the same class of customs as those spring and
mid-summer folk-customs of modern Europe which I have described
else-where, does not rest for its evidence merely on the intrinsic
probability of the case. Fortunately we are able to show that
gardens of Adonis (if we may use the expression in a general sense)
are still planted, first, by a primitive race at their sowing
season, and, second, by European peasants at midsummer. Amongst the
Oraons and Mundas of Bengal, when the time comes for planting out
the rice which has been grown in seed-beds, a party of young people
of both sexes go to the forest and cut a young Karma-tree, or the
branch of one. Bearing it in triumph they return dancing, singing,
and beating drums, and plant it in the middle of the village
dancing-ground. A sacrifice is offered to the tree; and next morning
the youth of both sexes, linked arm-in-arm, dance in a great circle
round the Karma-tree, which is decked with strips of coloured cloth
and sham bracelets and necklets of plaited straw. As a preparation
for the festival, the daughters of the headman of the village
cultivate blades of barley in a peculiar way. The seed is sown in
moist, sandy soil, mixed with turmeric, and the blades sprout and
unfold of a pale-yellow or primrose colour. On the day of the
festival the girls take up these blades and carry them in baskets to
the dancing-ground, where, prostrating themselves reverentially,
they place some of the plants before the Karma-tree. Finally, the
Karma-tree is taken away and thrown into a stream or tank. The
meaning of planting these barley blades and then presenting them to
the Karma-tree is hardly open to question. Trees are supposed to
exercise a quickening influence upon the growth of crops, and
amongst the very people in question--the Mundas or Mundaris--"the
grove deities are held responsible for the crops." Therefore, when
at the season for planting out the rice the Mundas bring in a tree
and treat it with so much respect, their object can only be to
foster thereby the growth of the rice which is about to be planted
out; and the custom of causing barley blades to sprout rapidly and
then presenting them to the tree must be intended to subserve the
same purpose, perhaps by reminding the tree-spirit of his duty
towards the crops, and stimulating his activity by this visible
example of rapid vegetable growth. The throwing of the Karma-tree
into the water is to be interpreted as a rain-charm. Whether the
barley blades are also thrown into the water is not said; but if my
interpretation of the custom is right, probably they are so. A
distinction between this Bengal custom and the Greek rites of Adonis
is that in the former the tree-spirit appears in his original form
as a tree; whereas in the Adonis worship he appears in human form,
represented as a dead man, though his vegetable nature is indicated
by the gardens of Adonis, which are, so to say, a secondary
manifestation of his original power as a tree-spirit.

Gardens of Adonis are cultivated also by the Hindoos, with the
intention apparently of ensuring the fertility both of the earth and
of mankind. Thus at Oodeypoor in Rajputana a festival is held in
honour of Gouri, or Isani, the goddess of abundance. The rites begin
when the sun enters the sign of the Ram, the opening of the Hindoo
year. An image of the goddess Gouri is made of earth, and a smaller
one of her husband Iswara, and the two are placed together. A small
trench is next dug, barley is sown in it, and the ground watered and
heated artificially till the grain sprouts, when the women dance
round it hand in hand, invoking the blessing of Gouri on their
husbands. After that the young corn is taken up and distributed by
the women to the men, who wear it in their turbans. In these rites
the distribution of the barley shoots to the men, and the invocation
of a blessing on their husbands by the wives, point clearly to the
desire of offspring as one motive for observing the custom. The same
motive probably explains the use of gardens of Adonis at the
marriage of Brahmans in the Madras Presidency. Seeds of five or nine
sorts are mixed and sown in earthen pots, which are made specially
for the purpose and are filled with earth. Bride and bridegroom
water the seeds both morning and evening for four days; and on the
fifth day the seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis,
into a tank or river.

In Sardinia the gardens of Adonis are still planted in connexion
with the great midsummer festival which bears the name of St. John.
At the end of March or on the first of April a young man of the
village presents himself to a girl, and asks her to be his _comare_
(gossip or sweetheart), offering to be her _compare._ The invitation
is considered as an honour by the girl's family, and is gladly
accepted. At the end of May the girl makes a pot of the bark of the
cork-tree, fills it with earth, and sows a handful of wheat and
barley in it. The pot being placed in the sun and often watered, the
corn sprouts rapidly and has a good head by Midsummer Eve (St.
John's Eve, the twenty-third of June). The pot is then called _Erme_
or _Nenneri._ On St. John's Day the young man and the girl, dressed
in their best, accompanied by a long retinue and preceded by
children gambolling and frolicking, move in procession to a church
outside the village. Here they break the pot by throwing it against
the door of the church. Then they sit down in a ring on the grass
and eat eggs and herbs to the music of flutes. Wine is mixed in a
cup and passed round, each one drinking as it passes. Then they join
hands and sing "Sweethearts of St. John" (_Compare e comare di San
Giovanni_) over and over again, the flutes playing the while. When
they tire of singing they stand up and dance gaily in a ring till
evening. This is the general Sardinian custom. As practised at
Ozieri it has some special features. In May the pots are made of
cork-bark and planted with corn, as already described. Then on the
Eve of St. John the window-sills are draped with rich cloths, on
which the pots are placed, adorned with crimson and blue silk and
ribbons of various colours. On each of the pots they used formerly
to place a statuette or cloth doll dressed as a woman, or a
Priapus-like figure made of paste; but this custom, rigorously
forbidden by the Church, has fallen into disuse. The village swains
go about in a troop to look at the pots and their decorations and to
wait for the girls, who assemble on the public square to celebrate
the festival. Here a great bonfire is kindled, round which they
dance and make merry. Those who wish to be "Sweethearts of St. John"
act as follows. The young man stands on one side of the bonfire and
the girl on the other, and they, in a manner, join hands by each
grasping one end of a long stick, which they pass three times
backwards and forwards across the fire, thus thrusting their hands
thrice rapidly into the flames. This seals their relationship to
each other. Dancing and music go on till late at night. The
correspondence of these Sardinian pots of grain to the gardens of
Adonis seems complete, and the images formerly placed in them answer
to the images of Adonis which accompanied his gardens.

Customs of the same sort are observed at the same season in Sicily.
Pairs of boys and girls become gossips of St. John on St. John's Day
by drawing each a hair from his or her head and performing various
ceremonies over them. Thus they tie the hairs together and throw
them up in the air, or exchange them over a potsherd, which they
afterwards break in two, preserving each a fragment with pious care.
The tie formed in the latter way is supposed to last for life. In
some parts of Sicily the gossips of St. John present each other with
plates of sprouting corn, lentils, and canary seed, which have been
planted forty days before the festival. The one who receives the
plate pulls a stalk of the young plants, binds it with a ribbon, and
preserves it among his or her greatest treasures, restoring the
platter to the giver. At Catania the gossips exchange pots of basil
and great cucumbers; the girls tend the basil, and the thicker it
grows the more it is prized.

In these midsummer customs of Sardinia and Sicily it is possible
that, as Mr. R. Wünsch supposes, St. John has replaced Adonis. We
have seen that the rites of Tammuz or Adonis were commonly
celebrated about midsummer; according to Jerome, their date was
June.

In Sicily gardens of Adonis are still sown in spring as well as in
summer, from which we may perhaps infer that Sicily as well as Syria
celebrated of old a vernal festival of the dead and risen god. At
the approach of Easter, Sicilian women sow wheat, lentils, and
canaryseed in plates, which they keep in the dark and water every
two days. The plants soon shoot up; the stalks are tied together
with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the
sepulchres which, with the effigies of the dead Christ, are made up
in Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, just as the gardens
of Adonis were placed on the grave of the dead Adonis. The practice
is not confined to Sicily, for it is observed also at Cosenza in
Calabria, and perhaps in other places. The whole custom--sepulchres
as well as plates of sprouting grain--may be nothing but a
continuation, under a different name, of the worship of Adonis.

Nor are these Sicilian and Calabrian customs the only Easter
ceremonies which resemble the rites of Adonis. "During the whole of
Good Friday a waxen effigy of the dead Christ is exposed to view in
the middle of the Greek churches and is covered with fervent kisses
by the thronging crowd, while the whole church rings with
melancholy, monotonous dirges. Late in the evening, when it has
grown quite dark, this waxen image is carried by the priests into
the street on a bier adorned with lemons, roses, jessamine, and
other flowers, and there begins a grand procession of the multitude,
who move in serried ranks, with slow and solemn step, through the
whole town. Every man carries his taper and breaks out into doleful
lamentation. At all the houses which the procession passes there are
seated women with censers to fumigate the marching host. Thus the
community solemnly buries its Christ as if he had just died. At last
the waxen image is again deposited in the church, and the same
lugubrious chants echo anew. These lamentations, accompanied by a
strict fast, continue till midnight on Saturday. As the clock
strikes twelve, the bishop appears and announces the glad tidings
that 'Christ is risen,' to which the crowd replies, 'He is risen
indeed,' and at once the whole city bursts into an uproar of joy,
which finds vent in shrieks and shouts, in the endless discharge of
carronades and muskets, and the explosion of fire-works of every
sort. In the very same hour people plunge from the extremity of the
fast into the enjoyment of the Easter lamb and neat wine."

In like manner the Catholic Church has been accustomed to bring
before its followers in a visible form the death and resurrection of
the Redeemer. Such sacred dramas are well fitted to impress the
lively imagination and to stir the warm feelings of a susceptible
southern race, to whom the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism are
more congenial than to the colder temperament of the Teutonic
peoples.

When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to
plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we
may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ
was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis,
which, as we have seen reason to believe, was celebrated in Syria at
the same season. The type, created by Greek artists, of the
sorrowful goddess with her dying lover in her arms, resembles and
may have been the model of the _Pietà_ of Christian art, the Virgin
with the dead body of her divine Son in her lap, of which the most
celebrated example is the one by Michael Angelo in St. Peters. That
noble group, in which the living sorrow of the mother contrasts so
wonderfully with the languor of death in the son, is one of the
finest compositions in marble. Ancient Greek art has bequeathed to
us few works so beautiful, and none so pathetic.

In this connexion a well-known statement of Jerome may not be
without significance. He tells us that Bethlehem, the traditionary
birthplace of the Lord, was shaded by a grove of that still older
Syrian Lord, Adonis, and that where the infant Jesus had wept, the
lover of Venus was bewailed. Though he does not expressly say so,
Jerome seems to have thought that the grove of Adonis had been
planted by the heathen after the birth of Christ for the purpose of
defiling the sacred spot. In this he may have been mistaken. If
Adonis was indeed, as I have argued, the spirit of the corn, a more
suitable name for his dwelling-place could hardly be found than
Bethlehem, "the House of Bread," and he may well have been
worshipped there at his House of Bread long ages before the birth of
Him who said, "I am the bread of life." Even on the hypothesis that
Adonis followed rather than preceded Christ at Bethlehem, the choice
of his sad figure to divert the allegiance of Christians from their
Lord cannot but strike us as eminently appropriate when we remember
the similarity of the rites which commemorated the death and
resurrection of the two. One of the earliest seats of the worship of
the new god was Antioch, and at Antioch, as we have seen, the death
of the old god was annually celebrated with great solemnity. A
circumstance which attended the entrance of Julian into the city at
the time of the Adonis festival may perhaps throw some light on the
date of its celebration. When the emperor drew near to the city he
was received with public prayers as if he had been a god, and he
marvelled at the voices of a great multitude who cried that the Star
of Salvation had dawned upon them in the East. This may doubtless
have been no more than a fulsome compliment paid by an obsequious
Oriental crowd to the Roman emperor. But it is also possible that
the rising of a bright star regularly gave the signal for the
festival, and that as chance would have it the star emerged above
the rim of the eastern horizon at the very moment of the emperor's
approach. The coincidence, if it happened, could hardly fail to
strike the imagination of a superstitious and excited multitude, who
might thereupon hail the great man as the deity whose coming was
announced by the sign in the heavens. Or the emperor may have
mistaken for a greeting to himself the shouts which were addressed
to the star. Now Astarte, the divine mistress of Adonis, was
identified with the planet Venus, and her changes from a morning to
an evening star were carefully noted by the Babylonian astronomers,
who drew omens from her alternate appearance and disappearance.
Hence we may conjecture that the festival of Adonis was regularly
timed to coincide with the appearance of Venus as the Morning or
Evening Star. But the star which the people of Antioch saluted at
the festival was seen in the East; therefore, if it was indeed
Venus, it can only have been the Morning Star. At Aphaca in Syria,
where there was a famous temple of Astarte, the signal for the
celebration of the rites was apparently given by the flashing of a
meteor, which on a certain day fell like a star from the top of
Mount Lebanon into the river Adonis. The meteor was thought to be
Astarte herself, and its flight through the air might naturally be
interpreted as the descent of the amorous goddess to the arms of her
lover. At Antioch and elsewhere the appearance of the Morning Star
on the day of the festival may in like manner have been hailed as
the coming of the goddess of love to wake her dead leman from his
earthy bed. If that were so, we may surmise that it was the Morning
Star which guided the wise men of the East to Bethlehem, the
hallowed spot which heard, in the language of Jerome, the weeping of
the infant Christ and the lament for Adonis.



XXXIV. The Myth and Ritual of Attis

ANOTHER of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection struck
such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is Attis.
He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he appears
to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection
were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The
legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the
ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was said to
have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the
Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility, who had
her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her son. His
birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been
miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by putting
a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the Phrygian
cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things, perhaps
because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds of
the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves have
opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of
childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the intercourse
of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two different accounts
of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was
killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned
himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. The latter
is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus,
a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the whole legend of which
the story forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and
savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity. Both tales might
claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented
to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of
the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for
the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated
themselves on entering the service of the goddess. The story of his
death by the boar may have been told to explain why his worshippers,
especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In
like manner the worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a
boar had killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have
been changed into a pine-tree.

The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by the
Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with
Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered by
a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of
nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be
driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to
Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city
Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied the mighty
divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to Rome, where it was
received with great respect and installed in the temple of Victory
on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April when the goddess
arrived, and she went to work at once. For the harvest that year was
such as had not been seen for many a long day, and in the very next
year Hannibal and his veterans embarked for Africa. As he looked his
last on the coast of Italy, fading behind him in the distance, he
could not foresee that Europe, which had repelled the arms, would
yet yield to the gods, of the Orient. The vanguard of the conquerors
had already encamped in the heart of Italy before the rearguard of
the beaten army fell sullenly back from its shores.

We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of the
Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son to
her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar with
the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the
Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with
little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a
familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in
procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their
hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns,
while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the
wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image
and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was taken by
the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of
the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis,
in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of
Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was
celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman ceremonies
were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed hardly, if at
all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival seems to
have been as follows.

On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the woods
and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a
great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted
to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with
woollen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for violets were
said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones
from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man, doubtless
Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On the second day
of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems
to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth
of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or
highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering.
Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the
wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning
horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in
the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a
frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their
bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to
bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.
The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and
may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The
Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves
of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be
born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly
told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose
that the novices sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the
highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed
portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These
broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up
and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to
Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed
instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the general
resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf and
blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this conjecture
is furnished by the savage story that the mother of Attis conceived
by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from the severed
genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis.

If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom,
we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility
were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities
required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the
divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions:
they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy
before they could transmit it to the world. Goddesses thus
ministered to by eunuch priests were the great Artemis of Ephesus
and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis, whose sanctuary,
frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched by the offerings of
Assyria and Babylonia, of Arabia and Phoenicia, was perhaps in the
days of its glory the most popular in the East. Now the unsexed
priests of this Syrian goddess resembled those of Cybele so closely
that some people took them to be the same. And the mode in which
they dedicated themselves to the religious life was similar. The
greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of
spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the
regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and
the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious
excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of
onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do
when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after
man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the
sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped
forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready
for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through
the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them
into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The
household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female
attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.
When the tumult of emotion had subsided, and the man had come to
himself again, the irrevocable sacrifice must often have been
followed by passionate sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of
natural human feeling after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is
powerfully depicted by Catullus in a celebrated poem.

The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the
similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on
the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the
violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover,
were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned
himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his
priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his
festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood
witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which was
afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was probably
the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the period of
mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally because Cybele
had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but really perhaps
for the same reason which induced the women of Harran to abstain
from eating anything ground in a mill while they wept for Tammuz. To
partake of bread or flour at such a season might have been deemed a
wanton profanation of the bruised and broken body of the god. Or the
fast may possibly have been a preparation for a sacramental meal.

But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned
to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was
opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched
the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in
their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the
god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would
issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow,
the twenty-fifth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal
equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst
of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the
form of a carnival. It was the Festival of Joy (_Hilaria_). A
universal licence prevailed. Every man might say and do what he
pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was
too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with
impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to
take advantage of the masquerade by dressing in the uniform of the
Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with the crowd of merrymakers, to
get within stabbing distance of the emperor. But the plot
miscarried. Even the stern Alexander Severus used to relax so far on
the joyous day as to admit a pheasant to his frugal board. The next
day, the twenty-sixth of March, was given to repose, which must have
been much needed after the varied excitements and fatigues of the
preceding days. Finally, the Roman festival closed on the
twenty-seventh of March with a procession to the brook Almo. The
silver image of the goddess, with its face of jagged black stone,
sat in a waggon drawn by oxen. Preceded by the nobles walking
barefoot, it moved slowly, to the loud music of pipes and
tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and so down to the banks of
the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just below the walls of Rome.
There the high-priest, robed in purple, washed the waggon, the
image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On
returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were strewn with
fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and gaiety. No one thought of
the blood that had flowed so lately. Even the eunuch priests forgot
their wounds.

Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the
death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public
rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or
mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper,
and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god.
Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of
their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to
have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the
sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating
out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of music
which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of Attis. The
fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may perhaps
have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant for the
reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all that could
defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee,
crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit,
the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull,
adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold
leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to death
with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents
through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the
worshipper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged
from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to
receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had
been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the
blood of the bull. For some time afterwards the fiction of a new
birth was kept up by dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The
regeneration of the worshipper took place at the same time as the
regeneration of his god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the
new birth and the remission of sins by the shedding of bull's blood
appear to have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the
Phrygian goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the
great basilica of St. Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions
relating to the rites were found when the church was being enlarged
in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system
of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman
empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial
sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican. From the
same source we learn that the testicles as well as the blood of the
bull played an important part in the ceremonies. Probably they were
regarded as a powerful charm to promote fertility and hasten the new
birth.



XXXV. Attis as a God of Vegetation

THE ORIGINAL character of Attis as a tree-spirit is brought out
plainly by the part which the pine-tree plays in his legend, his
ritual, and his monuments. The story that he was a human being
transformed into a pine-tree is only one of those transparent
attempts at rationalising old beliefs which meet us so frequently in
mythology. The bringing in of the pine-tree from the woods, decked
with violets and woollen bands, is like bringing in the May-tree or
Summer-tree in modern folk-custom; and the effigy which was attached
to the pine-tree was only a duplicate representative of the
tree-spirit Attis. After being fastened to the tree, the effigy was
kept for a year and then burned. The same thing appears to have been
sometimes done with the May-pole; and in like manner the effigy of
the corn-spirit, made at harvest, is often preserved till it is
replaced by a new effigy at next year's harvest. The original
intention of such customs was no doubt to maintain the spirit of
vegetation in life throughout the year. Why the Phrygians should
have worshipped the pine above other trees we can only guess.
Perhaps the sight of its changeless, though sombre, green cresting
the ridges of the high hills above the fading splendour of the
autumn woods in the valleys may have seemed to their eyes to mark it
out as the seat of a diviner life, of something exempt from the sad
vicissitudes of the seasons, constant and eternal as the sky which
stooped to meet it. For the same reason, perhaps, ivy was sacred to
Attis; at all events, we read that his eunuch priests were tattooed
with a pattern of ivy leaves. Another reason for the sanctity of the
pine may have been its usefulness. The cones of the stone-pine
contain edible nut-like seeds, which have been used as food since
antiquity, and are still eaten, for example, by the poorer classes
in Rome. Moreover, a wine was brewed from these seeds, and this may
partly account for the orgiastic nature of the rites of Cybele,
which the ancients compared to those of Dionysus. Further,
pine-cones were regarded as symbols or rather instruments of
fertility. Hence at the festival of the Thesmophoria they were
thrown, along with pigs and other agents or emblems of fecundity,
into the sacred vaults of Demeter for the purpose of quickening the
ground and the wombs of women.

Like tree-spirits in general, Attis was apparently thought to wield
power over the fruits of the earth or even to be identical with the
corn. One of his epithets was "very fruitful": he was addressed as
the "reaped green (or yellow) ear of corn"; and the story of his
sufferings, death, and resurrection was interpreted as the ripe
grain wounded by the reaper, buried in the granary, and coming to
life again when it is sown in the ground. A statue of him in the
Lateran Museum at Rome clearly indicates his relation to the fruits
of the earth, and particularly to the corn; for it represents him
with a bunch of ears of corn and fruit in his hand, and a wreath of
pine-cones, pomegranates, and other fruits on his head, while from
the top of his Phrygian cap ears of corn are sprouting. On a stone
urn, which contained the ashes of an Archigallus or high-priest of
Attis, the same idea is expressed in a slightly different way. The
top of the urn is adorned with ears of corn carved in relief, and it
is surmounted by the figure of a cock, whose tail consists of ears
of corn. Cybele in like manner was conceived as a goddess of
fertility who could make or mar the fruits of the earth; for the
people of Augustodunum (Autun) in Gaul used to cart her image about
in a waggon for the good of the fields and vineyards, while they
danced and sang before it, and we have seen that in Italy an
unusually fine harvest was attributed to the recent arrival of the
Great Mother. The bathing of the image of the goddess in a river may
well have been a rain-charm to ensure an abundant supply of moisture
for the crops.



XXXVI. Human Representatives of Attis

FROM INSCRIPTIONS it appears that both at Pessinus and Rome the
high-priest of Cybele regularly bore the name of Attis. It is
therefore a reasonable conjecture that he played the part of his
namesake, the legendary Attis, at the annual festival. We have seen
that on the Day of Blood he drew blood from his arms, and this may
have been an imitation of the self-inflicted death of Attis under
the pine-tree. It is not inconsistent with this supposition that
Attis was also represented at these ceremonies by an effigy; for
instances can be shown in which the divine being is first
represented by a living person and afterwards by an effigy, which is
then burned or otherwise destroyed. Perhaps we may go a step farther
and conjecture that this mimic killing of the priest, accompanied by
a real effusion of his blood, was in Phrygia, as it has been
elsewhere, a substitute for a human sacrifice which in earlier times
was actually offered.

A reminiscence of the manner in which these old representatives of
the deity were put to death is perhaps preserved in the famous story
of Marsyas. He was said to be a Phrygian satyr or Silenus, according
to others a shepherd or herdsman, who played sweetly on the flute. A
friend of Cybele, he roamed the country with the disconsolate
goddess to soothe her grief for the death of Attis. The composition
of the Mother's Air, a tune played on the flute in honour of the
Great Mother Goddess, was attributed to him by the people of
Celaenae in Phrygia. Vain of his skill, he challenged Apollo to a
musical contest, he to play on the flute and Apollo on the lyre.
Being vanquished, Marsyas was tied up to a pine-tree and flayed or
cut limb from limb either by the victorious Apollo or by a Scythian
slave. His skin was shown at Celaenae in historical times. It hung
at the foot of the citadel in a cave from which the river Marsyas
rushed with an impetuous and noisy tide to join the Maeander. So the
Adonis bursts full-born from the precipices of the Lebanon; so the
blue river of Ibreez leaps in a crystal jet from the red rocks of
the Taurus; so the stream, which now rumbles deep underground, used
to gleam for a moment on its passage from darkness to darkness in
the dim light of the Corycian cave. In all these copious fountains,
with their glad promise of fertility and life, men of old saw the
hand of God and worshipped him beside the rushing river with the
music of its tumbling waters in their ears. At Celaenae, if we can
trust tradition, the piper Marsyas, hanging in his cave, had a soul
for harmony even in death; for it is said that at the sound of his
native Phrygian melodies the skin of the dead satyr used to thrill,
but that if the musician struck up an air in praise of Apollo it
remained deaf and motionless.

In this Phrygian satyr, shepherd, or herdsman who enjoyed the
friendship of Cybele, practised the music so characteristic of her
rites, and died a violent death on her sacred tree, the pine, may we
not detect a close resemblance to Attis, the favourite shepherd or
herdsman of the goddess, who is himself described as a piper, is
said to have perished under a pine-tree, and was annually
represented by an effigy hung, like Marsyas, upon a pine? We may
conjecture that in old days the priest who bore the name and played
the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele was regularly
hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this
barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it
is known to us in later times, when the priest merely drew blood
from his body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of
himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsala men and animals
were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human
victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or
by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being strung up to
a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was
called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is
represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have
been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the
weird verses of the _Havamal,_ in which the god describes how he
acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:


   "I know that I hung on the windy tree
    For nine whole nights,
    Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
    Myself to myself."


The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, used
annually to sacrifice human victims for the good of the crops in a
similar way. Early in December, when the constellation Orion
appeared at seven o'clock in the evening, the people knew that the
time had come to clear their fields for sowing and to sacrifice a
slave. The sacrifice was presented to certain powerful spirits as
payment for the good year which the people had enjoyed, and to
ensure the favour of the spirits for the coming season. The victim
was led to a great tree in the forest; there he was tied with his
back to the tree and his arms stretched high above his head, in the
attitude in which ancient artists portrayed Marsyas hanging on the
fatal tree. While he thus hung by the arms, he was slain by a spear
thrust through his body at the level of the armpits. Afterwards the
body was cut clean through the middle at the waist, and the upper
part was apparently allowed to dangle for a little from the tree,
while the under part wallowed in blood on the ground. The two
portions were finally cast into a shallow trench beside the tree.
Before this was done, anybody who wished might cut off a piece of
flesh or a lock of hair from the corpse and carry it to the grave of
some relation whose body was being consumed by a ghoul. Attracted by
the fresh corpse, the ghoul would leave the mouldering old body in
peace. These sacrifices have been offered by men now living.

In Greece the great goddess Artemis herself appears to have been
annually hanged in effigy in her sacred grove of Condylea among the
Arcadian hills, and there accordingly she went by the name of the
Hanged One. Indeed a trace of a similar rite may perhaps be detected
even at Ephesus, the most famous of her sanctuaries, in the legend
of a woman who hanged herself and was thereupon dressed by the
compassionate goddess in her own divine garb and called by the name
of Hecate. Similarly, at Melite in Phthia, a story was told of a
girl named Aspalis who hanged herself, but who appears to have been
merely a form of Artemis. For after her death her body could not be
found, but an image of her was discovered standing beside the image
of Artemis, and the people bestowed on it the title of Hecaerge or
Far-shooter, one of the regular epithets of the goddess. Every year
the virgins sacrificed a young goat to the image by hanging it,
because Aspalis was said to have hanged herself. The sacrifice may
have been a substitute for hanging an image or a human
representative of Artemis. Again, in Rhodes the fair Helen was
worshipped under the title of Helen of the Tree, because the queen
of the island had caused her handmaids, disguised as Furies, to
string her up to a bough. That the Asiatic Greeks sacrificed animals
in this fashion is proved by coins of Ilium, which represent an ox
or cow hanging on a tree and stabbed with a knife by a man, who sits
among the branches or on the animal's back. At Hierapolis also the
victims were hung on trees before they were burnt. With these Greek
and Scandinavian parallels before us we can hardly dismiss as wholly
improbable the conjecture that in Phrygia a man-god may have hung
year by year on the sacred but fatal tree.



XXXVII. Oriental Religions in the West

THE WORSHIP of the Great Mother of the Gods and her lover or son was
very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove that the two
received divine honours, separately or conjointly, not only in
Italy, and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces,
particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and
Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity
by Constantine; for Symmachus records the recurrence of the festival
of the Great Mother, and in the days of Augustine her effeminate
priests still paraded the streets and squares of Carthage with
whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait, while, like the
mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged alms from the
passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody orgies of the
Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found little favour.
The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic
excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of
the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites
of Adonis. Yet the same features which shocked and repelled the
Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and
barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken
for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a
new birth and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood,
have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to
peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong. Their true
character was indeed often disguised under a decent veil of
allegorical or philosophical interpretation, which probably sufficed
to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic worshippers, reconciling
even the more cultivated of them to things which otherwise must have
filled them with horror and disgust.

The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of crude
savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a multitude of
similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of paganism spread
over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the European peoples with
alien ideals of life gradually undermined the whole fabric of
ancient civilisation. Greek and Roman society was built on the
conception of the subordination of the individual to the community,
of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth,
as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual
whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy
in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the
public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good;
or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to
them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their
personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was
changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the
communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only
objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the
prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into
insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral
doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public
service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions,
and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he
regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The
saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic
contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal
of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who,
forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his
country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose
eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the
centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a
future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there
can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A
general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the
state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended
to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to
relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible through
the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to
subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused
to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their
anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were
content to leave the material world, which they identified with the
principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for
a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian
philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle
Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and
conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the
march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had
turned at last. It is ebbing still.

Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the ancient
world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West was
the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of his worship
is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which have been
found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire. In respect
both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears to have
presented many points of resemblance not only to the religion of the
Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity. The similarity struck
the Christian doctors themselves and was explained by them as a work
of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true
faith by a false and insidious imitation of it. So to the Spanish
conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the native heathen rites
appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the Christian sacraments.
With more probability the modern student of comparative religion
traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of
the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the
secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful
mysteries. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the
Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity,
combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral
purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict
between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the
balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in
our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed
directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the
twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it
was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to
lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that
turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears
to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The
celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at
midnight they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth!
The light is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born
sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter
solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No
doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the
twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the
Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess;
in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly
identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as
they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of
December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth,
and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time,
however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January
as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of commemorating the
birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the
fourth century it was universally established in the East. But at
the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century the
Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth of January as
the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the
true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern
Church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year
375 A.D.

What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute
the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated
with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. "The
reason," he tells us, "why the fathers transferred the celebration
of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It
was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of
December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in
token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the
Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the
Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival,
they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be
solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth
of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has
prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth." The heathen origin of
Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by
Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate
that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on
account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great
rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because
of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of
the nativity of Christ.

Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the
birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to
transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was
called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no
intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same
sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the
Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the
festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which
fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in
Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy bear in some respects a striking
resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the
Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen
predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this
adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in
the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of
Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have made
little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed
part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have
taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the
similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great Mother.
Now the death and resurrection of Attis were officially celebrated
at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter
being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most
appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been
dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient
and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of
March, and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the
Crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the moon.
This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia, and Gaul,
and there seem to be grounds for thinking that at one time it was
followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed the death of
Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted.
It is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations
prove that it can have had no historical foundation. The inference
appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ must have been
arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonise with an
older festival of the spring equinox. This is the view of the
learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne, who points out that
the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon the very day on
which, according to a widespread belief, the world had been created.
But the resurrection of Attis, who combined in himself the
characters of the divine Father and the divine Son, was officially
celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember that the
festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan
festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the Baptist
in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of water: that
the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted
the festival of Diana; that the feast of All Souls in November is a
continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and that the
Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter solstice in
December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun; we can
hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the
other cardinal festival of the Christian church--the solemnisation
of Easter--may have been in like manner, and from like motives of
edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god
Attis at the vernal equinox.

At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that
the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death and
resurrection should have been solemnised at the same season and in
the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of Christ
at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently Rome, that
is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis either originated
or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the coincidence as
purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season at which in the
temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies to a fresh
outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as the time
when the world was annually created afresh in the resurrection of a
god, nothing could be more natural than to place the resurrection of
the new deity at the same cardinal point of the year. Only it is to
be observed that if the death of Christ was dated on the
twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according to Christian
tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of March, which
is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the Julian
calendar and the resurrection of Attis. A similar displacement of
two days in the adjustment of Christian to heathen celebrations
occurs in the festivals of St. George and the Assumption of the
Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius
and perhaps by the practice of the Church in Gaul, placed the death
of Christ on the twenty-third and his resurrection on the
twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his resurrection coincided
exactly with the resurrection of Attis.

In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous
Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that
Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable
coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective
deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter
controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans
contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation
of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with
equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical
counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly
bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might
seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and
therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a
general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble
argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that
in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly
demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of
Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by
inverting the usual order of nature.

Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen
festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark
the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was
compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals.
The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with
their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had been exchanged for the
supple policy, the easy tolerance, the comprehensive charity of
shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly perceived that if Christianity was
to conquer the world it could do so only by relaxing the too rigid
principles of its Founder, by widening a little the narrow gate
which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive parallel
might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history
of Buddhism. Both systems were in their origin essentially ethical
reforms born of the generous ardour, the lofty aspirations, the
tender compassion of their noble Founders, two of those beautiful
spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth like beings come from
a better world to support and guide our weak and erring nature. Both
preached moral virtue as the means of accomplishing what they
regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the
individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that
salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from
suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which
they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties
but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in
practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently
renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out
their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such
faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by the
world, it was essential that they should first be modified or
transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the
passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of
accommodation was carried out in after ages by followers who, made
of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the
better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as
time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their
growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements
which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressing.
Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at
the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality
of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral
weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from
their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by
their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions
struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human
existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the
vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving
their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.



XXXVIII. The Myth of Osiris

IN ANCIENT EGYPT the god whose death and resurrection were annually
celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the most
popular of all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds for
classing him in one of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a
personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature,
especially of the corn. But the immense vogue which he enjoyed for
many ages induced his devoted worshippers to heap upon him the
attributes and powers of many other gods; so that it is not always
easy to strip him, so to say, of his borrowed plumes and to restore
them to their proper owners.

The story of Osiris is told in a connected form only by Plutarch,
whose narrative has been confirmed and to some extent amplified in
modern times by the evidence of the monuments.

Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the earth-god Seb
(Keb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated) and the
sky-goddess Nut. The Greeks identified his parents with their own
deities Cronus and Rhea. When the sun-god Ra perceived that his wife
Nut had been unfaithful to him, he declared with a curse that she
should be delivered of the child in no month and no year. But the
goddess had another lover, the god Thoth or Hermes, as the Greeks
called him, and he playing at draughts with the moon won from her a
seventy-second part of every day, and having compounded five whole
days out of these parts he added them to the Egyptian year of three
hundred and sixty days. This was the mythical origin of the five
supplementary days which the Egyptians annually inserted at the end
of every year in order to establish a harmony between lunar and
solar time. On these five days, regarded as outside the year of
twelve months, the curse of the sun-god did not rest, and
accordingly Osiris was born on the first of them. At his nativity a
voice rang out proclaiming that the Lord of All had come into the
world. Some say that a certain Pamyles heard a voice from the temple
at Thebes bidding him announce with a shout that a great king, the
beneficent Osiris, was born. But Osiris was not the only child of
his mother. On the second of the supplementary days she gave birth
to the elder Horus, on the third to the god Set, whom the Greeks
called Typhon, on the fourth to the goddess Isis, and on the fifth
to the goddess Nephthys. Afterwards Set married his sister Nephthys,
and Osiris married his sister Isis.

Reigning as a king on earth, Osiris reclaimed the Egyptians from
savagery, gave them laws, and taught them to worship the gods.
Before his time the Egyptians had been cannibals. But Isis, the
sister and wife of Osiris, discovered wheat and barley growing wild,
and Osiris introduced the cultivation of these grains amongst his
people, who forthwith abandoned cannibalism and took kindly to a
corn diet. Moreover, Osiris is said to have been the first to gather
fruit from trees, to train the vine to poles, and to tread the
grapes. Eager to communicate these beneficent discoveries to all
mankind, he committed the whole government of Egypt to his wife
Isis, and travelled over the world, diffusing the blessings of
civilisation and agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a
harsh climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the vine,
he taught the inhabitants to console themselves for the want of wine
by brewing beer from barley. Loaded with the wealth that had been
showered upon him by grateful nations, he returned to Egypt, and on
account of the benefits he had conferred on mankind he was
unanimously hailed and worshipped as a deity. But his brother Set
(whom the Greeks called Typhon) with seventy-two others plotted
against him. Having taken the measure of his good brother's body by
stealth, the bad brother Typhon fashioned and highly decorated a
coffer of the same size, and once when they were all drinking and
making merry he brought in the coffer and jestingly promised to give
it to the one whom it should fit exactly. Well, they all tried one
after the other, but it fitted none of them. Last of all Osiris
stepped into it and lay down. On that the conspirators ran and
slammed the lid down on him, nailed it fast, soldered it with molten
lead, and flung the coffer into the Nile. This happened on the
seventeenth day of the month Athyr, when the sun is in the sign of
the Scorpion, and in the eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or
the life of Osiris. When Isis heard of it she sheared off a lock of
her hair, put on a mourning attire, and wandered disconsolately up
and down, seeking the body.

By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in the papyrus
swamps of the Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her flight.
One evening when she was weary she came to the house of a woman,
who, alarmed at the sight of the scorpions, shut the door in her
face. Then one of the scorpions crept under the door and stung the
child of the woman that he died. But when Isis heard the mother's
lamentation, her heart was touched, and she laid her hands on the
child and uttered her powerful spells; so the poison was driven out
of the child and he lived. Afterwards Isis herself gave birth to a
son in the swamps. She had conceived him while she fluttered in the
form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband. The infant was
the younger Horus, who in his youth bore the name of Harpocrates,
that is, the child Horus. Him Buto, the goddess of the north, hid
from the wrath of his wicked uncle Set. Yet she could not guard him
from all mishap; for one day when Isis came to her little son's
hiding-place she found him stretched lifeless and rigid on the
ground: a scorpion had stung him. Then Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra
for help. The god hearkened to her and staid his bark in the sky,
and sent down Thoth to teach her the spell by which she might
restore her son to life. She uttered the words of power, and
straightway the poison flowed from the body of Horus, air passed
into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended up into the sky and took
his place once more in the bark of the sun, and the bright pomp
passed onward jubilant.

Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris had floated down
the river and away out to sea, till at last it drifted ashore at
Byblus, on the coast of Syria. Here a fine _erica_-tree shot up
suddenly and enclosed the chest in its trunk. The king of the
country, admiring the growth of the tree, had it cut down and made
into a pillar of his house; but he did not know that the coffer with
the dead Osiris was in it. Word of this came to Isis and she
journeyed to Byblus, and sat down by the well, in humble guise, her
face wet with tears. To none would she speak till the king's
handmaidens came, and them she greeted kindly, and braided their
hair, and breathed on them from her own divine body a wondrous
perfume. But when the queen beheld the braids of her handmaidens'
hair and smelt the sweet smell that emanated from them, she sent for
the stranger woman and took her into her house and made her the
nurse of her child. But Isis gave the babe her finger instead of her
breast to suck, and at night she began to burn all that was mortal
of him away, while she herself in the likeness of a swallow
fluttered round the pillar that contained her dead brother,
twittering mournfully. But the queen spied what she was doing and
shrieked out when she saw her child in flames, and thereby she
hindered him from becoming immortal. Then the goddess revealed
herself and begged for the pillar of the roof, and they gave it her,
and she cut the coffer out of it, and fell upon it and embraced it
and lamented so loud that the younger of the king's children died of
fright on the spot. But the trunk of the tree she wrapped in fine
linen, and poured ointment on it, and gave it to the king and queen,
and the wood stands in a temple of Isis and is worshipped by the
people of Byblus to this day. And Isis put the coffer in a boat and
took the eldest of the king's children with her and sailed away. As
soon as they were alone, she opened the chest, and laying her face
on the face of her brother she kissed him and wept. But the child
came behind her softly and saw what she was about, and she turned
and looked at him in anger, and the child could not bear her look
and died; but some say that it was not so, but that he fell into the
sea and was drowned. It is he whom the Egyptians sing of at their
banquets under the name of Maneros.

But Isis put the coffer by and went to see her son Horus at the city
of Buto, and Typhon found the coffer as he was hunting a boar one
night by the light of a full moon. And he knew the body, and rent it
into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. But Isis sailed up
and down the marshes in a shallop made of papyrus, looking for the
pieces; and that is why when people sail in shallops made of
papyrus, the crocodiles do not hurt them, for they fear or respect
the goddess. And that is the reason, too, why there are many graves
of Osiris in Egypt, for she buried each limb as she found it. But
others will have it that she buried an image of him in every city,
pretending it was his body, in order that Osiris might be worshipped
in many places, and that if Typhon searched for the real grave he
might not be able to find it. However, the genital member of Osiris
had been eaten by the fishes, so Isis made an image of it instead,
and the image is used by the Egyptians at their festivals to this
day. "Isis," writes the historian Diodorus Siculus, "recovered all
the parts of the body except the genitals; and because she wished
that her husband's grave should be unknown and honoured by all who
dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to the following device.
She moulded human images out of wax and spices, corresponding to the
stature of Osiris, round each one of the parts of his body. Then she
called in the priests according to their families and took an oath
of them all that they would reveal to no man the trust she was about
to repose in them. So to each of them privately she said that to
them alone she entrusted the burial of the body, and reminding them
of the benefits they had received she exhorted them to bury the body
in their own land and to honour Osiris as a god. She also besought
them to dedicate one of the animals of their country, whichever they
chose, and to honour it in life as they had formerly honoured
Osiris, and when it died to grant it obsequies like his. And because
she would encourage the priests in their own interest to bestow the
aforesaid honours, she gave them a third part of the land to be used
by them in the service and worship of the gods. Accordingly it is
said that the priests, mindful of the benefits of Osiris, desirous
of gratifying the queen, and moved by the prospect of gain, carried
out all the injunctions of Isis. Wherefore to this day each of the
priests imagines that Osiris is buried in his country, and they
honour the beasts that were consecrated in the beginning, and when
the animals die the priests renew at their burial the mourning for
Osiris. But the sacred bulls, the one called Apis and the other
Mnevis, were dedicated to Osiris, and it was ordained that they
should be worshipped as gods in common by all the Egyptians, since
these animals above all others had helped the discoverers of corn in
sowing the seed and procuring the universal benefits of
agriculture."

Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by Greek writers and
eked out by more or less fragmentary notices or allusions in native
Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the temple at Denderah
has preserved a list of the god's graves, and other texts mention
the parts of his body which were treasured as holy relics in each of
the sanctuaries. Thus his heart was at Athribis, his backbone at
Busiris, his neck at Letopolis, and his head at Memphis. As often
happens in such cases, some of his divine limbs were miraculously
multiplied. His head, for example, was at Abydos as well as at
Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably numerous, would have
sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this respect, however,
Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less than seven heads,
all equally genuine, are extant.

According to native Egyptian accounts, which supplement that of
Plutarch, when Isis had found the corpse of her husband Osiris, she
and her sister Nephthys sat down beside it and uttered a lament
which in after ages became the type of all Egyptian lamentations for
the dead. "Come to thy house," they wailed. "Come to thy house. O
god On! come to thy house, thou who hast no foes. O fair youth, come
to thy house, that thou mayest see me. I am thy sister, whom thou
lovest; thou shalt not part from me. O fair boy, come to thy house.
. . . I see thee not, yet doth my heart yearn after thee and mine
eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee, who loves thee,
Unnefer, thou blessed one! Come to thy sister, come to thy wife, to
thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy housewife. I am
thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far from me. Gods
and men have turned their faces towards thee and weep for thee
together. . . . I call after thee and weep, so that my cry is heard
to heaven, but thou hearest not my voice; yet am I thy sister, whom
thou didst love on earth; thou didst love none but me, my brother!
my brother!" This lament for the fair youth cut off in his prime
reminds us of the laments for Adonis. The title of Unnefer or "the
Good Being" bestowed on him marks the beneficence which tradition
universally ascribed to Osiris; it was at once his commonest title
and one of his names as king.

The lamentations of the two sad sisters were not in vain. In pity
for her sorrow the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven the
jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys, of
Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the murdered
god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the other rites
which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies of the
departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings: Osiris
revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other
world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld, Lord of
Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. There, too, in the great Hall of the
Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from each of the
principal districts of Egypt, he presided as judge at the trial of
the souls of the departed, who made their solemn confession before
him, and, their heart having been weighed in the balance of justice,
received the reward of virtue in a life eternal or the appropriate
punishment of their sins.

In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life
everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They believed that
every man would live eternally in the other world if only his
surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done for the
body of Osiris. Hence the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over
the human dead were an exact copy of those which Anubis, Horus, and
the rest had performed over the dead god. "At every burial there was
enacted a representation of the divine mystery which had been
performed of old over Osiris, when his son, his sisters, his friends
were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by their
spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into the
first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with the
means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave. The
mummy of the deceased was Osiris; the professional female mourners
were his two sisters Isis and Nephthys; Anubis, Horus, all the gods
of the Osirian legend gathered about the corpse." In this way every
dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his name. From the
Middle Kingdom onwards it was the regular practice to address the
deceased as "Osiris So-and-So," as if he were the god himself, and
to add the standing epithet "true of speech," because true speech
was characteristic of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed and
pictured tombs that have been opened in the valley of the Nile prove
that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the benefit
of every dead Egyptian; as Osiris died and rose again from the dead,
so all men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal.

Thus according to what seems to have been the general native
tradition Osiris was a good and beloved king of Egypt, who suffered
a violent death but rose from the dead and was henceforth worshipped
as a deity. In harmony with this tradition he was regularly
represented by sculptors and painters in human and regal form as a
dead king, swathed in the wrappings of a mummy, but wearing on his
head a kingly crown and grasping in one of his hands, which were
left free from the bandages, a kingly sceptre. Two cities above all
others were associated with his myth or memory. One of them was
Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to possess his backbone; the
other was Abydos in Upper Egypt, which gloried in the possession of
his head. Encircled by the nimbus of the dead yet living god,
Abydos, originally an obscure place, became from the end of the Old
Kingdom the holiest spot in Egypt; his tomb there would seem to have
been to the Egyptians what the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at
Jerusalem is to Christians. It was the wish of every pious man that
his dead body should rest in hallowed earth near the grave of the
glorified Osiris. Few indeed were rich enough to enjoy this
inestimable privilege; for, apart from the cost of a tomb in the
sacred city, the mere transport of mummies from great distances was
both difficult and expensive. Yet so eager were many to absorb in
death the blessed influence which radiated from the holy sepulchre
that they caused their surviving friends to convey their mortal
remains to Abydos, there to tarry for a short time, and then to be
brought back by river and interred in the tombs which had been made
ready for them in their native land. Others had cenotaphs built or
memorial tablets erected for themselves near the tomb of their dead
and risen Lord, that they might share with him the bliss of a joyful
resurrection.



XXXIX. The Ritual of Osiris



1. The Popular Rites

A USEFUL clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is often
furnished by the season at which his or her festival is celebrated.
Thus, if the festival falls at the new or the full moon, there is a
certain presumption that the deity thus honoured either is the moon
or at least has lunar affinities. If the festival is held at the
winter or summer solstice, we naturally surmise that the god is the
sun, or at all events that he stands in some close relation to that
luminary. Again, if the festival coincides with the time of sowing
or harvest, we are inclined to infer that the divinity is an
embodiment of the earth or of the corn. These presumptions or
inferences, taken by themselves, are by no means conclusive; but if
they happen to be confirmed by other indications, the evidence may
be regarded as fairly strong.

Unfortunately, in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a great
measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is not
that the dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that they
shifted from year to year, until after a long interval they had
revolved through the whole course of the seasons. This gradual
revolution of the festal Egyptian cycle resulted from the employment
of a calendar year which neither corresponded exactly to the solar
year nor was periodically corrected by intercalation.

If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help, except
at the rarest intervals, from the official or sacerdotal calendar,
he must have been compelled to observe for himself those natural
signals which marked the times for the various operations of
husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the Egyptians
have been an agricultural people, dependent for their subsistence on
the growth of the corn. The cereals which they cultivated were
wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (_Holcus sorghum,_ Linnaeus),
the _doora_ of the modern fellaheen. Then as now the whole country,
with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean,
was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the
annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate
system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing
the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from
the great equatorial lakes and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the
rise of the river has always been watched by the inhabitants with
the utmost anxiety; for if it either falls short of or exceeds a
certain height, dearth and famine are the inevitable consequences.
The water begins to rise early in June, but it is not until the
latter half of July that it swells to a mighty tide. By the end of
September the inundation is at its greatest height. The country is
now submerged, and presents the appearance of a sea of turbid water,
from which the towns and villages, built on higher ground, rise like
islands. For about a month the flood remains nearly stationary, then
sinks more and more rapidly, till by December or January the river
has returned to its ordinary bed. With the approach of summer the
level of the water continues to fall. In the early days of June the
Nile is reduced to half its ordinary breadth; and Egypt, scorched by
the sun, blasted by the wind that has blown from the Sahara for many
days, seems a mere continuation of the desert. The trees are choked
with a thick layer of grey dust. A few meagre patches of vegetables,
watered with difficulty, struggle painfully for existence in the
immediate neighbourhood of the villages. Some appearance of verdure
lingers beside the canals and in the hollows from which the moisture
has not wholly evaporated. The plain appears to pant in the pitiless
sunshine, bare, dusty, ash-coloured, cracked and seamed as far as
the eye can see with a network of fissures. From the middle of April
till the middle of June the land of Egypt is but half alive, waiting
for the new Nile.

For countless ages this cycle of natural events has determined the
annual labours of the Egyptian husbandman. The first work of the
agricultural year is the cutting of the dams which have hitherto
prevented the swollen river from flooding the canals and the fields.
This is done, and the pent-up waters released on their beneficent
mission, in the first half of August. In November, when the
inundation has subsided, wheat, barley, and sorghum are sown. The
time of harvest varies with the district, falling about a month
later in the north than in the south. In Upper or Southern Egypt
barley is reaped at the beginning of March, wheat at the beginning
of April, and sorghum about the end of that month.

It is natural to suppose that the various events of the agricultural
year were celebrated by the Egyptian farmer with some simple
religious rites designed to secure the blessing of the gods upon his
labours. These rustic ceremonies he would continue to perform year
after year at the same season, while the solemn festivals of the
priests continued to shift, with the shifting calendar, from summer
through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer.
The rites of the husbandman were stable because they rested on
direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were unstable
because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the
priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals
disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of sacerdotalism and
severed, by the error of the calendar, from their roots in the
natural cycle of the seasons.

These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of the
popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that
the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the Nile
began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for
the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes
swelled the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was in one of
his aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than
that he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that time the harvest
was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be
suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who saw
the handiwork of divine beings in all the operations of nature might
well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by
the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her husband.

And the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a sign
in heaven. For in the early days of Egyptian history, some three or
four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the splendid
star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, appeared at
dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time of the summer
solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians called it
Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians
deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both peoples
apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed the
goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or spouse
and to wake him from the dead. Hence the rising of Sirius marked the
beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was regularly celebrated
by a festival which did not shift with the shifting official year.

The cutting of the dams and the admission of the water into the
canals and fields is a great event in the Egyptian year. At Cairo
the operation generally takes place between the sixth and the
sixteenth of August, and till lately was attended by ceremonies
which deserve to be noticed, because they were probably handed down
from antiquity. An ancient canal, known by the name of the Khalíj,
formerly passed through the native town of Cairo. Near its entrance
the canal was crossed by a dam of earth, very broad at the bottom
and diminishing in breadth upwards, which used to be constructed
before or soon after the Nile began to rise. In front of the dam, on
the side of the river, was reared a truncated cone of earth called
the '_arooseh_ or "bride," on the top of which a little maize or
millet was generally sown. This "bride" was commonly washed down by
the rising tide a week or a fortnight before the cutting of the dam.
Tradition runs that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in gay
apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a
plentiful inundation. Whether that was so or not, the intention of
the practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a
male power, to his bride the cornland, which was so soon to be
fertilised by his water. The ceremony was therefore a charm to
ensure the growth of the crops. In modern times money used to be
thrown into the canal on this occasion, and the populace dived into
the water after it. This practice also would seem to have been
ancient, for Seneca tells us that at a place called the Veins of the
Nile, not far from Philae, the priests used to cast money and
offerings of gold into the river at a festival which apparently took
place at the rising of the water.

The next great operation of the agricultural year in Egypt is the
sowing of the seed in November, when the water of the inundation has
retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many peoples
of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the
character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let
Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the
gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to
omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions
of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many
rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about
the same time. Thus at the festival of the Thesmophoria in Athens
women sit on the ground and fast. And the Boeotians open the vaults
of the Sorrowful One, naming that festival sorrowful because Demeter
is sorrowing for the descent of the Maiden. The month is the month
of sowing about the setting of the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it
Athyr, the Athenians Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter.
. . . For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits
vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others
grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands
and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they
deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity. Thus
they did in many respects like those who bury and mourn their dead."

The Egyptian harvest, as we have seen, falls not in autumn but in
spring, in the months of March, April, and May. To the husbandman
the time of harvest, at least in a good year, must necessarily be a
season of joy: in bringing home his sheaves he is requited for his
long and anxious labours. Yet if the old Egyptian farmer felt a
secret joy at reaping and garnering the grain, it was essential that
he should conceal the natural emotion under an air of profound
dejection. For was he not severing the body of the corn-god with his
sickle and trampling it to pieces under the hoofs of his cattle on
the threshing-floor? Accordingly we are told that it was an ancient
custom of the Egyptian corn-reapers to beat their breasts and lament
over the first sheaf cut, while at the same time they called upon
Isis. The invocation seems to have taken the form of a melancholy
chant, to which the Greeks gave the name of Maneros. Similar
plaintive strains were chanted by corn-reapers in Phoenicia and
other parts of Western Asia. Probably all these doleful ditties were
lamentations for the corn-god killed by the sickles of the reapers.
In Egypt the slain deity was Osiris, and the name _Maneros,_ applied
to the dirge, appears to be derived from certain words meaning "Come
to thy house," which often occur in the lamentations for the dead
god.

Ceremonies of the same sort have been observed by other peoples,
probably for the same purpose. Thus we are told that among all
vegetables corn, by which is apparently meant maize, holds the first
place in the household economy and the ceremonial observance of the
Cherokee Indians, who invoke it under the name of "the Old Woman" in
allusion to a myth that it sprang from the blood of an old woman
killed by her disobedient sons. After the last working of the crop a
priest and his assistant went into the field and sang songs of
invocation to the spirit of the corn. After that a loud rustling
would be heard, which was thought to be caused by the Old Woman
bringing the corn into the field. A clean trail was always kept from
the field to the house, "so that the corn might be encouraged to
stay at home and not go wandering elsewhere." "Another curious
ceremony, of which even the memory is now almost forgotten, was
enacted after the first working of the corn, when the owner or
priest stood in succession at each of the four corners of the field
and wept and wailed loudly. Even the priests are now unable to give
a reason for this performance, which may have been a lament for the
bloody death of Selu," the Old Woman of the Corn. In these Cherokee
practices the lamentations and the invocations of the Old Woman of
the Corn resemble the ancient Egyptian customs of lamenting over the
first corn cut and calling upon Isis, herself probably in one of her
aspects an Old Woman of the Corn. Further, the Cherokee precaution
of leaving a clear path from the field to the house resembles the
Egyptian invitation to Osiris, "Come to thy house." So in the East
Indies to this day people observe elaborate ceremonies for the
purpose of bringing back the Soul of the Rice from the fields to the
barn. The Nandi of East Africa perform a ceremony in September when
the eleusine grain is ripening. Every woman who owns a plantation
goes out with her daughters into the cornfields and makes a bonfire
of the branches and leaves of certain trees. After that they pluck
some of the eleusine, and each of them puts one grain in her
necklace, chews another and rubs it on her forehead, throat, and
breast. "No joy is shown by the womenfolk on this occasion, and they
sorrowfully cut a basketful of the corn which they take home with
them and place in the loft to dry."

The conception of the corn-spirit as old and dead at harvest is very
clearly embodied in a custom observed by the Arabs of Moab. When the
harvesters have nearly finished their task and only a small corner
of the field remains to be reaped, the owner takes a handful of
wheat tied up in a sheaf. A hole is dug in the form of a grave, and
two stones are set upright, one at the head and the other at the
foot, just as in an ordinary burial. Then the sheaf of wheat is laid
at the bottom of the grave, and the sheikh pronounces these words,
"The old man is dead." Earth is afterwards thrown in to cover the
sheaf, with a prayer, "May Allah bring us back the wheat of the
dead."



2. The Official Rites

SUCH, then, were the principal events of the farmer's calendar in
ancient Egypt, and such the simple religious rites by which he
celebrated them. But we have still to consider the Osirian festivals
of the official calendar, so far as these are described by Greek
writers or recorded on the monuments. In examining them it is
necessary to bear in mind that on account of the movable year of the
old Egyptian calendar the true or astronomical dates of the official
festivals must have varied from year to year, at least until the
adoption of the fixed Alexandrian year in 30 B.C. From that time
onward, apparently, the dates of the festivals were determined by
the new calendar, and so ceased to rotate throughout the length of
the solar year. At all events Plutarch, writing about the end of the
first century, implies that they were then fixed, not movable; for
though he does not mention the Alexandrian calendar, he clearly
dates the festivals by it. Moreover, the long festal calendar of
Esne, an important document of the Imperial age, is obviously based
on the fixed Alexandrian year; for it assigns the mark for New
Year's Day to the day which corresponds to the twenty-ninth of
August, which was the first day of the Alexandrian year, and its
references to the rising of the Nile, the position of the sun, and
the operations of agriculture are all in harmony with this
supposition. Thus we may take it as fairly certain that from 30 B.C.
onwards the Egyptian festivals were stationary in the solar year.

Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower
Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of
the god were displayed as a mystery by night. This commemoration of
the divine passion was held once a year: the people mourned and beat
their breasts at it to testify their sorrow for the death of the
god; and an image of a cow, made of gilt wood with a golden sun
between its horns, was carried out of the chamber in which it stood
the rest of the year. The cow no doubt represented Isis herself, for
cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with the
horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of a
cow. It is probable that the carrying out of her cow-shaped image
symbolised the goddess searching for the dead body of Osiris; for
this was the native Egyptian interpretation of a similar ceremony
observed in Plutarch's time about the winter solstice, when the gilt
cow was carried seven times round the temple. A great feature of the
festival was the nocturnal illumination. People fastened rows of
oil-lamps to the outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all
night long. The custom was not confined to Sais, but was observed
throughout the whole of Egypt.

This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the year
suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not merely
of the dead Osiris but of the dead in general, in other words, that
it may have been a night of All Souls. For it is a widespread belief
that the souls of the dead revisit their old homes on one night of
the year; and on that solemn occasion people prepare for the
reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them to eat, and
lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from and to the
grave. Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival, omits to
mention its date, but we can determine it with some probability from
other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on
the seventeenth of the month Athyr, and that the Egyptians
accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the
seventeenth of Athyr. Now in the Alexandrian calendar, which
Plutarch used, these four days corresponded to the thirteenth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of November, and this date
answers exactly to the other indications given by Plutarch, who says
that at the time of the festival the Nile was sinking, the north
winds dying away, the nights lengthening, and the leaves falling
from the trees. During these four days a gilt cow swathed in a black
pall was exhibited as an image of Isis. This, no doubt, was the
image mentioned by Herodotus in his account of the festival. On the
nineteenth day of the month the people went down to the sea, the
priests carrying a shrine which contained a golden casket. Into this
casket they poured fresh water, and thereupon the spectators raised
a shout that Osiris was found. After that they took some vegetable
mould, moistened it with water, mixed it with precious spices and
incense, and moulded the paste into a small moon-shaped image, which
was then robed and ornamented. Thus it appears that the purpose of
the ceremonies described by Plutarch was to represent dramatically,
first, the search for the dead body of Osiris, and, second, its
joyful discovery, followed by the resurrection of the dead god who
came to life again in the new image of vegetable mould and spices.
Lactantius tells us how on these occasions the priests, with their
shaven bodies, beat their breasts and lamented, imitating the
sorrowful search of Isis for her lost son Osiris, and how afterwards
their sorrow was turned to joy when the jackal-headed god Anubis, or
rather a mummer in his stead, produced a small boy, the living
representative of the god who was lost and was found. Thus
Lactantius regarded Osiris as the son instead of the husband of
Isis, and he makes no mention of the image of vegetable mould. It is
probable that the boy who figured in the sacred drama played the
part, not of Osiris, but of his son Horus; but as the death and
resurrection of the god were celebrated in many cities of Egypt, it
is also possible that in some places the part of the god come to
life was played by a living actor instead of by an image. Another
Christian writer describes how the Egyptians, with shorn heads,
annually lamented over a buried idol of Osiris, smiting their
breasts, slashing their shoulders, ripping open their old wounds,
until, after several days of mourning, they professed to find the
mangled remains of the god, at which they rejoiced. However the
details of the ceremony may have varied in different places, the
pretence of finding the god's body, and probably of restoring it to
life, was a great event in the festal year of the Egyptians. The
shouts of joy which greeted it are described or alluded to by many
ancient writers.

The funeral rites of Osiris, as they were observed at his great
festival in the sixteen provinces of Egypt, are described in a long
inscription of the Ptolemaic period, which is engraved on the walls
of the god's temple at Denderah, the Tentyra of the Greeks, a town
of Upper Egypt situated on the western bank of the Nile about forty
miles north of Thebes. Unfortunately, while the information thus
furnished is remarkably full and minute on many points, the
arrangement adopted in the inscription is so confused and the
expression often so obscure that a clear and consistent account of
the ceremonies as a whole can hardly be extracted from it. Moreover,
we learn from the document that the ceremonies varied somewhat in
the several cities, the ritual of Abydos, for example, differing
from that of Busiris. Without attempting to trace all the
particularities of local usage I shall briefly indicate what seem to
have been the leading features of the festival, so far as these can
be ascertained with tolerable certainty.

The rites lasted eighteen days, from the twelfth to the thirtieth of
the month Khoiak, and set forth the nature of Osiris in his triple
aspect as dead, dismembered, and finally reconstituted by the union
of his scattered limbs. In the first of these aspects he was called
Chent-Ament (Khenti-Amenti), in the second Osiris-Sep, and in the
third Sokari (Seker). Small images of the god were moulded of sand
or vegetable earth and corn, to which incense was sometimes added;
his face was painted yellow and his cheek-bones green. These images
were cast in a mould of pure gold, which represented the god in the
form of a mummy, with the white crown of Egypt on his head. The
festival opened on the twelfth day of Khoiak with a ceremony of
ploughing and sowing. Two black cows were yoked to the plough, which
was made of tamarisk wood, while the share was of black copper. A
boy scattered the seed. One end of the field was sown with barley,
the other with spelt, and the middle with flax. During the operation
the chief celebrant recited the ritual chapter of "the sowing of the
fields." At Busiris on the twentieth of Khoiak sand and barley were
put in the god's "garden," which appears to have been a sort of
large flower-pot. This was done in the presence of the cow-goddess
Shenty, represented seemingly by the image of a cow made of gilt
sycamore wood with a headless human image in its inside. "Then fresh
inundation water was poured out of a golden vase over both the
goddess and the 'garden,' and the barley was allowed to grow as the
emblem of the resurrection of the god after his burial in the earth,
'for the growth of the garden is the growth of the divine
substance.'" On the twenty-second of Khoiak, at the eighth hour, the
images of Osiris, attended by thirty-four images of deities,
performed a mysterious voyage in thirty-four tiny boats made of
papyrus, which were illuminated by three hundred and sixty-five
lights. On the twenty-fourth of Khoiak, after sunset, the effigy of
Osiris in a coffin of mulberry wood was laid in the grave, and at
the ninth hour of the night the effigy which had been made and
deposited the year before was removed and placed upon boughs of
sycamore. Lastly, on the thirtieth day of Khoiak they repaired to
the holy sepulchre, a subterranean chamber over which appears to
have grown a clump of Persea-trees. Entering the vault by the
western door, they laid the coffined effigy of the dead god
reverently on a bed of sand in the chamber. So they left him to his
rest, and departed from the sepulchre by the eastern door. Thus
ended the ceremonies in the month of Khoiak.

In the foregoing account of the festival, drawn from the great
inscription of Denderah, the burial of Osiris figures prominently,
while his resurrection is implied rather than expressed. This defect
of the document, however, is amply compensated by a remarkable
series of bas-reliefs which accompany and illustrate the
inscription. These exhibit in a series of scenes the dead god lying
swathed as a mummy on his bier, then gradually raising himself up
higher and higher, until at last he has entirely quitted the bier
and is seen erect between the guardian wings of the faithful Isis,
who stands behind him, while a male figure holds up before his eyes
the _crux ansata,_ the Egyptian symbol of life. The resurrection of
the god could hardly be portrayed more graphically. Even more
instructive, however, is another representation of the same event in
a chamber dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of Isis at Philae.
Here we see the dead body of Osiris with stalks of corn springing
from it, while a priest waters the stalks from a pitcher which he
holds in his hand. The accompanying inscription sets forth that
"this is the form of him whom one may not name, Osiris of the
mysteries, who springs from the returning waters." Taken together,
the picture and the words seem to leave no doubt that Osiris was
here conceived and represented as a personification of the corn
which springs from the fields after they have been fertilised by the
inundation. This, according to the inscription, was the kernel of
the mysteries, the innermost secret revealed to the initiated. So in
the rites of Demeter at Eleusis a reaped ear of corn was exhibited
to the worshippers as the central mystery of their religion. We can
now fully understand why at the great festival of sowing in the
month of Khoiak the priests used to bury effigies of Osiris made of
earth and corn. When these effigies were taken up again at the end
of a year or of a shorter interval, the corn would be found to have
sprouted from the body of Osiris, and this sprouting of the grain
would be hailed as an omen, or rather as the cause, of the growth of
the crops. The corn-god produced the corn from himself: he gave his
own body to feed the people: he died that they might live.

And from the death and resurrection of their great god the Egyptians
drew not only their support and sustenance in this life, but also
their hope of a life eternal beyond the grave. This hope is
indicated in the clearest manner by the very remarkable effigies of
Osiris which have come to light in Egyptian cemeteries. Thus in the
Valley of the Kings at Thebes there was found the tomb of a royal
fan-bearer who lived about 1500 B.C. Among the rich contents of the
tomb there was a bier on which rested a mattress of reeds covered
with three layers of linen. On the upper side of the linen was
painted a life-size figure of Osiris; and the interior of the
figure, which was waterproof, contained a mixture of vegetable
mould, barley, and a sticky fluid. The barley had sprouted and sent
out shoots two or three inches long. Again, in the cemetery at
Cynopolis "were numerous burials of Osiris figures. These were made
of grain wrapped up in cloth and roughly shaped like an Osiris, and
placed inside a bricked-up recess at the side of the tomb, sometimes
in small pottery coffins, sometimes in wooden coffins in the form of
a hawkmummy, sometimes without any coffins at all." These
corn-stuffed figures were bandaged like mummies with patches of
gilding here and there, as if in imitation of the golden mould in
which the similar figures of Osiris were cast at the festival of
sowing. Again, effigies of Osiris, with faces of green wax and their
interior full of grain, were found buried near the necropolis of
Thebes. Finally, we are told by Professor Erman that between the
legs of mummies "there sometimes lies a figure of Osiris made of
slime; it is filled with grains of corn, the sprouting of which is
intended to signify the resurrection of the god." We cannot doubt
that, just as the burial of corn-stuffed images of Osiris in the
earth at the festival of sowing was designed to quicken the seed, so
the burial of similar images in the grave was meant to quicken the
dead, in other words, to ensure their spiritual immortality.




XL. The Nature of Osiris



1. Osiris a Corn-god

THE FOREGOING survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may suffice to
prove that in one of his aspects the god was a personification of
the corn, which may be said to die and come to life again every
year. Through all the pomp and glamour with which in later times the
priests had invested his worship, the conception of him as the
corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his death and
resurrection, which was celebrated in the month of Khoiak and at a
later period in the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have
been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at the
time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the earth.
On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, moulded of earth and
corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order that,
dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops. The
ceremony was, in fact, a charm to ensure the growth of the corn by
sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was
practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields
long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
stately ritual of the temple. In the modern, but doubtless ancient,
Arab custom of burying "the Old Man," namely, a sheaf of wheat, in
the harvest-field and praying that he may return from the dead, we
see the germ out of which the worship of the corn-god Osiris was
probably developed.

The details of his myth fit in well with this interpretation of the
god. He was said to be the offspring of Sky and Earth. What more
appropriate parentage could be invented for the corn which springs
from the ground that has been fertilised by the water of heaven? It
is true that the land of Egypt owed its fertility directly to the
Nile and not to showers; but the inhabitants must have known or
guessed that the great river in its turn was fed by the rains which
fell in the far interior. Again, the legend that Osiris was the
first to teach men the use of corn would be most naturally told of
the corn-god himself. Further, the story that his mangled remains
were scattered up and down the land and buried in different places
may be a mythical way of expressing either the sowing or the
winnowing of the grain. The latter interpretation is supported by
the tale that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris on a
corn-sieve. Or more probably the legend may be a reminiscence of a
custom of slaying a human victim, perhaps a representative of the
corn-spirit, and distributing his flesh or scattering his ashes over
the fields to fertilise them. In modern Europe the figure of Death
is sometimes torn in pieces, and the fragments are then buried in
the ground to make the crops grow well, and in other parts of the
world human victims are treated in the same way. With regard to the
ancient Egyptians we have it on the authority of Manetho that they
used to burn red-haired men and scatter their ashes with winnowing
fans, and it is highly significant that this barbarous sacrifice was
offered by the kings at the grave of Osiris. We may conjecture that
the victims represented Osiris himself, who was annually slain,
dismembered, and buried in their persons that he might quicken the
seed in the earth.

Possibly in prehistoric times the kings themselves played the part
of the god and were slain and dismembered in that character. Set as
well as Osiris is said to have been torn in pieces after a reign of
eighteen days, which was commemorated by an annual festival of the
same length. According to one story Romulus, the first king of Rome,
was cut in pieces by the senators, who buried the fragments of him
in the ground; and the traditional day of his death, the seventh of
July, was celebrated with certain curious rites, which were
apparently connected with the artificial fertilisation of the fig.
Again, Greek legend told how Pentheus, king of Thebes, and Lycurgus,
king of the Thracian Edonians, opposed the vine-god Dionysus, and
how the impious monarchs were rent in pieces, the one by the
frenzied Bacchanals, the other by horses. The Greek traditions may
well be distorted reminiscences of a custom of sacrificing human
beings, and especially divine kings, in the character of Dionysus, a
god who resembled Osiris in many points and was said like him to
have been torn limb from limb. We are told that in Chios men were
rent in pieces as a sacrifice to Dionysus; and since they died the
same death as their god, it is reasonable to suppose that they
personated him. The story that the Thracian Orpheus was similarly
torn limb from limb by the Bacchanals seems to indicate that he too
perished in the character of the god whose death he died. It is
significant that the Thracian Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, is
said to have been put to death in order that the ground, which had
ceased to be fruitful, might regain its fertility.

Further, we read of a Norwegian king, Halfdan the Black, whose body
was cut up and buried in different parts of his kingdom for the sake
of ensuring the fruitfulness of the earth. He is said to have been
drowned at the age of forty through the breaking of the ice in
spring. What followed his death is thus related by the old Norse
historian Snorri Sturluson: "He had been the most prosperous
(literally, blessed with abundance) of all kings. So greatly did men
value him that when the news came that he was dead and his body
removed to Hringariki and intended for burial there, the chief men
from Raumariki and Westfold and Heithmörk came and all requested
that they might take his body with them and bury it in their various
provinces; they thought that it would bring abundance to those who
obtained it. Eventually it was settled that the body was distributed
in four places. The head was laid in a barrow at Steinn in
Hringariki, and each party took away their own share and buried it.
All these barrows are called Halfdan's barrows." It should be
remembered that this Halfdan belonged to the family of the Ynglings,
who traced their descent from Frey, the great Scandinavian god of
fertility.

The natives of Kiwai, an island lying off the mouth of the Fly River
in British New Guinea, tell of a certain magician named Segera, who
had sago for his totem. When Segera was old and ill, he told the
people that he would soon die, but that, nevertheless, he would
cause their gardens to thrive. Accordingly, he instructed them that
when he was dead they should cut him up and place pieces of his
flesh in their gardens, but his head was to be buried in his own
garden. Of him it is said that he outlived the ordinary age, and
that no man knew his father, but that he made the sago good and no
one was hungry any more. Old men who were alive some years ago
affirmed that they had known Segera in their youth, and the general
opinion of the Kiwai people seems to be that Segera died not more
than two generations ago.

Taken all together, these legends point to a widespread practice of
dismembering the body of a king or magician and burying the pieces
in different parts of the country in order to ensure the fertility
of the ground and probably also the fecundity of man and beast.

To return to the human victims whose ashes the Egyptians scattered
with winnowing-fans, the red hair of these unfortunates was probably
significant. For in Egypt the oxen which were sacrificed had also to
be red; a single black or white hair found on the beast would have
disqualified it for the sacrifice. If, as I conjecture, these human
sacrifices were intended to promote the growth of the crops--and the
winnowing of their ashes seems to support this view--redhaired
victims were perhaps selected as best fitted to personate the spirit
of the ruddy grain. For when a god is represented by a living
person, it is natural that the human representative should be chosen
on the ground of his supposed resemblance to the divine original.
Hence the ancient Mexicans, conceiving the maize as a personal being
who went through the whole course of life between seed-time and
harvest, sacrificed new-born babes when the maize was sown, older
children when it had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe,
when they sacrificed old men. A name for Osiris was the "crop" or
"harvest"; and the ancients sometimes explained him as a
personification of the corn.



2. Osiris a Tree-spirit

BUT Osiris was more than a spirit of the corn; he was also a
tree-spirit, and this may perhaps have been his primitive character,
since the worship of trees is naturally older in the history of
religion than the worship of the cereals. The character of Osiris as
a tree-spirit was represented very graphically in a ceremony
described by Firmicus Maternus. A pine-tree having been cut down,
the centre was hollowed out, and with the wood thus excavated an
image of Osiris was made, which was then buried like a corpse in the
hollow of the tree. It is hard to imagine how the conception of a
tree as tenanted by a personal being could be more plainly
expressed. The image of Osiris thus made was kept for a year and
then burned, exactly as was done with the image of Attis which was
attached to the pine-tree. The ceremony of cutting the tree, as
described by Firmicus Maternus, appears to be alluded to by
Plutarch. It was probably the ritual counterpart of the mythical
discovery of the body of Osiris enclosed in the _erica_-tree. In the
hall of Osiris at Denderah the coffin containing the hawk-headed
mummy of the god is clearly depicted as enclosed within a tree,
apparently a conifer, the trunk and branches of which are seen above
and below the coffin. The scene thus corresponds closely both to the
myth and to the ceremony described by Firmicus Maternus.

It accords with the character of Osiris as a tree-spirit that his
worshippers were forbidden to injure fruit-trees, and with his
character as a god of vegetation in general that they were not
allowed to stop up wells of water, which are so important for the
irrigation of hot southern lands. According to one legend, he taught
men to train the vine to poles, to prune its superfluous foliage,
and to extract the juice of the grape. In the papyrus of Nebseni,
written about 1550 B.C., Osiris is depicted sitting in a shrine,
from the roof of which hang clusters of grapes; and in the papyrus
of the royal scribe Nekht we see the god enthroned in front of a
pool, from the banks of which a luxuriant vine, with many bunches of
grapes, grows towards the green face of the seated deity. The ivy
was sacred to him, and was called his plant because it is always
green.



3. Osiris a God of Fertility

AS A GOD of vegetation Osiris was naturally conceived as a god of
creative energy in general, since men at a certain stage of
evolution fail to distinguish between the reproductive powers of
animals and of plants. Hence a striking feature in his worship was
the coarse but expressive symbolism by which this aspect of his
nature was presented to the eye not merely of the initiated but of
the multitude. At his festival women used to go about the villages
singing songs in his praise and carrying obscene images of him which
they set in motion by means of strings. The custom was probably a
charm to ensure the growth of the crops. A similar image of him,
decked with all the fruits of the earth, is said to have stood in a
temple before a figure of Isis, and in the chambers dedicated to him
at Philae the dead god is portrayed lying on his bier in an attitude
which indicates in the plainest way that even in death his
generative virtue was not extinct but only suspended, ready to prove
a source of life and fertility to the world when the opportunity
should offer. Hymns addressed to Osiris contain allusions to this
important side of his nature. In one of them it is said that the
world waxes green in triumph through him; and another declares,
"Thou art the father and mother of mankind, they live on thy breath,
they subsist on the flesh of thy body." We may conjecture that in
this paternal aspect he was supposed, like other gods of fertility,
to bless men and women with offspring, and that the processions at
his festival were intended to promote this object as well as to
quicken the seed in the ground. It would be to misjudge ancient
religion to denounce as lewd and profligate the emblems and the
ceremonies which the Egyptians employed for the purpose of giving
effect to this conception of the divine power. The ends which they
proposed to themselves in these rites were natural and laudable;
only the means they adopted to compass them were mistaken. A similar
fallacy induced the Greeks to adopt a like symbolism in their
Dionysiac festivals, and the superficial but striking resemblance
thus produced between the two religions has perhaps more than
anything else misled enquirers, both ancient and modern, into
identifying worships which, though certainly akin in nature, are
perfectly distinct and independent in origin.



4. Osiris a God of the Dead

WE have seen that in one of his aspects Osiris was the ruler and
judge of the dead. To a people like the Egyptians, who not only
believed in a life beyond the grave but actually spent much of their
time, labour, and money in preparing for it, this office of the god
must have appeared hardly, if at all, less important than his
function of making the earth to bring forth its fruits in due
season. We may assume that in the faith of his worshippers the two
provinces of the god were intimately connected. In laying their dead
in the grave they committed them to his keeping who could raise them
from the dust to life eternal, even as he caused the seed to spring
from the ground. Of that faith the corn-stuffed effigies of Osiris
found in Egyptian tombs furnish an eloquent and un-equivocal
testimony. They were at once an emblem and an instrument of
resurrection. Thus from the sprouting of the grain the ancient
Egyptians drew an augury of human immortality. They are not the only
people who have built the same lofty hopes on the same slender
foundation.

A god who thus fed his people with his own broken body in this life,
and who held out to them a promise of a blissful eternity in a
better world hereafter, naturally reigned supreme in their
affections. We need not wonder, therefore, that in Egypt the worship
of the other gods was overshadowed by that of Osiris, and that while
they were revered each in his own district, he and his divine
partner Isis were adored in all.




XLI. Isis

THE ORIGINAL meaning of the goddess Isis is still more difficult to
determine than that of her brother and husband Osiris. Her
attributes and epithets were so numerous that in the hieroglyphics
she is called "the many-named," "the thousand-named," and in Greek
inscriptions "the myriad-named." Yet in her complex nature it is
perhaps still possible to detect the original nucleus round which by
a slow process of accretion the other elements gathered. For if her
brother and husband Osiris was in one of his aspects the corn-god,
as we have seen reason to believe, she must surely have been the
corn-goddess. There are at least some grounds for thinking so. For
if we may trust Diodorus Siculus, whose authority appears to have
been the Egyptian historian Manetho, the discovery of wheat and
barley was attributed to Isis, and at her festivals stalks of these
grains were carried in procession to commemorate the boon she had
conferred on men. A further detail is added by Augustine. He says
that Isis made the discovery of barley at the moment when she was
sacrificing to the common ancestors of her husband and herself, all
of whom had been kings, and that she showed the newly discovered
ears of barley to Osiris and his councillor Thoth or Mercury, as
Roman writers called him. That is why, adds Augustine, they identify
Isis with Ceres. Further, at harvest-time, when the Egyptian reapers
had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their
breasts, wailing and calling upon Isis. The custom has been already
explained as a lamen for the corn-spirit slain under the sickle.
Amongst the epithets by which Isis is designated in the inscriptions
are "Creatress of green things," "Green goddess, whose green colour
is like unto the greenness of the earth," "Lady of Bread," "Lady of
Beer," "Lady of Abundance." According to Brugsch she is "not only
the creatress of the fresh verdure of vegetation which covers the
earth, but is actually the green corn-field itself, which is
personified as a goddess." This is confirmed by her epithet _Sochit_
or _Sochet,_ meaning "a corn-field," a sense which the word still
retains in Coptic. The Greeks conceived of Isis as a corn-goddess,
for they identified her with Demeter. In a Greek epigram she is
described as "she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth,"
and "the mother of the ears of corn"; and in a hymn composed in her
honour she speaks of herself as "queen of the wheat-field," and is
described as "charged with the care of the fruitful furrow's
wheat-rich path." Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often
represented her with ears of corn on her head or in her hand.

Such, we may suppose, was Isis in the olden time, a rustic
Corn-Mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains. But the
homely features of the clownish goddess could hardly be traced in
the refined, the saintly form which, spiritualised by ages of
religious evolution, she presented to her worshippers of after days
as the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of nature,
encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial and
mysterious sanctity. Thus chastened and transfigured she won many
hearts far beyond the boundaries of her native land. In that welter
of religions which accompanied the decline of national life in
antiquity her worship was one of the most popular at Rome and
throughout the empire. Some of the Roman emperors themselves were
openly addicted to it. And however the religion of Isis may, like
any other, have been often worn as a cloak by men and women of loose
life, her rites appear on the whole to have been honourably
distinguished by a dignity and composure, a solemnity and decorum,
well fitted to soothe the troubled mind, to ease the burdened heart.
They appealed therefore to gentle spirits, and above all to women,
whom the bloody and licentious rites of other Oriental goddesses
only shocked and repelled. We need not wonder, then, that in a
period of decadence, when traditional faiths were shaken, when
systems clashed, when men's minds were disquieted, when the fabric
of empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous rents
and fissures, the serene figure of Isis with her spiritual calm, her
gracious promise of immortality, should have appeared to many like a
star in a stormy sky, and should have roused in their breasts a
rapture of devotion not unlike that which was paid in the Middle
Ages to the Virgin Mary. Indeed her stately ritual, with its shaven
and tonsured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music,
its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn processions,
its jewelled images of the Mother of God, presented many points of
similarity to the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism. The
resemblance need not be purely accidental. Ancient Egypt may have
contributed its share to the gorgeous symbolism of the Catholic
Church as well as to the pale abstractions of her theology.
Certainly in art the figure of Isis suckling the infant Horus is so
like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received
the adoration of ignorant Christians. And to Isis in her later
character of patroness of mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her
beautiful epithet of _Stella Maris,_ "Star of the Sea," under which
she is adored by tempest-tossed sailors. The attributes of a marine
deity may have been bestowed on Isis by the sea-faring Greeks of
Alexandria. They are quite foreign to her original character and to
the habits of the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea. On this
hypothesis Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings
rises from the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a
harbinger of halcyon weather to mariners, was the true _Stella
Maris,_ "the Star of the Sea."



XLII. Osiris and the Sun

OSIRIS has been sometimes interpreted as the sun-god, and in modern
times this view has been held by so many distinguished writers that
it deserves a brief examination. If we enquire on what evidence
Osiris has been identified with the sun or the sun-god, it will be
found on analysis to be minute in quantity and dubious, where it is
not absolutely worthless, in quality. The diligent Jablonski, the
first modern scholar to collect and sift the testimony of classical
writers on Egyptian religion, says that it can be shown in many ways
that Osiris is the sun, and that he could produce a cloud of
witnesses to prove it, but that it is needless to do so, since no
learned man is ignorant of the fact. Of the ancient writers whom he
condescends to quote, the only two who expressly identify Osiris
with the sun are Diodorus and Macrobius. But little weight can be
attached to their evidence; for the statement of Diodorus is vague
and rhetorical, and the reasons which Macrobius, one of the fathers
of solar mythology, assigns for the identification are exceedingly
slight.

The ground upon which some modern writers seem chiefly to rely for
the identification of Osiris with the sun is that the story of his
death fits better with the solar phenomena than with any other in
nature. It may readily be admitted that the daily appearance and
disappearance of the sun might very naturally be expressed by a myth
of his death and resurrection; and writers who regard Osiris as the
sun are careful to indicate that it is the diurnal, and not the
annual, course of the sun to which they understand the myth to
apply. Thus Renouf, who identified Osiris with the sun, admitted
that the Egyptian sun could not with any show of reason be described
as dead in winter. But if his daily death was the theme of the
legend, why was it celebrated by an annual ceremony? This fact alone
seems fatal to the interpretation of the myth as descriptive of
sunset and sunrise. Again, though the sun may be said to die daily,
in what sense can he be said to be torn in pieces?

In the course of our enquiry it has, I trust, been made clear that
there is another natural phenomenon to which the conception of death
and resurrection is as applicable as to sunset and sunrise, and
which, as a matter of fact, has been so conceived and represented in
folk-custom. That phenomenon is the annual growth and decay of
vegetation. A strong reason for interpreting the death of Osiris as
the decay of vegetation rather than as the sunset is to be found in
the general, though not unanimous, voice of antiquity, which classed
together the worship and myths of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus,
and Demeter, as religions of essentially the same type. The
consensus of ancient opinion on this subject seems too great to be
rejected as a mere fancy. So closely did the rites of Osiris
resemble those of Adonis at Byblus that some of the people of Byblus
themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not Adonis whose death
was mourned by them. Such a view could certainly not have been held
if the rituals of the two gods had not been so alike as to be almost
indistinguishable. Herodotus found the similarity between the rites
of Osiris and Dionysus so great, that he thought it impossible the
latter could have arisen independently; they must, he supposed, have
been recently borrowed, with slight alterations, by the Greeks from
the Egyptians. Again, Plutarch, a very keen student of comparative
religion, insists upon the detailed resemblance of the rites of
Osiris to those of Dionysus. We cannot reject the evidence of such
intelligent and trustworthy witnesses on plain matters of fact which
fell under their own cognizance. Their explanations of the worships
it is indeed possible to reject, for the meaning of religious cults
is often open to question; but resemblances of ritual are matters of
observation. Therefore, those who explain Osiris as the sun are
driven to the alternative of either dismissing as mistaken the
testimony of antiquity to the similarity of the rites of Osiris,
Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, or of interpreting all these
rites as sun-worship. No modern scholar has fairly faced and
accepted either side of this alternative. To accept the former would
be to affirm that we know the rites of these deities better than the
men who practised, or at least who witnessed them. To accept the
latter would involve a wrenching, clipping, mangling, and distorting
of myth and ritual from which even Macrobius shrank. On the other
hand, the view that the essence of all these rites was the mimic
death and revival of vegetation, explains them separately and
collectively in an easy and natural way, and harmonises with the
general testimony borne by the ancients to their substantial
similarity.



XLIII. Dionysus

IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised
nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes
of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of
vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death
and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of
alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in
form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that is to say, it was
intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the
vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication of animals,
which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of winter. In the
ancient world, however, such ideas and such rites were by no means
confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia
and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious
mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of
livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the
shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers
in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples
borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient the conception of
the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in
which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of
the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced
in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no
more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous
coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the
similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and
under different skies. The Greek had no need to journey into far
countries to learn the vicissitudes of the seasons, to mark the
fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the transient glory of the
golden corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by
year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the
bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of
winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst
of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of
nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of
imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery
of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and
goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the
seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with
alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and
sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of
rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration
of some of the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from
the dead may furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set
side by side with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We
begin with Dionysus.

The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification
of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the
grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling
music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude
tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its
mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to
the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet
appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to
revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion
spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly
deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the
pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present
to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and
modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris,
imported directly from Egypt into Greece. But the great
preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the
similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the
similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded.

While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic
manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general.
Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to "Dionysus
of the tree." In Boeotia one of his titles was "Dionysus in the
tree." His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but
draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and
with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to show the
nature of the deity. On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing
out of a low tree or bush. At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of
Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been
broken by the wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees: prayers
were offered to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was
especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up
an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their
orchards. He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst
which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was
referred to as "well-fruited," "he of the green fruit," and "making
the fruit to grow." One of his titles was "teeming" or "bursting"
(as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica
and at Patrae in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the
prosperity of the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly
sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The
Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular
pine-tree "equally with the god," so they made two images of
Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand,
tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his
worshippers. Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially
associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a
Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos,
where figs were called _meilicha,_ there was a Dionysus Meilichios,
the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.

Further, there are indications, few but significant, that Dionysus
was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He is spoken
of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is reported to have
been the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which before had been
dragged by hand alone; and some people found in this tradition the
clue to the bovine shape in which, as we shall see, the god was
often supposed to present himself to his worshippers. Thus guiding
the ploughshare and scattering the seed as he went, Dionysus is said
to have eased the labour of the husbandman. Further, we are told
that in the land of the Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a
great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at his festival a bright
light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant harvest
vouchsafed by the diety; but if the crops were to fail that year,
the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary
as at other times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the
winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which
down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain
from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple
agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus;
indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in
a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an
infant so cradled; and from these traditions and representations he
derived the epithet of _Liknites,_ that is, "He of the
Winnowing-fan."

Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a
violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his
sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred
rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in the
form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she bore him Zagreus, that
is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he born, when the babe
mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the great god by
brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not occupy
the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces whitened
with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking at himself
in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by turning himself
into various shapes, assuming the likeness successively of Zeus and
Cronus, of a young man, of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. Finally,
in the form of a bull, he was cut to pieces by the murderous knives
of his enemies. His Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus Maternus,
ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter, a
Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and
sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno
cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to
the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely.
Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with rattles
and a cunningly-wrought looking glass lured him into an ambush,
where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from
limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister
Minerva, who had shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to
Jupiter on his return, revealing to him the whole history of the
crime. In his rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and,
to soothe his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which
he enclosed the child's heart, and then built a temple in his
honour. In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the
myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and
queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who
danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to
have done round the infant Zeus. Very noteworthy is the legend,
recorded both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus
occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus
tells us that "Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by
Zeus. For his father set him on the kingly throne, and placed in his
hand the sceptre, and made him king of all the gods of the world."
Such traditions point to a custom of temporarily investing the
king's son with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing
him instead of his father. Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung
from the blood of Dionysus, as anemones from the blood of Adonis and
violets from the blood of Attis: hence women refrained from eating
seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria. According
to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the
command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave
of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue
of Apollo. However, according to another account, the grave of
Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in
pieces. Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned,
but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. According
to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and
Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him
young again. In others it is simply said that shortly after his
burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven; or that Zeus
raised him up as he lay mortally wounded; or that Zeus swallowed the
heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele, who in the
common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart
was pounded up and given in a potion to Semele, who thereby
conceived him.

Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans
celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was
represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his
last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who
tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods
with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed
to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of
flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god
had been lured to his doom. Where the resurrection formed part of
the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it even appears that a
general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was
inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his
wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the
thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and
revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A different form of the myth
of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into
Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. The local Argive
tradition was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his
return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was
annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him
from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the
lake as an offering to the warder of the dead. Whether this was a
spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly
celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to
bring the season with him. Deities of vegetation, who are believed
to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come
to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both
Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.

A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first
sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation,
is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape,
especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus
he is spoken of as "cow-born," "bull," "bull-shaped," "bull-faced,"
"bull-browed," "bull-horned," "horn-bearing," "two-horned,"
"horned." He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a
bull. His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or
with bull horns; and he was painted with horns. Types of the horned
Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity. On
one statuette he appears clad in a bull's hide, the head, horns, and
hoofs hanging down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with
clusters of grapes round his brow, and a calf's head, with sprouting
horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the
god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman's lap. The
people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men,
who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion, used to pick
out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary of the god.
Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the particular
bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for at his
festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis
hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull's foot.
They sang, "Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea;
come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull's foot, O
goodly bull, O goodly bull!" The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in
imitation of their god. According to the myth, it was in the shape
of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans,
when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live
bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring
of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of
the Dionysiac rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the
god as a bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief
that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred
rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces,
we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his
festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be
killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.

Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his
names was "Kid." At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under
the title of "the one of the Black Goatskin," and a legend ran that
on a certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he
took the title. In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in
autumn the plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden
foliage of the fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a
goat, which the husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of
protecting their vines against blight. The image probably
represented the vine-god himself. To save him from the wrath of
Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and
when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus
was turned into a goat. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a
live goat and devoured it raw, they must have believed that they
were eating the body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in
pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw
has been practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times.
We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity
to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of
Bacchus.

The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine
more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human
culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance
of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their
bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes
(which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and
sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become
purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so,
the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves,
still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with the
anthropomorphic gods who have developed out of them. The origin of
the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having
been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These
explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based
on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal
or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only
exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to
explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. Devised for
the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to
the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth
would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The
reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus exemplifies a myth of
the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because
they injured the vine. Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally
an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested
himself of his animal character and had become essentially
anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be
regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity himself, but as a
sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason had to be assigned
why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that
this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine,
the object of the god's especial care. Thus we have the strange
spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is
his own enemy. And as the deity is supposed to partake of the victim
offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god's old
self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is
represented as eating raw goat's blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is
called "eater of bulls." On the analogy of these instances we may
conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the eater of a
particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but
the deity himself. Later on we shall find that some savages
propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of their
own bodies.

All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should
appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point had
better be deferred till we have discussed the character and
attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to mention that in some
places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at
the rites of Dionysus. This was the practice in Chios and Tenedos;
and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been
formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a
child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted. At Orchomenus, as
we have seen, the human victim was taken from the women of an old
royal family. As the slain bull or goat represented the slain god,
so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him.

The legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings who
are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals, the
other by horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus, may
be, as I have already suggested, distorted reminiscences of a custom
of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of
dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields for
the purpose of fertilising them. It is probably no mere coincidence
that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in pieces at Thebes,
the very place where according to legend the same fate befell king
Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vine-god.

However, a tradition of human sacrifice may sometimes have been a
mere misinterpretation of a sacrificial ritual in which an animal
victim was treated as a human being. For example, at Tenedos the
new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins, and the
mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed. At Rome a shegoat
was sacrificed to Vedijovis as if it were a human victim. Yet on the
other hand it is equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that
these curious rites were themselves mitigations of an older and
ruder custom of sacrificing human beings, and that the later
pretence of treating the sacrificial victims as if they were human
beings was merely part of a pious and merciful fraud, which palmed
off on the deity less precious victims than living men and women.
This interpretation is supported by many undoubted cases in which
animals have been substituted for human victims.



XLIV. Demeter and Persephone

DIONYSUS was not the only Greek deity whose tragic story and ritual
appear to reflect the decay and revival of vegetation. In another
form and with a different application the old tale reappears in the
myth of Demeter and Persephone. Substantially their myth is
identical with the Syrian one of Aphrodite (Astarte) and Adonis, the
Phrygian one of Cybele and Attis, and the Egyptian one of Isis and
Osiris. In the Greek fable, as in its Asiatic and Egyptian
counterparts, a goddess mourns the loss of a loved one, who
personifies the vegetation, more especially the corn, which dies in
winter to revive in spring; only whereas the Oriental imagination
figured the loved and lost one as a dead lover or a dead husband
lamented by his leman or his wife, Greek fancy embodied the same
idea in the tenderer and purer form of a dead daughter bewailed by
her sorrowing mother.

The oldest literary document which narrates the myth of Demeter and
Persephone is the beautiful Homeric _Hymn to Demeter,_ which critics
assign to the seventh century before our era. The object of the poem
is to explain the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the
complete silence of the poet as to Athens and the Athenians, who in
after ages took conspicuous part in the festival, renders it
probable that the hymn was composed in the far off time when Eleusis
was still a petty independent state, and before the stately
procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile, in bright September
days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills which divides the
flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious olive-clad expanse
of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the hymn reveals to us the
conception which the writer entertained of the character and
functions of the two goddesses; their natural shapes stand out
sharply enough under the thin veil of poetical imagery. The youthful
Persephone, so runs the tale, was gathering roses and lilies,
crocuses and violets, hyacinths and narcissuses in a lush meadow,
when the earth gaped and Pluto, lord of the Dead, issuing from the
abyss carried her off on his golden car to be his bride and queen in
the gloomy subterranean world. Her sorrowing mother Demeter, with
her yellow tresses veiled in a dark mourning mantle, sought her over
land and sea, and learning from the Sun her daughter's fate she
withdrew in high dudgeon from the gods and took up her abode at
Eleusis, where she presented herself to the king's daughters in the
guise of an old woman, sitting sadly under the shadow of an olive
tree beside the Maiden's Well, to which the damsels had come to draw
water in bronze pitchers for their father's house. In her wrath at
her bereavement the goddess suffered not the seed to grow in the
earth but kept it hidden under ground, and she vowed that never
would she set foot on Olympus and never would she let the corn
sprout till her lost daughter should be restored to her. Vainly the
oxen dragged the ploughs to and fro in the fields; vainly the sower
dropped the barley seed in the brown furrows; nothing came up from
the parched and crumbling soil. Even the Rarian plain near Eleusis,
which was wont to wave with yellow harvests, lay bare and fallow.
Mankind would have perished of hunger and the gods would have been
robbed of the sacrifices which were their due, if Zeus in alarm had
not commanded Pluto to disgorge his prey, to restore his bride
Persephone to her mother Demeter. The grim lord of the Dead smiled
and obeyed, but before he sent back his queen to the upper air on a
golden car, he gave her the seed of a pomegranate to eat, which
ensured that she would return to him. But Zeus stipulated that
henceforth Persephone should spend two thirds of every year with her
mother and the gods in the upper world and one third of the year
with her husband in the nether world, from which she was to return
year by year when the earth was gay with spring flowers. Gladly the
daughter then returned to the sunshine, gladly her mother received
her and fell upon her neck; and in her joy at recovering the lost
one Demeter made the corn to sprout from the clods of the ploughed
fields and all the broad earth to be heavy with leaves and blossoms.
And straightway she went and showed this happy sight to the princes
of Eleusis, to Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Diocles, and to the king
Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed to them her sacred rites
and mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is the mortal man who has
seen these things, but he who has had no share of them in life will
never be happy in death when he has descended into the darkness of
the grave. So the two goddesses departed to dwell in bliss with the
gods on Olympus; and the bard ends the hymn with a pious prayer to
Demeter and Persephone that they would be pleased to grant him a
livelihood in return for his song.

It has been generally recognised, and indeed it seems scarcely open
to doubt, that the main theme which the poet set before himself in
composing this hymn was to describe the traditional foundation of
the Eleusinian mysteries by the goddess Demeter. The whole poem
leads up to the transformation scene in which the bare leafless
expanse of the Eleusinian plain is suddenly turned, at the will of
the goddess, into a vast sheet of ruddy corn; the beneficent deity
takes the princes of Eleusis, shows them what she has done, teaches
them her mystic rites, and vanishes with her daughter to heaven. The
revelation of the mysteries is the triumphal close of the piece.
This conclusion is confirmed by a more minute examination of the
poem, which proves that the poet has given, not merely a general
account of the foundation of the mysteries, but also in more or less
veiled language mythical explanations of the origin of particular
rites which we have good reason to believe formed essential features
of the festival. Amongst the rites as to which the poet thus drops
significant hints are the preliminary fast of the candidates for
initiation, the torchlight procession, the all-night vigil, the
sitting of the candidates, veiled and in silence, on stools covered
with sheepskins, the use of scurrilous language, the breaking of
ribald jests, and the solemn communion with the divinity by
participation in a draught of barley-water from a holy chalice.

But there is yet another and a deeper secret of the mysteries which
the author of the poem appears to have divulged under cover of his
narrative. He tells us how, as soon as she had transformed the
barren brown expanse of the Eleusinian plain into a field of golden
grain, she gladdened the eyes of Triptolemus and the other
Eleusinian princes by showing them the growing or standing corn.
When we compare this part of the story with the statement of a
Christian writer of the second century, Hippolytus, that the very
heart of the mysteries consisted in showing to the initiated a
reaped ear of corn, we can hardly doubt that the poet of the hymn
was well acquainted with this solemn rite, and that he deliberately
intended to explain its origin in precisely the same way as he
explained other rites of the mysteries, namely by representing
Demeter as having set the example of performing the ceremony in her
own person. Thus myth and ritual mutually explain and confirm each
other. The poet of the seventh century before our era gives us the
myth--he could not without sacrilege have revealed the ritual: the
Christian father reveals the ritual, and his revelation accords
perfectly with the veiled hint of the old poet. On the whole, then,
we may, with many modern scholars, confidently accept the statement
of the learned Christian father Clement of Alexandria, that the myth
of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a sacred drama in the
mysteries of Eleusis.

But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal part,
of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancient Greece, we
have still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped of later
accretions, the original kernel of the myth which appears to later
ages surrounded and transfigured by an aureole of awe and mystery,
lit up by some of the most brilliant rays of Grecian literature and
art? If we follow the indications given by our oldest literary
authority on the subject, the author of the Homeric hymn to Demeter,
the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of the two goddesses,
the mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into
personifications of the corn. At least this appears to be fairly
certain for the daughter Persephone. The goddess who spends three
or, according to another version of the myth, six months of every
year with the dead under ground and the remainder of the year with
the living above ground; in whose absence the barley seed is hidden
in the earth and the fields lie bare and fallow; on whose return in
spring to the upper world the corn shoots up from the clods and the
earth is heavy with leaves and blossoms--this goddess can surely be
nothing else than a mythical embodiment of the vegetation, and
particularly of the corn, which is buried under the soil for some
months of every winter and comes to life again, as from the grave,
in the sprouting cornstalks and the opening flowers and foliage of
every spring. No other reasonable and probable explanation of
Persephone seems possible. And if the daughter goddess was a
personification of the young corn of the present year, may not the
mother goddess be a personification of the old corn of last year,
which has given birth to the new crops? The only alternative to this
view of Demeter would seem to be to suppose that she is a
personification of the earth, from whose broad bosom the corn and
all other plants spring up, and of which accordingly they may
appropriately enough be regarded as the daughters. This view of the
original nature of Demeter has indeed been taken by some writers,
both ancient and modern, and it is one which can be reasonably
maintained. But it appears to have been rejected by the author of
the Homeric hymn to Demeter, for he not only distinguishes Demeter
from the personified Earth but places the two in the sharpest
opposition to each other. He tells us that it was Earth who, in
accordance with the will of Zeus and to please Pluto, lured
Persephone to her doom by causing the narcissuses to grow which
tempted the young goddess to stray far beyond the reach of help in
the lush meadow. Thus Demeter of the hymn, far from being identical
with the Earth-goddess, must have regarded that divinity as her
worst enemy, since it was to her insidious wiles that she owed the
loss of her daughter. But if the Demeter of the hymn cannot have
been a personification of the earth, the only alternative apparently
is to conclude that she was a personification of the corn.

The conclusion is confirmed by the monuments; for in ancient art
Demeter and Persephone are alike characterised as goddesses of the
corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads and by the
stalks of corn which they hold in their hands. Again, it was Demeter
who first revealed to the Athenians the secret of the corn and
diffused the beneficent discovery far and wide through the agency of
Triptolemus, whom she sent forth as an itinerant missionary to
communicate the boon to all mankind. On monuments of art, especially
in vase-paintings, he is constantly represented along with Demeter
in this capacity, holding corn-stalks in his hand and sitting in his
car, which is sometimes winged and sometimes drawn by dragons, and
from which he is said to have sowed the seed down on the whole world
as he sped through the air. In gratitude for the priceless boon many
Greek cities long continued to send the first-fruits of their barley
and wheat harvests as thank-offerings to the Two Goddesses, Demeter
and Persephone, at Eleusis, where subterranean granaries were built
to store the overflowing contributions. Theocritus tells how in the
island of Cos, in the sweet-scented summer time, the farmer brought
the first-fruits of the harvest to Demeter who had filled his
threshingfloor with barley, and whose rustic image held sheaves and
poppies in her hands. Many of the epithets bestowed by the ancients
on Demeter mark her intimate association with the corn in the
clearest manner.

How deeply implanted in the mind of the ancient Greeks was this
faith in Demeter as goddess of the corn may be judged by the
circumstance that the faith actually persisted among their Christian
descendants at her old sanctuary of Eleusis down to the beginning of
the nineteenth century. For when the English traveller Dodwell
revisited Eleusis, the inhabitants lamented to him the loss of a
colossal image of Demeter, which was carried off by Clarke in 1802
and presented to the University of Cambridge, where it still
remains. "In my first journey to Greece," says Dodwell, "this
protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the centre of a
threshing-floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The villagers were
impressed with a persuasion that their rich harvests were the effect
of her bounty, and since her removal, their abundance, as they
assured me, has disappeared." Thus we see the Corn Goddess Demeter
standing on the threshing-floor of Eleusis and dispensing corn to
her worshippers in the nineteenth century of the Christian era,
precisely as her image stood and dispensed corn to her worshippers
on the threshing-floor of Cos in the days of Theocritus. And just as
the people of Eleusis in the nineteenth century attributed the
diminution of their harvests to the loss of the image of Demeter, so
in antiquity the Sicilians, a corn-growing people devoted to the
worship of the two Corn Goddesses, lamented that the crops of many
towns had perished because the unscrupulous Roman governor Verres
had impiously carried off the image of Demeter from her famous
temple at Henna. Could we ask for a clearer proof that Demeter was
indeed the goddess of the corn than this belief, held by the Greeks
down to modern times, that the corn-crops depended on her presence
and bounty and perished when her image was removed?

On the whole, then, if, ignoring theories, we adhere to the evidence
of the ancients themselves in regard to the rites of Eleusis, we
shall probably incline to agree with the most learned of ancient
antiquaries, the Roman Varro, who, to quote Augustine's report of
his opinion, "interpreted the whole of the Eleusinian mysteries as
relating to the corn which Ceres (Demeter) had discovered, and to
Proserpine (Persephone), whom Pluto had carried off from her. And
Proserpine herself he said, signifies the fecundity of the seeds,
the failure of which at a certain time had caused the earth to mourn
for barrenness, and therefore had given rise to the opinion that the
daughter of Ceres, that is, fecundity itself, had been ravished by
Pluto and detained in the nether world; and when the dearth had been
publicly mourned and fecundity had returned once more, there was
gladness at the return of Proserpine and solemn rites were
instituted accordingly. After that he says," continues Augustine,
reporting Varro, "that many things were taught in her mysteries
which had no reference but to the discovery of the corn."

Thus far I have for the most part assumed an identity of nature
between Demeter and Persephone, the divine mother and daughter
personifying the corn in its double aspect of the seed-corn of last
year and the ripe ears of this, and this view of the substantial
unity of mother and daughter is borne out by their portraits in
Greek art, which are often so alike as to be indistinguishable. Such
a close resemblance between the artistic types of Demeter and
Persephone militates decidedly against the view that the two
goddesses are mythical embodiments of two things so different and so
easily distinguishable from each other as the earth and the
vegetation which springs from it. Had Greek artists accepted that
view of Demeter and Persephone, they could surely have devised types
of them which would have brought out the deep distinction between
the goddesses. And if Demeter did not personify the earth, can there
be any reasonable doubt that, like her daughter, she personified the
corn which was so commonly called by her name from the time of Homer
downwards? The essential identity of mother and daughter is
suggested, not only by the close resemblance of their artistic
types, but also by the official title of "the Two Goddesses" which
was regularly applied to them in the great sanctuary at Eleusis
without any specification of their individual attributes and titles,
as if their separate individualities had almost merged in a single
divine substance.

Surveying the evidence as a whole, we are fairly entitled to
conclude that in the mind of the ordinary Greek the two goddesses
were essentially personifications of the corn, and that in this germ
the whole efflorescence of their religion finds implicitly its
explanation. But to maintain this is not to deny that in the long
course of religious evolution high moral and spiritual conceptions
were grafted on this simple original stock and blossomed out into
fairer flowers than the bloom of the barley and the wheat. Above
all, the thought of the seed buried in the earth in order to spring
up to new and higher life readily suggested a comparison with human
destiny, and strengthened the hope that for man too the grave may be
but the beginning of a better and happier existence in some brighter
world unknown. This simple and natural reflection seems perfectly
sufficient to explain the association of the Corn Goddess at Eleusis
with the mystery of death and the hope of a blissful immortality.
For that the ancients regarded initiation in the Eleusinian
mysteries as a key to unlock the gates of Paradise appears to be
proved by the allusions which well-informed writers among them drop
to the happiness in store for the initiated hereafter. No doubt it
is easy for us to discern the flimsiness of the logical foundation
on which such high hopes were built. But drowning men clutch at
straws, and we need not wonder that the Greeks, like ourselves, with
death before them and a great love of life in their hearts, should
not have stopped to weigh with too nice a hand the arguments that
told for and against the prospect of human immortality. The
reasoning that satisfied Saint Paul and has brought comfort to
untold thousands of sorrowing Christians, standing by the deathbed
or the open grave of their loved ones, was good enough to pass
muster with ancient pagans, when they too bowed their heads under
the burden of grief, and, with the taper of life burning low in the
socket, looked forward into the darkness of the unknown. Therefore
we do no indignity to the myth of Demeter and Persephone--one of the
few myths in which the sunshine and clarity of the Greek genius are
crossed by the shadow and mystery of death--when we trace its origin
to some of the most familiar, yet eternally affecting aspects of
nature, to the melancholy gloom and decay of autumn and to the
freshness, the brightness, and the verdure of spring.



XLV. The Corn-Mother and the Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe

IT has been argued by W. Mannhardt that the first part of Demeter's
name is derived from an alleged Cretan word _deai,_ "barley," and
that accordingly Demeter means neither more nor less than
"Barley-mother" or "Corn-mother"; for the root of the word seems to
have been applied to different kinds of grain by different branches
of the Aryans. As Crete appears to have been one of the most ancient
seats of the worship of Demeter, it would not be surprising if her
name were of Cretan origin. But the etymology is open to serious
objections, and it is safer therefore to lay no stress on it. Be
that as it may, we have found independent reasons for identifying
Demeter as the Corn-mother, and of the two species of corn
associated with her in Greek religion, namely barley and wheat, the
barley has perhaps the better claim to be her original element; for
not only would it seem to have been the staple food of the Greeks in
the Homeric age, but there are grounds for believing that it is one
of the oldest, if not the very oldest, cereal cultivated by the
Aryan race. Certainly the use of barley in the religious ritual of
the ancient Hindoos as well as of the ancient Greeks furnishes a
strong argument in favour of the great antiquity of its cultivation,
which is known to have been practised by the lake-dwellers of the
Stone Age in Europe.

Analogies to the Corn-mother or Barley-mother of ancient Greece have
been collected in great abundance by W. Mannhardt from the folk-lore
of modern Europe. The following may serve as specimens.

In Germany the corn is very commonly personified under the name of
the Corn-mother. Thus in spring, when the corn waves in the wind,
the peasants say, "There comes the Corn-mother," or "The Corn-mother
is running over the field," or "The Corn-mother is going through the
corn." When children wish to go into the fields to pull the blue
corn-flowers or the red poppies, they are told not to do so, because
the Corn-mother is sitting in the corn and will catch them. Or again
she is called, according to the crop, the Rye-mother or the
Pea-mother, and children are warned against straying in the rye or
among the peas by threats of the Rye-mother or the Pea-mother. Again
the Corn-mother is believed to make the crop grow. Thus in the
neighbourhood of Magdeburg it is sometimes said, "It will be a good
year for flax; the Flax-mother has been seen." In a village of
Styria it is said that the Corn-mother, in the shape of a female
puppet made out of the last sheaf of corn and dressed in white, may
be seen at mid-night in the corn-fields, which she fertilises by
passing through them; but if she is angry with a farmer, she withers
up all his corn.

Further, the Corn-mother plays an important part in harvest customs.
She is believed to be present in the handful of corn which is left
standing last on the field; and with the cutting of this last
handful she is caught, or driven away, or killed. In the first of
these cases, the last sheaf is carried joyfully home and honoured as
a divine being. It is placed in the barn, and at threshing the
corn-spirit appears again. In the Hanoverian district of Hadeln the
reapers stand round the last sheaf and beat it with sticks in order
to drive the Corn-mother out of it. They call to each other, "There
she is! hit her! Take care she doesn't catch you!" The beating goes
on till the grain is completely threshed out; then the Corn-mother
is believed to be driven away. In the neighbourhood of Danzig the
person who cuts the last ears of corn makes them into a doll, which
is called the Corn-mother or the Old Woman and is brought home on
the last waggon. In some parts of Holstein the last sheaf is dressed
in woman's clothes and called the Corn-mother. It is carried home on
the last waggon, and then thoroughly drenched with water. The
drenching with water is doubtless a rain-charm. In the district of
Bruck in Styria the last sheaf, called the Corn-mother, is made up
into the shape of a woman by the oldest married woman in the
village, of an age from fifty to fifty-five years. The finest ears
are plucked out of it and made into a wreath, which, twined with
flowers, is carried on her head by the prettiest girl of the village
to the farmer or squire, while the Corn-mother is laid down in the
barn to keep off the mice. In other villages of the same district
the Corn-mother, at the close of harvest, is carried by two lads at
the top of a pole. They march behind the girl who wears the wreath
to the squire's house, and while he receives the wreath and hangs it
up in the hall, the Corn-mother is placed on the top of a pile of
wood, where she is the centre of the harvest supper and dance.
Afterwards she is hung up in the barn and remains there till the
threshing is over. The man who gives the last stroke at threshing is
called the son of the Corn-mother; he is tied up in the Corn-mother,
beaten, and carried through the village. The wreath is dedicated in
church on the following Sunday; and on Easter Eve the grain is
rubbed out of it by a seven-year-old girl and scattered amongst the
young corn. At Christmas the straw of the wreath is placed in the
manger to make the cattle thrive. Here the fertilising power of the
Corn-mother is plainly brought out by scattering the seed taken from
her body (for the wreath is made out of the Corn-mother) among the
new corn; and her influence over animal life is indicated by placing
the straw in the manger. Amongst the Slavs also the last sheaf is
known as the Rye-mother, the Wheat-mother, the Oats-mother, the
Barley-mother, and so on, according to the crop. In the district of
Tarnow, Galicia, the wreath made out of the last stalks is called
the Wheat-mother, Rye-mother, or Pea-mother. It is placed on a
girl's head and kept till spring, when some of the grain is mixed
with the seed-corn. Here again the fertilising power of the
Corn-mother is indicated. In France, also, in the neighbourhood of
Auxerre, the last sheaf goes by the name of the Mother of the Wheat,
Mother of the Barley, Mother of the Rye, or Mother of the Oats. They
leave it standing in the field till the last waggon is about to wend
homewards. Then they make a puppet out of it, dress it with clothes
belonging to the farmer, and adorn it with a crown and a blue or
white scarf. A branch of a tree is stuck in the breast of the
puppet, which is now called the Ceres. At the dance in the evening
the Ceres is set in the middle of the floor, and the reaper who
reaped fastest dances round it with the prettiest girl for his
partner. After the dance a pyre is made. All the girls, each wearing
a wreath, strip the puppet, pull it to pieces, and place it on the
pyre, along with the flowers with which it was adorned. Then the
girl who was the first to finish reaping sets fire to the pile, and
all pray that Ceres may give a fruitful year. Here, as Mannhardt
observes, the old custom has remained intact, though the name Ceres
is a bit of schoolmaster's learning. In Upper Brittany the last
sheaf is always made into human shape; but if the farmer is a
married man, it is made double and consists of a little corn-puppet
placed inside of a large one. This is called the Mother-sheaf. It is
delivered to the farmer's wife, who unties it and gives drink-money
in return.

Sometimes the last sheaf is called, not the Corn-mother, but the
Harvest-mother or the Great Mother. In the province of Osnabrück,
Hanover, it is called the Harvest-mother; it is made up in female
form, and then the reapers dance about with it. In some parts of
Westphalia the last sheaf at the rye-harvest is made especially
heavy by fastening stones in it. They bring it home on the last
waggon and call it the Great Mother, though they do not fashion it
into any special shape. In the district of Erfurt a very heavy
sheaf, not necessarily the last, is called the Great Mother, and is
carried on the last waggon to the barn, where all hands lift it down
amid a fire of jokes.

Sometimes again the last sheaf is called the Grandmother, and is
adorned with flowers, ribbons, and a woman's apron. In East Prussia,
at the rye or wheat harvest, the reapers call out to the woman who
binds the last sheaf, "You are getting the Old Grandmother." In the
neighbourhood of Magdeburg the men and women servants strive who
shall get the last sheaf, called the Grandmother. Whoever gets it
will be married in the next year, but his or her spouse will be old;
if a girl gets it, she will marry a widower; if a man gets it, he
will marry an old crone. In Silesia the Grandmother--a huge bundle
made up of three or four sheaves by the person who tied the last
sheaf--was formerly fashioned into a rude likeness of the human
form. In the neighbourhood of Belfast the last sheaf sometimes goes
by the name of the Granny. It is not cut in the usual way, but all
the reapers throw their sickles at it and try to bring it down. It
is plaited and kept till the (next?) autumn. Whoever gets it will
marry in the course of the year.

Often the last sheaf is called the Old Woman or the Old Man. In
Germany it is frequently shaped and dressed as a woman, and the
person who cuts it or binds it is said to "get the Old Woman." At
Altisheim, in Swabia, when all the corn of a farm has been cut
except a single strip, all the reapers stand in a row before the
strip; each cuts his share rapidly, and he who gives the last cut
"has the Old Woman." When the sheaves are being set up in heaps, the
person who gets hold of the Old Woman, which is the largest and
thickest of all the sheaves, is jeered at by the rest, who call out
to him, "He has the Old Woman and must keep her." The woman who
binds the last sheaf is sometimes herself called the Old Woman, and
it is said that she will be married in the next year. In Neusaass,
West Prussia, both the last sheaf--which is dressed up in jacket,
hat, and ribbons--and the woman who binds it are called the Old
Woman. Together they are brought home on the last waggon and are
drenched with water. In various parts of North Germany the last
sheaf at harvest is made up into a human effigy and called "the Old
Man"; and the woman who bound it is said "to have the Old Man."

In West Prussia, when the last rye is being raked together, the
women and girls hurry with the work, for none of them likes to be
the last and to get "the Old Man," that is, a puppet made out of the
last sheaf, which must be carried before the other reapers by the
person who was the last to finish. In Silesia the last sheaf is
called the Old Woman or the Old Man and is the theme of many jests;
it is made unusually large and is sometimes weighted with a stone.
Among the Wends the man or woman who binds the last sheaf at wheat
harvest is said to "have the Old Man." A puppet is made out of the
wheaten straw and ears in the likeness of a man and decked with
flowers. The person who bound the last sheaf must carry the Old Man
home, while the rest laugh and jeer at him. The puppet is hung up in
the farmhouse and remains till a new Old Man is made at the next
harvest.

In some of these customs, as Mannhardt has remarked, the person who
is called by the same name as the last sheaf and sits beside it on
the last waggon is obviously identified with it; he or she
represents the corn-spirit which has been caught in the last sheaf;
in other words, the corn-spirit is represented in duplicate, by a
human being and by a sheaf. The identification of the person with
the sheaf is made still clearer by the custom of wrapping up in the
last sheaf the person who cuts or binds it. Thus at Hermsdorf in
Silesia it used to be the regular practice to tie up in the last
sheaf the woman who had bound it. At Weiden, in Bavaria, it is the
cutter, not the binder, of the last sheaf who is tied up in it. Here
the person wrapt up in the corn represents the corn-spirit, exactly
as a person wrapt in branches or leaves represents the tree-spirit.

The last sheaf, designated as the Old Woman, is often distinguished
from the other sheaves by its size and weight. Thus in some villages
of West Prussia the Old Woman is made twice as long and thick as a
common sheaf, and a stone is fastened in the middle of it. Sometimes
it is made so heavy that a man can barely lift it. At Alt-Pillau, in
Samland, eight or nine sheaves are often tied together to make the
Old Woman, and the man who sets it up grumbles at its weight. At
Itzgrund, in Saxe-Coburg, the last sheaf, called the Old Woman, is
made large with the express intention of thereby securing a good
crop next year. Thus the custom of making the last sheaf unusually
large or heavy is a charm, working by sympathetic magic, to ensure a
large and heavy crop at the following harvest.

In Scotland, when the last corn was cut after Hallowmas, the female
figure made out of it was sometimes called the Carlin or Carline,
that is, the Old Woman. But if cut before Hallowmas, it was called
the Maiden; if cut after sunset, it was called the Witch, being
supposed to bring bad luck. Among the Highlanders of Scotland the
last corn cut at harvest is known either as the Old Wife
(_Cailleach_) or as the Maiden; on the whole the former name seems
to prevail in the western and the latter in the central and eastern
districts. Of the Maiden we shall speak presently; here we are
dealing with the Old Wife. The following general account of the
custom is given by a careful and well-informed enquirer, the Rev. J.
G. Campbell, minister of the remote Hebridean island of Tiree: "The
Harvest Old Wife (_a Cailleach_).--In harvest, there was a struggle
to escape from being the last done with the shearing, and when
tillage in common existed, instances were known of a ridge being
left unshorn (no person would claim it) because of it being behind
the rest. The fear entertained was that of having the 'famine of the
farm' (_gort a bhaile_), in the shape of an imaginary old woman
(_cailleach_), to feed till next harvest. Much emulation and
amusement arose from the fear of this old woman. . . . The first
done made a doll of some blades of corn, which was called the 'old
wife,' and sent it to his nearest neighbour. He in turn, when ready,
passed it to another still less expeditious, and the person it last
remained with had 'the old woman' to keep for that year."

In the island of Islay the last corn cut goes by the name of the Old
Wife (_Cailleach_), and when she has done her duty at harvest she is
hung up on the wall and stays there till the time comes to plough
the fields for the next year's crop. Then she is taken down, and on
the first day when the men go to plough she is divided among them by
the mistress of the house. They take her in their pockets and give
her to the horses to eat when they reach the field. This is supposed
to secure good luck for the next harvest, and is understood to be
the proper end of the Old Wife.

Usages of the same sort are reported from Wales. Thus in North
Pembrokeshire a tuft of the last corn cut, from six to twelve inches
long, is plaited and goes by the name of the Hag (_wrach_); and
quaint old customs used to be practised with it within the memory of
many persons still alive. Great was the excitement among the reapers
when the last patch of standing corn was reached. All in turn threw
their sickles at it, and the one who succeeded in cutting it
received a jug of home-brewed ale. The Hag (_wrach_) was then
hurriedly made and taken to a neighbouring farm, where the reapers
were still busy at their work. This was generally done by the
ploughman; but he had to be very careful not to be observed by his
neighbours, for if they saw him coming and had the least suspicion
of his errand they would soon make him retrace his steps. Creeping
stealthily up behind a fence he waited till the foreman of his
neighbour's reapers was just opposite him and within easy reach.
Then he suddenly threw the Hag over the fence and, if possible, upon
the foreman's sickle. On that he took to his heels and made off as
fast as he could run, and he was a lucky man if he escaped without
being caught or cut by the flying sickles which the infuriated
reapers hurled after him. In other cases the Hag was brought home to
the farmhouse by one of the reapers. He did his best to bring it
home dry and without being observed; but he was apt to be roughly
handled by the people of the house, if they suspected his errand.
Sometimes they stripped him of most of his clothes, sometimes they
would drench him with water which had been carefully stored in
buckets and pans for the purpose. If, however, he succeeded in
bringing the Hag in dry and unobserved, the master of the house had
to pay him a small fine; or sometimes a jug of beer "from the cask
next to the wall," which seems to have commonly held the best beer,
would be demanded by the bearer. The Hag was then carefully hung on
a nail in the hall or elsewhere and kept there all the year. The
custom of bringing in the Hag (_wrach_) into the house and hanging
it up still exists in some farms of North Pembrokeshire, but the
ancient ceremonies which have just been described are now
discontinued.

In County Antrim, down to some years ago, when the sickle was
finally expelled by the reaping machine, the few stalks of corn left
standing last on the field were plaited together; then the reapers,
blindfolded, threw their sickles at the plaited corn, and whoever
happened to cut it through took it home with him and put it over his
door. This bunch of corn was called the Carley--probably the same
word as Carlin.

Similar customs are observed by Slavonic peoples. Thus in Poland the
last sheaf is commonly called the Baba, that is, the Old Woman. "In
the last sheaf," it is said, "sits the Baba." The sheaf itself is
also called the Baba, and is sometimes composed of twelve smaller
sheaves lashed together. In some parts of Bohemia the Baba, made out
of the last sheaf, has the figure of a woman with a great straw hat.
It is carried home on the last harvest-waggon and delivered, along
with a garland, to the farmer by two girls. In binding the sheaves
the women strive not to be last, for she who binds the last sheaf
will have a child next year. Sometimes the harvesters call out to
the woman who binds the last sheaf, "She has the Baba," or "She is
the Baba." In the district of Cracow, when a man binds the last
sheaf, they say, "The Grandfather is sitting in it"; when a woman
binds it, they say, "The Baba is sitting in it," and the woman
herself is wrapt up in the sheaf, so that only her head projects out
of it. Thus encased in the sheaf, she is carried on the last
harvest-waggon to the house, where she is drenched with water by the
whole family. She remains in the sheaf till the dance is over, and
for a year she retains the name of Baba.

In Lithuania the name for the last sheaf is Boba (Old Woman),
answering to the Polish name Baba. The Boba is said to sit in the
corn which is left standing last. The person who binds the last
sheaf or digs the last potato is the subject of much banter, and
receives and long retains the name of the Old Rye-woman or the Old
Potato-woman. The last sheaf--the Boba--is made into the form of a
woman, carried solemnly through the village on the last
harvest-waggon, and drenched with water at the farmer's house; then
every one dances with it.

In Russia also the last sheaf is often shaped and dressed as a
woman, and carried with dance and song to the farmhouse. Out of the
last sheaf the Bulgarians make a doll which they call the Corn-queen
or Corn-mother; it is dressed in a woman's shirt, carried round the
village, and then thrown into the river in order to secure plenty of
rain and dew for the next year's crop. Or it is burned and the ashes
strew on the fields, doubtless to fertilise them. The name Queen, as
applied to the last sheaf, has its analogies in Central and Northern
Europe. Thus, in the Salzburg district of Austria, at the end of the
harvest a great procession takes place, in which a Queen of the
Corn-ears (_Ährenkönigin_) is drawn along in a little carriage by
young fellows. The custom of the Harvest Queen appears to have been
common in England. Milton must have been familiar with it, for in
_Paradise Lost_ he says:


   "Adam the while
    Waiting desirous her return, had wove
    Of choicest flow'rs a garland to adorn
    Her tresses, and her rural labours crown,
    As reapers oft are wont their harvest-queen."


Often customs of this sort are practised, not on the harvest-field
but on the threshing-floor. The spirit of the corn, fleeing before
the reapers as they cut down the ripe grain, quits the reaped corn
and takes refuge in the barn, where it appears in the last sheaf
threshed, either to perish under the blows of the flail or to flee
thence to the still unthreshed corn of a neighbouring farm. Thus the
last corn to be threshed is called the Mother-Corn or the Old Woman.
Sometimes the person who gives the last stroke with the flail is
called the Old Woman, and is wrapt in the straw of the last sheaf,
or has a bundle of straw fastened on his back. Whether wrapt in the
straw or carrying it on his back, he is carted through the village
amid general laughter. In some districts of Bavaria, Thüringen, and
elsewhere, the man who threshes the last sheaf is said to have the
Old Woman or the Old Corn-woman; he is tied up in straw, carried or
carted about the village, and set down at last on the dunghill, or
taken to the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farmer who has not
finished his threshing. In Poland the man who gives the last stroke
at threshing is called Baba (Old Woman); he is wrapt in corn and
wheeled through the village. Sometimes in Lithuania the last sheaf
is not threshed, but is fashioned into female shape and carried to
the barn of a neighbour who has not finished his threshing.

In some parts of Sweden, when a stranger woman appears on the
threshing-floor, a flail is put round her body, stalks of corn are
wound round her neck, a crown of ears is placed on her head, and the
threshers call out, "Behold the Corn-woman." Here the stranger
woman, thus suddenly appearing, is taken to be the corn-spirit who
has just been expelled by the flails from the corn-stalks. In other
cases the farmer's wife represents the corn-spirit. Thus in the
Commune of Saligné (Vendée), the farmer's wife, along with the last
sheaf, is tied up in a sheet, placed on a litter, and carried to the
threshing machine, under which she is shoved. Then the woman is
drawn out and the sheaf is threshed by itself, but the woman is
tossed in the sheet, as if she were being winnowed. It would be
impossible to express more clearly the identification of the woman
with the corn than by this graphic imitation of threshing and
winnowing her.

In these customs the spirit of the ripe corn is regarded as old, or
at least as of mature age. Hence the names of Mother, Grandmother,
Old Woman, and so forth. But in other cases the corn-spirit is
conceived as young. Thus at Saldern, near Wolfenbuttel, when the rye
has been reaped, three sheaves are tied together with a rope so as
to make a puppet with the corn ears for a head. This puppet is
called the Maiden or the Corn-maiden. Sometimes the corn-spirit is
conceived as a child who is separated from its mother by the stroke
of the sickle. This last view appears in the Polish custom of
calling out to the man who cuts the last handful of corn, "You have
cut the navel-string." In some districts of West Prussia the figure
made out of the last sheaf is called the Bastard, and a boy is wrapt
up in it. The woman who binds the last sheaf and represents the
Corn-mother is told that she is about to be brought to bed; she
cries like a woman in travail, and an old woman in the character of
grandmother acts as midwife. At last a cry is raised that the child
is born; whereupon the boy who is tied up in the sheaf whimpers and
squalls like an infant. The grandmother wraps a sack, in imitation
of swaddling bands, round the pretended baby, who is carried
joyfully to the barn, lest he should catch cold in the open air. In
other parts of North Germany the last sheaf, or the puppet made out
of it, is called the Child, the Harvest-Child, and so on, and they
call out to the woman who binds the last sheaf, "you are getting the
child."

In some parts of Scotland, as well as in the north of England, the
last handful of corn cut on the harvest-field was called the _kirn,_
and the person who carried it off was said "to win the kirn." It was
then dressed up like a child's doll and went by the name of the
kirn-baby, the kirn-doll, or the Maiden. In Berwickshire down to
about the middle of the nineteenth century there was an eager
competition among the reapers to cut the last bunch of standing
corn. They gathered round it at a little distance and threw their
sickles in turn at it, and the man who succeeded in cutting it
through gave it to the girl he preferred. She made the corn so cut
into a kirn-dolly and dressed it, and the doll was then taken to the
farmhouse and hung up there till the next harvest, when its place
was taken by the new kirn-dolly. At Spottiswoode in Berwickshire the
reaping of the last corn at harvest was called "cutting the Queen"
almost as often as "cutting the kirn." The mode of cutting it was
not by throwing sickles. One of the reapers consented to be
blindfolded, and having been given a sickle in his hand and turned
twice or thrice about by his fellows, he was bidden to go and cut
the kirn. His groping about and making wild strokes in the air with
his sickle excited much hilarity. When he had tired himself out in
vain and given up the task as hopeless, another reaper was
blindfolded and pursued the quest, and so on, one after the other,
till at last the kirn was cut. The successful reaper was tossed up
in the air with three cheers by his brother harvesters. To decorate
the room in which the kirn-supper was held at Spottiswoode as well
as the granary, where the dancing took place, two women made
kirn-dollies or Queens every year; and many of these rustic effigies
of the corn-spirit might be seen hanging up together.

In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland the last handful of corn
that is cut by the reapers on any particular farm is called the
Maiden, or in Gaelic _Maidhdeanbuain,_ literally, "the shorn
Maiden." Superstitions attach to the winning of the Maiden. If it is
got by a young person, they think it an omen that he or she will be
married before another harvest. For that or other reasons there is a
strife between the reapers as to who shall get the Maiden, and they
resort to various stratagems for the purpose of securing it. One of
them, for example, will often leave a handful of corn uncut and
cover it up with earth to hide it from the other reapers, till all
the rest of the corn on the field is cut down. Several may try to
play the same trick, and the one who is coolest and holds out
longest obtains the coveted distinction. When it has been cut, the
Maiden is dressed with ribbons into a sort of doll and affixed to a
wall of the farmhouse. In the north of Scotland the Maiden is
carefully preserved till Yule morning, when it is divided among the
cattle "to make them thrive all the year round." In the
neighbourhood of Balquhidder, Perthshire, the last handful of corn
is cut by the youngest girl on the field, and is made into the rude
form of a female doll, clad in a paper dress, and decked with
ribbons. It is called the Maiden, and is kept in the farmhouse,
generally above the chimney, for a good while, sometimes till the
Maiden of the next year is brought in. The writer of this book
witnessed the ceremony of cutting the Maiden at Balquhidder in
September 1888. A lady friend informed me that as a young girl she
cut the Maiden several times at the request of the reapers in the
neighbourhood of Perth. The name of the Maiden was given to the last
handful of standing corn; a reaper held the top of the bunch while
she cut it. Afterwards the bunch was plaited, decked with ribbons,
and hung up in a conspicuous place on the wall of the kitchen till
the next Maiden was brought in. The harvest-supper in this
neighbourhood was also called the Maiden; the reapers danced at it.

On some farms on the Gareloch, in Dumbartonshire, about the year
1830, the last handful of standing corn was called the Maiden. It
was divided in two, plaited, and then cut with the sickle by a girl,
who, it was thought, would be lucky and would soon be married. When
it was cut the reapers gathered together and threw their sickles in
the air. The Maiden was dressed with ribbons and hung in the kitchen
near the roof, where it was kept for several years with the date
attached. Sometimes five or six Maidens might be seen hanging at
once on hooks. The harvest-supper was called the Kirn. In other
farms on the Gareloch the last handful of corn was called the
Maidenhead or the Head; it was neatly plaited, sometimes decked with
ribbons, and hung in the kitchen for a year, when the grain was
given to the poultry.

In Aberdeenshire "the last sheaf cut, or 'Maiden,' is carried home
in merry procession by the harvesters. It is then presented to the
mistress of the house, who dresses it up to be preserved till the
first mare foals. The Maiden is then taken down and presented to the
mare as its first food. The neglect of this would have untoward
effects upon the foal, and disastrous consequences upon farm
operations generally for the season." In the north-east of
Aberdeenshire the last sheaf is commonly called the _clyack_ sheaf.
It used to be cut by the youngest girl present and was dressed as a
woman. Being brought home in triumph, it was kept till Christmas
morning, and then given to a mare in foal, if there was one on the
farm, or, if there was not, to the oldest cow in calf. Elsewhere the
sheaf was divided between all the cows and their calves or between
all the horses and the cattle of the farm. In Fifeshire the last
handful of corn, known as the Maiden, is cut by a young girl and
made into the rude figure of a doll, tied with ribbons, by which it
is hung on the wall of the farm-kitchen till the next spring. The
custom of cutting the Maiden at harvest was also observed in
Inverness-shire and Sutherlandshire.

A somewhat maturer but still youthful age is assigned to the
corn-spirit by the appellations of Bride, Oats-bride, and
Wheat-bride, which in Germany are sometimes bestowed both on the
last sheaf and on the woman who binds it. At wheat-harvest near
Müglitz, in Moravia, a small portion of the wheat is left standing
after all the rest has been reaped. This remnant is then cut, amid
the rejoicing of the reapers, by a young girl who wears a wreath of
wheaten ears on her head and goes by the name of the Wheat-bride. It
is supposed that she will be a real bride that same year. Near
Roslin and Stonehaven, in Scotland, the last handful of corn cut
"got the name of 'the bride,' and she was placed over the _bress_ or
chimney-piece; she had a ribbon tied below her numerous _ears,_ and
another round her waist."

Sometimes the idea implied by the name of Bride is worked out more
fully by representing the productive powers of vegetation as bride
and bridegroom. Thus in the Vorharz an Oats-man and an Oats-woman,
swathed in straw, dance at the harvest feast. In South Saxony an
Oats-bridegroom and an Oats-bride figure together at the harvest
celebration. The Oats-bridegroom is a man completely wrapt in
oats-straw; the Oats-bride is a man dressed in woman's clothes, but
not wrapt in straw. They are drawn in a waggon to the ale-house,
where the dance takes place. At the beginning of the dance the
dancers pluck the bunches of oats one by one from the
Oats-bridegroom, while he struggles to keep them, till at last he is
completely stript of them and stands bare, exposed to the laughter
and jests of the company. In Austrian Silesia the ceremony of "the
Wheat-bride" is celebrated by the young people at the end of the
harvest. The woman who bound the last sheaf plays the part of the
Wheat-bride, wearing the harvest-crown of wheat ears and flowers on
her head. Thus adorned, standing beside her Bridegroom in a waggon
and attended by bridesmaids, she is drawn by a pair of oxen, in full
imitation of a marriage procession, to the tavern, where the dancing
is kept up till morning. Somewhat later in the season the wedding of
the Oats-bride is celebrated with the like rustic pomp. About
Neisse, in Silesia, an Oats-king and an Oats-queen, dressed up
quaintly as a bridal pair, are seated on a harrow and drawn by oxen
into the village.

In these last instances the corn-spirit is personified in double
form as male and female. But sometimes the spirit appears in a
double female form as both old and young, corresponding exactly to
the Greek Demeter and Persephone, if my interpretation of these
goddesses is right. We have seen that in Scotland, especially among
the Gaelic-speaking population, the last corn cut is sometimes
called the Old Wife and sometimes the Maiden. Now there are parts of
Scotland in which both an Old Wife (_Cailleach_) and a Maiden are
cut at harvest. The accounts of this custom are not quite clear and
consistent, but the general rule seems to be that, where both a
Maiden and an Old Wife (_Cailleach_) are fashioned out of the reaped
corn at harvest, the Maiden is made out of the last stalks left
standing, and is kept by the farmer on whose land it was cut; while
the Old Wife is made out of other stalks, sometimes out of the first
stalks cut, and is regularly passed on to a laggard farmer who
happens to be still reaping after his brisker neighbour has cut all
his corn. Thus while each farmer keeps his own Maiden, as the
embodiment of the young and fruitful spirit of the corn, he passes
on the Old Wife as soon as he can to a neighbour, and so the old
lady may make the round of all the farms in the district before she
finds a place in which to lay her venerable head. The farmer with
whom she finally takes up her abode is of course the one who has
been the last of all the countryside to finish reaping his crops,
and thus the distinction of entertaining her is rather an invidious
one. He is thought to be doomed to poverty or to be under the
obligation of "providing for the dearth of the township" in the
ensuing season. Similarly we saw that in Pembrokeshire, where the
last corn cut is called, not the Maiden, but the Hag, she is passed
on hastily to a neighbour who is still at work in his fields and who
receives his aged visitor with anything but a transport of joy. If
the Old Wife represents the corn-spirit of the past year, as she
probably does wherever she is contrasted with and opposed to a
Maiden, it is natural enough that her faded charms should have less
attractions for the husbandman than the buxom form of her daughter,
who may be expected to become in her turn the mother of the golden
grain when the revolving year has brought round another autumn. The
same desire to get rid of the effete Mother of the Corn by palming
her off on other people comes out clearly in some of the customs
observed at the close of threshing, particularly in the practice of
passing on a hideous straw puppet to a neighbour farmer who is still
threshing his corn.

The harvest customs just described are strikingly analogous to the
spring customs which we reviewed in an earlier part of this work.
(1) As in the spring customs the tree-spirit is represented both by
a tree and by a person, so in the harvest customs the corn-spirit is
represented both by the last sheaf and by the person who cuts or
binds or threshes it. The equivalence of the person to the sheaf is
shown by giving him or her the same name as the sheaf; by wrapping
him or her in it; and by the rule observed in some places, that when
the sheaf is called the Mother, it must be made up into human shape
by the oldest married woman, but that when it is called the Maiden,
it must be cut by the youngest girl. Here the age of the personal
representative of the corn-spirit corresponds with that of the
supposed age of the corn-spirit, just as the human victims offered
by the Mexicans to promote the growth of the maize varied with the
age of the maize. For in the Mexican, as in the European, custom the
human beings were probably representatives of the corn-spirit rather
than victims offered to it. (2) Again the same fertilising influence
which the tree-spirit is supposed to exert over vegetation, cattle,
and even women is ascribed to the corn-spirit. Thus, its supposed
influence on vegetation is shown by the practice of taking some of
the grain of the last sheaf (in which the corn-spirit is regularly
supposed to be present), and scattering it among the young corn in
spring or mixing it with the seed-corn. Its influence on animals is
shown by giving the last sheaf to a mare in foal, to a cow in calf,
and to horses at the first ploughing. Lastly, its influence on women
is indicated by the custom of delivering the Mother-sheaf, made into
the likeness of a pregnant woman, to the farmer's wife; by the
belief that the woman who binds the last sheaf will have a child
next year; perhaps, too, by the idea that the person who gets it
will soon be married.

Plainly, therefore, these spring and harvest customs are based on
the same ancient modes of thought, and form parts of the same
primitive heathendom, which was doubtless practised by our
forefathers long before the dawn of history. Amongst the marks of a
primitive ritual we may note the following:

1. No special class of persons is set apart for the performance of
the rites; in other words, there are no priests. The rites may be
performed by any one, as occasion demands.

2. No special places are set apart for the performance of the rites;
in other words, there are no temples. The rites may be performed
anywhere, as occasion demands.

3. Spirits, not gods, are recognised. (_a_) As distinguished from
gods, spirits are restricted in their operations to definite
departments of nature. Their names are general, not proper. Their
attributes are generic, rather than individual; in other words,
there is an indefinite number of spirits of each class, and the
individuals of a class are all much alike; they have no definitely
marked individuality; no accepted traditions are current as to their
origin, life, adventures, and character. (_b_) On the other hand
gods, as distinguished from spirits, are not restricted to definite
departments of nature. It is true that there is generally some one
department over which they preside as their special province; but
they are not rigorously confined to it; they can exert their power
for good or evil in many other spheres of nature and life. Again,
they bear individual or proper names, such as Demeter, Persephone,
Dionysus; and their individual characters and histories are fixed by
current myths and the representations of art.

4. The rites are magical rather than propitiatory. In other words,
the desired objects are attained, not by propitiating the favour of
divine beings through sacrifice, prayer, and praise, but by
ceremonies which, as I have already explained, are believed to
influence the course of nature directly through a physical sympathy
or resemblance between the rite and the effect which it is the
intention of the rite to produce.

Judged by these tests, the spring and harvest customs of our
European peasantry deserve to rank as primitive. For no special
class of persons and no special places are set exclusively apart for
their performance; they may be performed by any one, master or man,
mistress or maid, boy or girl; they are practised, not in temples or
churches, but in the woods and meadows, beside brooks, in barns, on
harvest fields and cottage floors. The supernatural beings whose
existence is taken for granted in them are spirits rather than
deities: their functions are limited to certain well-defined
departments of nature: their names are general like the
Barley-mother, the Old Woman, the Maiden, not proper names like
Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus. Their generic attributes are known,
but their individual histories and characters are not the subject of
myths. For they exist in classes rather than as individuals, and the
members of each class are indistinguishable. For example, every farm
has its Corn-mother, or its Old Woman, or its Maiden; but every
Corn-mother is much like every other Corn-mother, and so with the
Old Women and Maidens. Lastly, in these harvests, as in the spring
customs, the ritual is magical rather than propitiatory. This is
shown by throwing the Corn-mother into the river in order to secure
rain and dew for the crops; by making the Old Woman heavy in order
to get a heavy crop next year; by strewing grain from the last sheaf
amongst the young crops in spring; and by giving the last sheaf to
the cattle to make them thrive.



XLVI. The Corn-Mother in Many Lands



1. The Corn-mother in America

EUROPEAN peoples, ancient and modern, have not been singular in
personifying the corn as a mother goddess. The same simple idea has
suggested itself to other agricultural races in distant parts of the
world, and has been applied by them to other indigenous cereals than
barley and wheat. If Europe has its Wheat-mother and its
Barley-mother, America has its Maize-mother and the East Indies
their Rice-mother. These personifications I will now illustrate,
beginning with the American personification of the maize.

We have seen that among European peoples it is a common custom to
keep the plaited corn-stalks of the last sheaf, or the puppet which
is formed out of them, in the farm-house from harvest to harvest.
The intention no doubt is, or rather originally was, by preserving
the representative of the corn-spirit to maintain the spirit itself
in life and activity throughout the year, in order that the corn may
grow and the crops be good. This interpretation of the custom is at
all events rendered highly probable by a similar custom observed by
the ancient Peruvians, and thus described by the old Spanish
historian Acosta: "They take a certain portion of the most fruitful
of the maize that grows in their farms, the which they put in a
certain granary which they do call _Pirua,_ with certain ceremonies,
watching three nights; they put this maize in the richest garments
they have, and being thus wrapped and dressed, they worship this
_Pirua,_ and hold it in great veneration, saying it is the mother of
the maize of their inheritances, and that by this means the maize
augments and is preserved. In this month [the sixth month, answering
to May] they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches demand of
this _Pirua_ if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the
next year; and if it answers no, then they carry this maize to the
farm to burn, whence they brought it, according to every man's
power; then they make another _Pirua,_ with the same ceremonies,
saying that they renew it, to the end the seed of maize may not
perish, and if it answers that it hath force sufficient to last
longer, they leave it until the next year. This foolish vanity
continueth to this day, and it is very common amongst the Indians to
have these _Piruas._"

In this description of the custom there seems to be some error.
Probably it was the dressed-up bunch of maize, not the granary
(_Pirua_), which was worshipped by the Peruvians and regarded as the
Mother of the Maize. This is confirmed by what we know of the
Peruvian custom from another source. The Peruvians, we are told,
believed all useful plants to be animated by a divine being who
causes their growth. According to the particular plant, these divine
beings were called the Maize-mother (_Zara-mama_), the Quinoa-mother
(_Quinoa-mama_), the Coca-mother (_Coca-mama_), and the
Potato-mother (_Axo-mama_). Figures of these divine mothers were
made respectively of ears of maize and leaves of the quinoa and coca
plants; they were dressed in women's clothes and worshipped. Thus
the Maize-mother was represented by a puppet made of stalks of maize
dressed in full female attire; and the Indians believed that "as
mother, it had the power of producing and giving birth to much
maize." Probably, therefore, Acosta misunderstood his informant, and
the Mother of the Maize which he describes was not the granary
(_Pirua_), but the bunch of maize dressed in rich vestments. The
Peruvian Mother of the Maize, like the harvest-Maiden at
Balquhidder, was kept for a year in order that by her means the corn
might grow and multiply. But lest her strength might not suffice to
last till the next harvest, she was asked in the course of the year
how she felt, and if she answered that she felt weak, she was burned
and a fresh Mother of the Maize made, "to the end the seed of maize
may not perish." Here, it may be observed, we have a strong
confirmation of the explanation already given of the custom of
killing the god, both periodically and occasionally. The Mother of
the maize was allowed, as a rule, to live through a year, that being
the period during which her strength might reasonably be supposed to
last unimpaired; but on any symptom of her strength failing she was
put to death, and a fresh and vigorous Mother of the Maize took her
place, lest the maize which depended on her for its existence should
languish and decay.



2. The Rice-mother in the East Indies

IF THE READER still feels any doubts as to the meaning of the
harvest customs which have been practised within living memory by
European peasants, these doubts may perhaps be dispelled by
comparing the customs observed at the rice-harvest by the Malays and
Dyaks of the East Indies. For these Eastern peoples have not, like
our peasantry, advanced beyond the intellectual stage at which the
customs originated; their theory and their practice are still in
unison; for them the quaint rites which in Europe have long dwindled
into mere fossils, the pastime of clowns and the puzzle of the
learned, are still living realities of which they can render an
intelligible and truthful account. Hence a study of their beliefs
and usages concerning the rice may throw some light on the true
meaning of the ritual of the corn in ancient Greece and modern
Europe.

Now the whole of the ritual which the Malays and Dyaks observe in
connexion with the rice is founded on the simple conception of the
rice as animated by a soul like that which these people attribute to
mankind. They explain the phenomena of reproduction, growth, decay,
and death in the rice on the same principles on which they explain
the corresponding phenomena in human beings. They imagine that in
the fibres of the plant, as in the body of a man, there is a certain
vital element, which is so far independent of the plant that it may
for a time be completely separated from it without fatal effects,
though if its absence be prolonged beyond certain limits the plant
will wither and die. This vital yet separable element is what, for
the want of a better word, we must call the soul of a plant, just as
a similar vital and separable element is commonly supposed to
constitute the soul of man; and on this theory or myth of the
plant-soul is built the whole worship of the cereals, just as on the
theory or myth of the human soul is built the whole worship of the
dead,--a towering superstructure reared on a slender and precarious
foundation.

Believing the rice to be animated by a soul like that of a man, the
Indonesians naturally treat it with the deference and the
consideration which they show to their fellows. Thus they behave
towards the rice in bloom as they behave towards a pregnant woman;
they abstain from firing guns or making loud noises in the field,
lest they should so frighten the soul of the rice that it would
miscarry and bear no grain; and for the same reason they will not
talk of corpses or demons in the rice-fields. Moreover, they feed
the blooming rice with foods of various kinds which are believed to
be wholesome for women with child; but when the rice-ears are just
beginning to form, they are looked upon as infants, and women go
through the fields feeding them with rice-pap as if they were human
babes. In such natural and obvious comparisons of the breeding plant
to a breeding woman, and of the young grain to a young child, is to
be sought the origin of the kindred Greek conception of the
Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, Demeter and Persephone. But if
the timorous feminine soul of the rice can be frightened into a
miscarriage even by loud noises, it is easy to imagine what her
feelings must be at harvest, when people are under the sad necessity
of cutting down the rice with the knife. At so critical a season
every precaution must be used to render the necessary surgical
operation of reaping as inconspicuous and as painless as possible.
For that reason the reaping of the seed-rice is done with knives of
a peculiar pattern, such that the blades are hidden in the reapers'
hands and do not frighten the rice-spirit till the very last moment,
when her head is swept off almost before she is aware; and from a
like delicate motive the reapers at work in the fields employ a
special form of speech, which the rice-spirit cannot be expected to
understand, so that she has no warning or inkling of what is going
forward till the heads of rice are safely deposited in the basket.

Among the Indonesian peoples who thus personify the rice we may take
the Kayans or Bahaus of Central Borneo as typical. In order to
secure and detain the volatile soul of the rice the Kayans resort to
a number of devices. Among the instruments employed for this purpose
are a miniature ladder, a spatula, and a basket containing hooks,
thorns, and cords. With the spatula the priestess strokes the soul
of the rice down the little ladder into the basket, where it is
naturally held fast by the hooks, the thorn, and the cord; and
having thus captured and imprisoned the soul she conveys it into the
rice-granary. Sometimes a bamboo box and a net are used for the same
purpose. And in order to ensure a good harvest for the following
year it is necessary not only to detain the soul of all the grains
of rice which are safely stored in the granary, but also to attract
and recover the soul of all the rice that has been lost through
falling to the earth or being eaten by deer, apes, and pigs. For
this purpose instruments of various sorts have been invented by the
priests. One, for example, is a bamboo vessel provided with four
hooks made from the wood of a fruit-tree, by means of which the
absent rice-soul may be hooked and drawn back into the vessel, which
is then hung up in the house. Sometimes two hands carved out of the
wood of a fruit-tree are used for the same purpose. And every time
that a Kayan housewife fetches rice from the granary for the use of
her household, she must propitiate the souls of the rice in the
granary, lest they should be angry at being robbed of their
substance.

The same need of securing the soul of the rice, if the crop is to
thrive, is keenly felt by the Karens of Burma. When a rice-field
does not flourish, they suppose that the soul (_kelah_) of the rice
is in some way detained from the rice. If the soul cannot be called
back, the crop will fail. The following formula is used in recalling
the _kelah_ (soul) of the rice: "O come, rice-_kelah,_ come! Come to
the field. Come to the rice. With seed of each gender, come. Come
from the river Kho, come from the river Kaw; from the place where
they meet, come. Come from the West, come from the East. From the
throat of the bird, from the maw of the ape, from the throat of the
elephant. Come from the sources of rivers and their mouths. Come
from the country of the Shan and Burman. From the distant kingdoms
come. From all granaries come. O rice-_kelah,_ come to the rice."

The Corn-mother of our European peasants has her match in the
Rice-mother of the Minangkabauers of Sumatra. The Minangkabauers
definitely attribute a soul to rice, and will sometimes assert that
rice pounded in the usual way tastes better than rice ground in a
mill, because in the mill the body of the rice was so bruised and
battered that the soul has fled from it. Like the Javanese they
think that the rice is under the special guardianship of a female
spirit called Saning Sari, who is conceived as so closely knit up
with the plant that the rice often goes by her name, as with the
Romans the corn might be called Ceres. In particular Saning Sari is
represented by certain stalks or grains called _indoea padi,_ that
is, literally, "Mother of Rice," a name that is often given to the
guardian spirit herself. This so-called Mother of Rice is the
occasion of a number of ceremonies observed at the planting and
harvesting of the rice as well as during its preservation in the
barn. When the seed of the rice is about to be sown in the nursery
or bedding-out ground, where under the wet system of cultivation it
is regularly allowed to sprout before being transplanted to the
fields, the best grains are picked out to form the Rice-mother.
These are then sown in the middle of the bed, and the common seed is
planted round about them. The state of the Rice-mother is supposed
to exert the greatest influence on the growth of the rice; if she
droops or pines away, the harvest will be bad in consequence. The
woman who sows the Rice-mother in the nursery lets her hair hang
loose and afterwards bathes, as a means of ensuring an abundant
harvest. When the time comes to transplant the rice from the nursery
to the field, the Rice-mother receives a special place either in the
middle or in a corner of the field, and a prayer or charm is uttered
as follows: "Saning Sari, may a measure of rice come from a stalk of
rice and a basketful from a root; may you be frightened neither by
lightning nor by passers-by! Sunshine make you glad; with the storm
may you be at peace; and may rain serve to wash your face!" While
the rice is growing, the particular plant which was thus treated as
the Rice-mother is lost sight of; but before harvest another
Rice-mother is found. When the crop is ripe for cutting, the oldest
woman of the family or a sorcerer goes out to look for her. The
first stalks seen to bend under a passing breeze are the
Rice-mother, and they are tied together but not cut until the
first-fruits of the field have been carried home to serve as a
festal meal for the family and their friends, nay even for the
domestic animals; since it is Saning Sari's pleasure that the beasts
also should partake of her good gifts. After the meal has been
eaten, the Rice-mother is fetched home by persons in gay attire, who
carry her very carefully under an umbrella in a neatly worked bag to
the barn, where a place in the middle is assigned to her. Every one
believes that she takes care of the rice in the barn and even
multiplies it not uncommonly.

When the Tomori of Central Celebes are about to plant the rice, they
bury in the field some betel as an offering to the spirits who cause
the rice to grow. The rice that is planted round this spot is the
last to be reaped at harvest. At the commencement of the reaping the
stalks of this patch of rice are tied together into a sheaf, which
is called "the Mother of the Rice" (_ineno pae_), and offerings in
the shape of rice, fowl's liver, eggs, and other things are laid
down before it. When all the rest of the rice in the field has been
reaped, "the Mother of the Rice" is cut down and carried with due
honour to the rice-barn, where it is laid on the floor, and all the
other sheaves are piled upon it. The Tomori, we are told, regard the
Mother of the Rice as a special offering made to the rice-spirit
Omonga, who dwells in the moon. If that spirit is not treated with
proper respect, for example if the people who fetch rice from the
barn are not decently clad, he is angry and punishes the offenders
by eating up twice as much rice in the barn as they have taken out
of it; some people have heard him smacking his lips in the barn, as
he devoured the rice. On the other hand the Toradjas of Central
Celebes, who also practice the custom of the Rice-mother at harvest,
regard her as the actual mother of the whole harvest, and therefore
keep her carefully, lest in her absence the garnered store of rice
should all melt away and disappear.

Again, just as in Scotland the old and the young spirit of the corn
are represented as an Old Wife (_Cailleach_) and a Maiden
respectively, so in the Malay Peninsula we find both the Rice-mother
and her child represented by different sheaves or bundles of ears on
the harvest-field. The ceremony of cutting and bringing home the
Soul of the Rice was witnessed by Mr. W. W. Skeat at Chodoi in
Selangor on the twenty-eighth of January 1897. The particular bunch
or sheaf which was to serve as the Mother of the Rice-soul had
previously been sought and identified by means of the markings or
shape of the ears. From this sheaf an aged sorceress, with much
solemnity, cut a little bundle of seven ears, anointed them with
oil, tied them round with parti-coloured thread, fumigated them with
incense, and having wrapt them in a white cloth deposited them in a
little oval-shaped basket. These seven ears were the infant Soul of
the Rice and the little basket was its cradle. It was carried home
to the farmer's house by another woman, who held up an umbrella to
screen the tender infant from the hot rays of the sun. Arrived at
the house the Rice-child was welcomed by the women of the family,
and laid, cradle and all, on a new sleepingmat with pillows at the
head. After that the farmer's wife was instructed to observe certain
rules of taboo for three days, the rules being in many respects
identical with those which have to be observed for three days after
the birth of a real child. Something of the same tender care which
is thus bestowed on the newly-born Rice-child is naturally extended
also to its parent, the sheaf from whose body it was taken. This
sheaf, which remains standing in the field after the Rice-soul has
been carried home and put to bed, is treated as a newly-made mother;
that is to say, young shoots of trees are pounded together and
scattered broadcast every evening for three successive days, and
when the three days are up you take the pulp of a coco-nut and what
are called "goat-flowers," mix them up, eat them with a little
sugar, and spit some of the mixture out among the rice. So after a
real birth the young shoots of the jack-fruit, the rose-apple,
certain kinds of banana, and the thin pulp of young coco-nuts are
mixed with dried fish, salt, acid, prawn-condiment, and the like
dainties to form a sort of salad, which is administered to mother
and child for three successive days. The last sheaf is reaped by the
farmer's wife, who carries it back to the house, where it is
threshed and mixed with the Rice-soul. The farmer then takes the
Rice-soul and its basket and deposits it, together with the product
of the last sheaf, in the big circular rice-bin used by the Malays.
Some grains from the Rice-soul are mixed with the seed which is to
be sown in the following year. In this Rice-mother and Rice-child of
the Malay Peninsula we may see the counterpart and in a sense the
prototype of the Demeter and Persephone of ancient Greece.

Once more, the European custom of representing the corn-spirit in
the double form of bride and bridegroom has its parallel in a
ceremony observed at the rice-harvest in Java. Before the reapers
begin to cut the rice, the priest or sorcerer picks out a number of
ears of rice, which are tied together, smeared with ointment, and
adorned with flowers. Thus decked out, the ears are called the
_padi-peengantèn,_ that is, the Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom;
their wedding feast is celebrated, and the cutting of the rice
begins immediately afterwards. Later on, when the rice is being got
in, a bridal chamber is partitioned off in the barn, and furnished
with a new mat, a lamp, and all kinds of toilet articles. Sheaves of
rice, to represent the wedding guests, are placed beside the
Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom. Not till this has been done may
the whole harvest be housed in the barn. And for the first forty
days after the rice has been housed, no one may enter the barn, for
fear of disturbing the newly-wedded pair.

In the islands of Bali and Lombok, when the time of harvest has
come, the owner of the field himself makes a beginning by cutting
"the principal rice" with his own hands and binding it into two
sheaves, each composed of one hundred and eight stalks with their
leaves attached to them. One of the sheaves represents a man and the
other a woman, and they are called "husband and wife." The male
sheaf is wound about with thread so that none of the leaves are
visible, whereas the female sheaf has its leaves bent over and tied
so as to resemble the roll of a woman's hair. Sometimes, for further
distinction, a necklace of rice-straw is tied round the female
sheaf. When the rice is brought home from the field, the two sheaves
representing the husband and wife are carried by a woman on her
head, and are the last of all to be deposited in the barn. There
they are laid to rest on a small erection or on a cushion of
rice-straw. The whole arrangement, we are informed, has for its
object to induce the rice to increase and multiply in the granary,
so that the owner may get more out of it than he put in. Hence when
the people of Bali bring the two sheaves, the husband and wife, into
the barn, they say, "Increase ye and multiply without ceasing." When
all the rice in the barn has been used up, the two sheaves
representing the husband and wife remain in the empty building till
they have gradually disappeared or been devoured by mice. The pinch
of hunger sometimes drives individuals to eat up the rice of these
two sheaves, but the wretches who do so are viewed with disgust by
their fellows and branded as pigs and dogs. Nobody would ever sell
these holy sheaves with the rest of their profane brethren.

The same notion of the propagation of the rice by a male and female
power finds expression amongst the Szis of Upper Burma. When the
paddy, that is, the rice with the husks still on it, has been dried
and piled in a heap for threshing, all the friends of the household
are invited to the threshing-floor, and food and drink are brought
out. The heap of paddy is divided and one half spread out for
threshing, while the other half is left piled up. On the pile food
and spirits are set, and one of the elders, addressing "the father
and mother of the paddy-plant," prays for plenteous harvests in
future, and begs that the seed may bear many fold. Then the whole
party eat, drink, and make merry. This ceremony at the
threshing-floor is the only occasion when these people invoke "the
father and mother of the paddy."



3. The Spirit of the Corn embodied in Human Beings

THUS the theory which recognises in the European Corn-mother,
Corn-maiden, and so forth, the embodiment in vegetable form of the
animating spirit of the crops is amply confirmed by the evidence of
peoples in other parts of the world, who, because they have lagged
behind the European races in mental development, retain for that
very reason a keener sense of the original motives for observing
those rustic rites which among ourselves have sunk to the level of
meaningless survivals. The reader may, however, remember that
according to Mannhardt, whose theory I am expounding, the spirit of
the corn manifests itself not merely in vegetable but also in human
form; the person who cuts the last sheaf or gives the last stroke at
threshing passes for a temporary embodiment of the corn-spirit, just
as much as the bunch of corn which he reaps or threshes. Now in the
parallels which have been hitherto adduced from the customs of
peoples outside Europe the spirit of the crops appears only in
vegetable form. It remains, therefore, to prove that other races
besides our European peasantry have conceived the spirit of the
crops as incorporate in or represented by living men and women. Such
a proof, I may remind the reader, is germane to the theme of this
book; for the more instances we discover of human beings
representing in themselves the life or animating spirit of plants,
the less difficulty will be felt at classing amongst them the King
of the Wood at Nemi.

The Mandans and Minnitarees of North America used to hold a festival
in spring which they called the corn-medicine festival of the women.
They thought that a certain Old Woman who Never Dies made the crops
to grow, and that, living somewhere in the south, she sent the
migratory waterfowl in spring as her tokens and representatives.
Each sort of bird represented a special kind of crop cultivated by
the Indians: the wild goose stood for the maize, the wild swan for
the gourds, and the wild duck for the beans. So when the feathered
messengers of the Old Woman began to arrive in spring the Indians
celebrated the corn-medicine festival of the women. Scaffolds were
set up, on which the people hung dried meat and other things by way
of offerings to the Old Woman; and on a certain day the old women of
the tribe, as representatives of the Old Woman who Never Dies,
assembled at the scaffolds each bearing in her hand an ear of maize
fastened to a stick. They first planted these sticks in the ground,
then danced round the scaffolds, and finally took up the sticks
again in their arms. Meanwhile old men beat drums and shook rattles
as a musical accompaniment to the performance of the old women.
Further, young women came and put dried flesh into the mouths of the
old women, for which they received in return a grain of the
consecrated maize to eat. Three or four grains of the holy corn were
also placed in the dishes of the young women, to be afterwards
carefully mixed with the seed-corn, which they were supposed to
fertilise. The dried flesh hung on the scaffold belonged to the old
women, because they represented the Old Woman who Never Dies. A
similar corn-medicine festival was held in autumn for the purpose of
attracting the herds of buffaloes and securing a supply of meat. At
that time every woman carried in her arms an uprooted plant of
maize. They gave the name of the Old Woman who Never Dies both to
the maize and to those birds which they regarded as symbols of the
fruits of the earth, and they prayed to them in autumn saying,
"Mother, have pity on us! send us not the bitter cold too soon, lest
we have not meat enough! let not all the game depart, that we may
have something for the winter!" In autumn, when the birds were
flying south, the Indians thought that they were going home to the
Old Woman and taking to her the offerings that had been hung up on
the scaffolds, especially the dried meat, which she ate. Here then
we have the spirit or divinity of the corn conceived as an Old Woman
and represented in bodily form by old women, who in their capacity
of representatives receive some at least of the offerings which are
intended for her.

In some parts of India the harvest-goddess Gauri is represented at
once by an unmarried girl and by a bundle of wild balsam plants,
which is made up into the figure of a woman and dressed as such with
mask, garments, and ornaments. Both the human and the vegetable
representative of the goddess are worshipped, and the intention of
the whole ceremony appears to be to ensure a good crop of rice.



4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter

COMPARED with the Corn-mother of Germany and the Harvest-maiden of
Scotland, the Demeter and Persephone of Greece are late products of
religious growth. Yet as members of the Aryan family the Greeks must
at one time or another have observed harvest customs like those
which are still practised by Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, and which,
far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, have been practised by the
Indians of Peru and many peoples of the East Indies--a sufficient
proof that the ideas on which these customs rest are not confined to
any one race, but naturally suggest themselves to all untutored
peoples engaged in agriculture. It is probable, therefore, that
Demeter and Persephone, those stately and beautiful figures of Greek
mythology, grew out of the same simple beliefs and practices which
still prevail among our modern peasantry, and that they were
represented by rude dolls made out of the yellow sheaves on many a
harvest-field long before their breathing images were wrought in
bronze and marble by the master hands of Phidias and Praxiteles. A
reminiscence of that olden time--a scent, so to say, of the
harvest-field--lingered to the last in the title of the Maiden
(_Kore_) by which Persephone was commonly known. Thus if the
prototype of Demeter is the Corn-mother of Germany, the prototype of
Persephone is the Harvest-maiden which, autumn after autumn, is
still made from the last sheaf on the Braes of Balquhidder. Indeed,
if we knew more about the peasant-farmers of ancient Greece, we
should probably find that even in classical times they continued
annually to fashion their Corn-mothers (Demeters) and Maidens
(Persephones) out of the ripe corn on the harvest-fields. But
unfortunately the Demeter and Persephone whom we know were the
denizens of towns, the majestic inhabitants of lordly temples; it
was for such divinities alone that the refined writers of antiquity
had eyes; the uncouth rites performed by rustics amongst the corn
were beneath their notice. Even if they noticed them, they probably
never dreamed of any connexion between the puppet of corn-stalks on
the sunny stubble-field and the marble divinity in the shady
coolness of the temple. Still the writings even of these town-bred
and cultured persons afford us an occasional glimpse of a Demeter as
rude as the rudest that a remote German village can show. Thus the
story that Iasion begat a child Plutus ( "wealth," "abundance") by
Demeter on a thrice-ploughed field, may be compared with the West
Prussian custom of the mock birth of a child on the harvest-field.
In this Prussian custom the pretended mother represents the
Corn-mother (Zytniamatka_); the pretended child represents the
Corn-baby, and the whole ceremony is a charm to ensure a crop next
year. The custom and the legend alike point to an older practice of
performing, among the sprouting crops in spring or the stubble in
autumn, one of those real or mimic acts of procreation by which, as
we have seen, primitive man often seeks to infuse his own vigorous
life into the languid or decaying energies of nature. Another
glimpse of the savage under the civilised Demeter will be afforded
farther on, when we come to deal with another aspect of those
agricultural divinities.

The reader may have observed that in modern folk-customs the
corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old
Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, etc.), not both by a
Corn-mother and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks represent the
corn both as a mother and a daughter?

In the Breton custom the mother-sheaf--a large figure made out of
the last sheaf with a small corn-doll inside of it--clearly
represents both the Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, the latter
still unborn. Again, in the Prussian custom just referred to, the
woman who plays the part of Corn-mother represents the ripe grain;
the child appears to represent next year's corn, which may be
regarded, naturally enough, as the child of this year's corn, since
it is from the seed of this year's harvest that next year's crop
will spring. Further, we have seen that among the Malays of the
Peninsula and sometimes among the Highlanders of Scotland the spirit
of the grain is represented in double female form, both as old and
young, by means of ears taken alike from the ripe crop: in Scotland
the old spirit of the corn appears as the Carline or _Cailleach,_
the young spirit as the Maiden; while among the Malays of the
Peninsula the two spirits of the rice are definitely related to each
other as mother and child. Judged by these analogies Demeter would
be the ripe crop of this year; Persephone would be the seed-corn
taken from it and sown in autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent
of Persephone into the lower world would thus be a mythical
expression for the sowing of the seed; her reappearance in spring
would signify the sprouting of the young corn. In this way the
Persephone of one year becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may
very well have been the original form of the myth. But when with the
advance of religious thought the corn came to be personified no
longer as a being that went through the whole cycle of birth,
growth, reproduction, and death within a year, but as an immortal
goddess, consistency required that one of the two personifications,
the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed. However, the
double conception of the corn as mother and daughter may have been
too old and too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be eradicated
by logic, and so room had to be found in the reformed myth both for
mother and daughter. This was done by assigning to Persephone the
character of the corn sown in autumn and sprouting in spring, while
Demeter was left to play the somewhat vague part of the heavy mother
of the corn, who laments its annual disappearance underground, and
rejoices over its reappearance in spring. Thus instead of a regular
succession of divine beings, each living a year and then giving
birth to her successor, the reformed myth exhibits the conception of
two divine and immortal beings, one of whom annually disappears into
and reappears from the ground, while the other has little to do but
to weep and rejoice at the appropriate seasons.

This theory of the double personification of the corn in Greek myth
assumes that both personifications (Demeter and Persephone) are
original. But if we suppose that the Greek myth started with a
single personification, the aftergrowth of a second personification
may perhaps be explained as follows. On looking over the harvest
customs which have been passed under review, it may be noticed that
they involve two distinct conceptions of the corn-spirit. For
whereas in some of the customs the corn-spirit is treated as
immanent in the corn, in others it is regarded as external to it.
Thus when a particular sheaf is called by the name of the
corn-spirit, and is dressed in clothes and handled with reverence,
the spirit is clearly regarded as immanent in the corn. But when the
spirit is said to make the crops grow by passing through them, or to
blight the grain of those against whom she has a grudge, she is
apparently conceived as distinct from, though exercising power over,
the corn. Conceived in the latter mode the corn-spirit is in a fair
way to become a deity of the corn, if she has not become so already.
Of these two conceptions, that of the cornspirit as immanent in the
corn is doubtless the older, since the view of nature as animated by
indwelling spirits appears to have generally preceded the view of it
as controlled by external deities; to put it shortly, animism
precedes deism. In the harvest customs of our European peasantry the
corn-spirit seems to be conceived now as immanent in the corn and
now as external to it. In Greek mythology, on the other hand,
Demeter is viewed rather as the deity of the corn than as the spirit
immanent in it. The process of thought which leads to the change
from the one mode of conception to the other is anthropomorphism, or
the gradual investment of the immanent spirits with more and more of
the attributes of humanity. As men emerge from savagery the tendency
to humanise their divinities gains strength; and the more human
these become the wider is the breach which severs them from the
natural objects of which they were at first merely the animating
spirits or souls. But in the progress upwards from savagery men of
the same generation do not march abreast; and though the new
anthropomorphic gods may satisfy the religious wants of the more
developed intelligences, the backward members of the community will
cling by preference to the old animistic notions. Now when the
spirit of any natural object such as the corn has been invested with
human qualities, detached from the object, and converted into a
deity controlling it, the object itself is, by the withdrawal of its
spirit, left inanimate; it becomes, so to say, a spiritual vacuum.
But the popular fancy, intolerant of such a vacuum, in other words,
unable to conceive anything as inanimate, immediately creates a
fresh mythical being, with which it peoples the vacant object. Thus
the same natural object comes to be represented in mythology by two
distinct beings: first by the old spirit now separated from it and
raised to the rank of a deity; second, by the new spirit, freshly
created by the popular fancy to supply the place vacated by the old
spirit on its elevation to a higher sphere. In such cases the
problem for mythology is, having got two distinct personifications
of the same object, what to do with them? How are their relations to
each other to be adjusted, and room found for both in the
mythological system? When the old spirit or new deity is conceived
as creating or producing the object in question, the problem is
easily solved. Since the object is believed to be produced by the
old spirit, and animated by the new one, the latter, as the soul of
the object, must also owe its existence to the former; thus the old
spirit will stand to the new one as producer to produced, that is,
in mythology, as parent to child, and if both spirits are conceived
as female, their relation will be that of mother and daughter. In
this way, starting from a single personification of the corn as
female, mythic fancy might in time reach a double personification of
it as mother and daughter. It would be very rash to affirm that this
was the way in which the myth of Demeter and Persephone actually
took shape; but it seems a legitimate conjecture that the
reduplication of deities, of which Demeter and Persephone furnish an
example, may sometimes have arisen in the way indicated. For
example, among the pairs of deities dealt with in a former part of
this work, it has been shown that there are grounds for regarding
both Isis and her companion god Osiris as personifications of the
corn. On the hypothesis just suggested, Isis would be the old
corn-spirit, and Osiris would be the newer one, whose relationship
to the old spirit was variously explained as that of brother,
husband, and son; for of course mythology would always be free to
account for the coexistence of the two divinities in more ways than
one. It must not, however, be forgotten that this proposed
explanation of such pairs of deities as Demeter and Persephone or
Isis and Osiris is purely conjectural, and is only given for what it
is worth.




XLVII. Lityerses



1. Songs of the Corn Reapers

IN THE PRECEDING pages an attempt has been made to show that in the
Corn-mother and Harvest-maiden of Northern Europe we have the
prototypes of Demeter and Persephone. But an essential feature is
still wanting to complete the resemblance. A leading incident in the
Greek myth is the death and resurrection of Persephone; it is this
incident which, coupled with the nature of the goddess as a deity of
vegetation, links the myth with the cults of Adonis, Attis, Osiris,
and Dionysus; and it is in virtue of this incident that the myth
finds a place in our discussion of the Dying God. It remains,
therefore, to see whether the conception of the annual death and
resurrection of a god, which figures so prominently in these great
Greek and Oriental worships, has not also its origin or its analogy
in the rustic rites observed by reapers and vine-dressers amongst
the corn-shocks and the vines.

Our general ignorance of the popular superstitions and customs of
the ancients has already been confessed. But the obscurity which
thus hangs over the first beginnings of ancient religion is
fortunately dissipated to some extent in the present case. The
worships of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis had their respective seats, as
we have seen, in Egypt, Syria, and Phrygia; and in each of these
countries certain harvest and vintage customs are known to have been
observed, the resemblance of which to each other and to the national
rites struck the ancients themselves, and, compared with the harvest
customs of modern peasants and barbarians, seems to throw some light
on the origin of the rites in question.

It has been already mentioned, on the authority of Diodorus, that in
ancient Egypt the reapers were wont to lament over the first sheaf
cut, invoking Isis as the goddess to whom they owed the discovery of
corn. To the plaintive song or cry sung or uttered by Egyptian
reapers the Greeks gave the name of Maneros, and explained the name
by a story that Maneros, the only son of the first Egyptian king,
invented agriculture, and, dying an untimely death, was thus
lamented by the people. It appears, however, that the name Maneros
is due to a misunderstanding of the formula _maa-ne-hra,_ "Come to
the house," which has been discovered in various Egyptian writings,
for example in the dirge of Isis in the Book of the Dead. Hence we
may suppose that the cry _maa-ne-hra_ was chanted by the reapers
over the cut corn as a dirge for the death of the corn-spirit (Isis
or Osiris) and a prayer for its return. As the cry was raised over
the first ears reaped, it would seem that the corn-spirit was
believed by the Egyptians to be present in the first corn cut and to
die under the sickle. We have seen that in the Malay Peninsula and
Java the first ears of rice are taken to represent either the Soul
of the Rice or the Rice-bride and the Rice-bridegroom. In parts of
Russia the first sheaf is treated much in the same way that the last
sheaf is treated elsewhere. It is reaped by the mistress herself,
taken home and set in the place of honour near the holy pictures;
afterwards it is threshed separately, and some of its grain is mixed
with the next year's seed-corn. In Aberdeenshire, while the last
corn cut was generally used to make the _clyack_ sheaf, it was
sometimes, though rarely, the first corn cut that was dressed up as
a woman and carried home with ceremony.

In Phoenicia and Western Asia a plaintive song, like that chanted by
the Egyptian corn-reapers, was sung at the vintage and probably (to
judge by analogy) also at harvest. This Phoenician song was called
by the Greeks Linus or Ailinus and explained, like Maneros, as a
lament for the death of a youth named Linus. According to one story
Linus was brought up by a shepherd, but torn to pieces by his dogs.
But, like Maneros, the name Linus or Ailinus appears to have
originated in a verbal misunderstanding, and to be nothing more than
the cry _ai lanu,_ that is "Woe to us," which the Phoenicians
probably uttered in mourning for Adonis; at least Sappho seems to
have regarded Adonis and Linus as equivalent.

In Bithynia a like mournful ditty, called Bormus or Borimus, was
chanted by Mariandynian reapers. Bormus was said to have been a
handsome youth, the son of King Upias or of a wealthy and
distinguished man. One summer day, watching the reapers at work in
his fields, he went to fetch them a drink of water and was never
heard of more. So the reapers sought for him, calling him in
plaintive strains, which they continued to chant at harvest ever
afterwards.



2. Killing the Corn-spirit

IN PHRYGIA the corresponding song, sung by harvesters both at
reaping and at threshing, was called Lityerses. According to one
story, Lityerses was a bastard son of Midas, King of Phrygia, and
dwelt at Celaenae. He used to reap the corn, and had an enormous
appetite. When a stranger happened to enter the corn-field or to
pass by it, Lityerses gave him plenty to eat and drink, then took
him to the corn-fields on the banks of the Maeander and compelled
him to reap along with him. Lastly, it was his custom to wrap the
stranger in a sheaf, cut off his head with a sickle, and carry away
his body, swathed in the corn-stalks. But at last Hercules undertook
to reap with him, cut off his head with the sickle, and threw his
body into the river. As Hercules is reported to have slain Lityerses
in the same way that Lityerses slew others, we may infer that
Lityerses used to throw the bodies of his victims into the river.
According to another version of the story, Lityerses, a son of
Midas, was wont to challenge people to a reaping match with him, and
if he vanquished them he used to thrash them; but one day he met
with a stronger reaper, who slew him.

There are some grounds for supposing that in these stories of
Lityerses we have the description of a Phrygian harvest custom in
accordance with which certain persons, especially strangers passing
the harvest field, were regularly regarded as embodiments of the
corn-spirit, and as such were seized by the reapers, wrapt in
sheaves, and beheaded, their bodies, bound up in the corn-stalks,
being after-wards thrown into water as a rain-charm. The grounds for
this supposition are, first, the resemblance of the Lityerses story
to the harvest customs of European peasantry, and, second, the
frequency of human sacrifices offered by savage races to promote the
fertility of the fields. We will examine these grounds successively,
beginning with the former.

In comparing the story with the harvest customs of Europe, three
points deserve special attention, namely: I. the reaping match and
the binding of persons in the sheaves; II. the killing of the
corn-spirit or his representatives; III. the treatment of visitors
to the harvest field or of strangers passing it.

I. In regard to the first head, we have seen that in modern Europe
the person who cuts or binds or threshes the last sheaf is often
exposed to rough treatment at the hands of his fellow-labourers. For
example, he is bound up in the last sheaf, and, thus encased, is
carried or carted about, beaten, drenched with water, thrown on a
dunghill, and so forth. Or, if he is spared this horse-play, he is
at least the subject of ridicule or is thought to be destined to
suffer some misfortune in the course of the year. Hence the
harvesters are naturally reluctant to give the last cut at reaping
or the last stroke at threshing or to bind the last sheaf, and
towards the close of the work this reluctance produces an emulation
among the labourers, each striving to finish his task as fast as
possible, in order that he may escape the invidious distinction of
being last. For example, in the Mittelmark district of Prussia, when
the rye has been reaped, and the last sheaves are about to be tied
up, the binders stand in two rows facing each other, every woman
with her sheaf and her straw rope before her. At a given signal they
all tie up their sheaves, and the one who is the last to finish is
ridiculed by the rest. Not only so, but her sheaf is made up into
human shape and called the Old Man, and she must carry it home to
the farmyard, where the harvesters dance in a circle round her and
it. Then they take the Old Man to the farmer and deliver it to him
with the words, "We bring the Old Man to the Master. He may keep him
till he gets a new one." After that the Old Man is set up against a
tree, where he remains for a long time, the butt of many jests. At
Aschbach in Bavaria, when the reaping is nearly finished, the
reapers say, "Now, we will drive out the Old Man." Each of them sets
himself to reap a patch of corn as fast as he can; he who cuts the
last handful or the last stalk is greeted by the rest with an
exulting cry, "You have the Old Man." Sometimes a black mask is
fastened on the reaper's face and he is dressed in woman's clothes;
or if the reaper is a woman, she is dressed in man's clothes. A
dance follows. At the supper the Old Man gets twice as large a
portion of the food as the others. The proceedings are similar at
threshing; the person who gives the last stroke is said to have the
Old Man. At the supper given to the threshers he has to eat out of
the cream-ladle and to drink a great deal. Moreover, he is quizzed
and teased in all sorts of ways till he frees himself from further
annoyance by treating the others to brandy or beer.

These examples illustrate the contests in reaping, threshing, and
binding which take place amongst the harvesters, from their
unwillingness to suffer the ridicule and discomfort incurred by the
one who happens to finish his work last. It will be remembered that
the person who is last at reaping, binding, or threshing, is
regarded as the representative of the corn-spirit, and this idea is
more fully expressed by binding him or her in corn-stalks. The
latter custom has been already illustrated, but a few more instances
may be added. At Kloxin, near Stettin, the harvesters call out to
the woman who binds the last sheaf, "You have the Old Man, and must
keep him." As late as the first half of the nineteenth century the
custom was to tie up the woman herself in pease-straw, and bring her
with music to the farmhouse, where the harvesters danced with her
till the pease-straw fell off. In other villages round Stettin, when
the last harvest-waggon is being loaded, there is a regular race
amongst the women, each striving not to be last. For she who places
the last sheaf on the waggon is called the Old Man, and is
completely swathed in corn-stalks; she is also decked with flowers,
and flowers and a helmet of straw are placed on her head. In solemn
procession she carries the harvest-crown to the squire, over whose
head she holds it while she utters a string of good wishes. At the
dance which follows, the Old Man has the right to choose his, or
rather her, partner; it is an honour to dance with him. At Gommern,
near Magdeburg, the reaper who cuts the last ears of corn is often
wrapt up in corn-stalks so completely that it is hard to see whether
there is a man in the bundle or not. Thus wrapt up he is taken by
another stalwart reaper on his back, and carried round the field
amidst the joyous cries of the harvesters. At Neuhausen, near
Merseburg, the person who binds the last sheaf is wrapt in ears of
oats and saluted as the Oatsman, whereupon the others dance round
him. At Brie, Isle de France, the farmer himself is tied up in the
_first_ sheaf. At Dingelstedt, in the district of Erfurt, down to
the first half of the nineteenth century it was the custom to tie up
a man in the last sheaf. He was called the Old Man, and was brought
home on the last waggon, amid huzzas and music. On reaching the
farmyard he was rolled round the barn and drenched with water. At
Nördlingen in Bavaria the man who gives the last stroke at threshing
is wrapt in straw and rolled on the threshing-floor. In some parts
of Oberpfalz, Bavaria, he is said to "get the Old Man," is wrapt in
straw, and carried to a neighbour who has not yet finished his
threshing. In Silesia the woman who binds the last sheaf has to
submit to a good deal of horse-play. She is pushed, knocked down,
and tied up in the sheaf, after which she is called the corn-puppet
(_Kornpopel_).

"In all these cases the idea is that the spirit of the corn--the Old
Man of vegetation--is driven out of the corn last cut or last
threshed, and lives in the barn during the winter. At sowing-time he
goes out again to the fields to resume his activity as animating
force among the sprouting corn."

II. Passing to the second point of comparison between the Lityerses
story and European harvest customs, we have now to see that in the
latter the corn-spirit is often believed to be killed at reaping or
threshing. In the Romsdal and other parts of Norway, when the
haymaking is over, the people say that "the Old Hay-man has been
killed." In some parts of Bavaria the man who gives the last stroke
at threshing is said to have killed the Corn-man, the Oats-man, or
the Wheat-man, according to the crop. In the Canton of Tillot, in
Lorraine, at threshing the last corn the men keep time with their
flails, calling out as they thresh, "We are killing the Old Woman!
We are killing the Old Woman!" If there is an old woman in the house
she is warned to save herself, or she will be struck dead. Near
Ragnit, in Lithuania, the last handful of corn is left standing by
itself, with the words, "The Old Woman (_Boba_) is sitting in
there." Then a young reaper whets his scythe and, with a strong
sweep, cuts down the handful. It is now said of him that "he has cut
off the Boba's head"; and he receives a gratuity from the farmer and
a jugful of water over his head from the farmer's wife. According to
another account, every Lithuanian reaper makes haste to finish his
task; for the Old Rye-woman lives in the last stalks, and whoever
cuts the last stalks kills the Old Rye-woman, and by killing her he
brings trouble on himself. In Wilkischken, in the district of
Tilsit, the man who cuts the last corn goes by the name of "the
killer of the Rye-woman." In Lithuania, again, the corn-spirit is
believed to be killed at threshing as well as at reaping. When only
a single pile of corn remains to be threshed, all the threshers
suddenly step back a few paces, as if at the word of command. Then
they fall to work, plying their flails with the utmost rapidity and
vehemence, till they come to the last bundle. Upon this they fling
themselves with almost frantic fury, straining every nerve, and
raining blows on it till the word "Halt!" rings out sharply from the
leader. The man whose flail is the last to fall after the command to
stop has been given is immediately surrounded by all the rest,
crying out that "he has struck the Old Rye-woman dead." He has to
expiate the deed by treating them to brandy; and, like the man who
cuts the last corn, he is known as "the killer of the Old
Rye-woman." Sometimes in Lithuania the slain corn-spirit was
represented by a puppet. Thus a female figure was made out of
corn-stalks, dressed in clothes, and placed on the threshing-floor,
under the heap of corn which was to be threshed last. Whoever
thereafter gave the last stroke at threshing "struck the Old Woman
dead." We have already met with examples of burning the figure which
represents the corn-spirit. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a custom
called "burning the Old Witch" is observed on the last day of
harvest. A small sheaf of corn is burnt on the field in a fire of
stubble; peas are parched at the fire and eaten with a liberal
allowance of ale; and the lads and lasses romp about the flames and
amuse themselves by blackening each other's faces. Sometimes, again,
the corn-spirit is represented by a man, who lies down under the
last corn; it is threshed upon his body, and the people say that
"the Old Man is being beaten to death." We saw that sometimes the
farmer's wife is thrust, together with the last sheaf, under the
threshing-machine, as if to thresh her, and that afterwards a
pretence is made of winnowing her. At Volders, in the Tyrol, husks
of corn are stuck behind the neck of the man who gives the last
stroke at threshing, and he is throttled with a straw garland. If he
is tall, it is believed that the corn will be tall next year. Then
he is tied on a bundle and flung into the river. In Carinthia, the
thresher who gave the last stroke, and the person who untied the
last sheaf on the threshing-floor, are bound hand and foot with
straw bands, and crowns of straw are placed on their heads. Then
they are tied, face to face, on a sledge, dragged through the
village, and flung into a brook. The custom of throwing the
representative of the corn-spirit into a stream, like that of
drenching him with water, is, as usual, a rain-charm.

III. Thus far the representatives of the corn-spirit have generally
been the man or woman who cuts, binds, or threshes the last corn. We
now come to the cases in which the corn-spirit is represented either
by a stranger passing the harvest-field (as in the Lityerses tale),
or by a visitor entering it for the first time. All over Germany it
is customary for the reapers or threshers to lay hold of passing
strangers and bind them with a rope made of corn-stalks, till they
pay a forfeit; and when the farmer himself or one of his guests
enters the field or the threshing-floor for the first time, he is
treated in the same way. Sometimes the rope is only tied round his
arm or his feet or his neck. But sometimes he is regularly swathed
in corn. Thus at Solör in Norway, whoever enters the field, be he
the master or a stranger, is tied up in a sheaf and must pay a
ransom. In the neighbourhood of Soest, when the farmer visits the
flax-pullers for the first time, he is completely enveloped in flax.
Passers-by are also surrounded by the women, tied up in flax, and
compelled to stand brandy. At Nördlingen strangers are caught with
straw ropes and tied up in a sheaf till they pay a forfeit. Among
the Germans of Haselberg, in West Bohemia, as soon as a farmer had
given the last corn to be threshed on the threshing-floor, he was
swathed in it and had to redeem himself by a present of cakes. In
the canton of Putanges, in Normandy, a pretence of tying up the
owner of the land in the last sheaf of wheat is still practised, or
at least was still practised some quarter of a century ago. The task
falls to the women alone. They throw themselves on the proprietor,
seize him by the arms, the legs, and the body, throw him to the
ground, and stretch him on the last sheaf. Then a show is made of
binding him, and the conditions to be observed at the harvest-supper
are dictated to him. When he has accepted them, he is released and
allowed to get up. At Brie, Isle de France, when any one who does
not belong to the farm passes by the harvest-field, the reapers give
chase. If they catch him, they bind him in a sheaf an dbite him, one
after the other, in the forehead, crying, "You shall carry the key
of the field." "To have the key" is an expression used by harvesters
elsewhere in the sense of to cut or bind or thresh the last sheaf;
hence, it is equivalent to the phrases "You have the Old Man," "You
are the Old Man," which are addressed to the cutter, binder, or
thresher of the last sheaf. Therefore, when a stranger, as at Brie,
is tied up in a sheaf and told that he will "carry the key of the
field," it is as much as to say that he is the Old Man, that is, an
embodiment of the corn-spirit. In hop-picking, if a well-dressed
stranger passes the hop-yard, he is seized by the women, tumbled
into the bin, covered with leaves, and not released till he has paid
a fine.

Thus, like the ancient Lityerses, modern European reapers have been
wont to lay hold of a passing stranger and tie him up in a sheaf. It
is not to be expected that they should complete the parallel by
cutting off his head; but if they do not take such a strong step,
their language and gestures are at least indicative of a desire to
do so. For instance, in Mecklenburg on the first day of reaping, if
the master or mistress or a stranger enters the field, or merely
passes by it, all the mowers face towards him and sharpen their
scythes, clashing their whet-stones against them in unison, as if
they were making ready to mow. Then the woman who leads the mowers
steps up to him and ties a band round his left arm. He must ransom
himself by payment of a forfeit. Near Ratzeburg, when the master or
other person of mark enters the field or passes by it, all the
harvesters stop work and march towards him in a body, the men with
their scythes in front. On meeting him they form up in line, men and
women. The men stick the poles of their scythes in the ground, as
they do in whetting them; then they take off their caps and hang
them on the scythes, while their leader stands forward and makes a
speech. When he has done, they all whet their scythes in measured
time very loudly, after which they put on their caps. Two of the
women binders then come forward; one of them ties the master or
stranger (as the case may be) with corn-ears or with a silken band;
the other delivers a rhyming address. The following are specimens of
the speeches made by the reaper on these occasions. In some parts of
Pomerania every passer-by is stopped, his way being barred with a
corn-rope. The reapers form a circle round him and sharpen their
scythes, while their leader says:


   "The men are ready,
    The scythes are bent,
    The corn is great and small,
    The gentleman must be mowed."


Then the process of whetting the scythes is repeated. At Ramin, in
the district of Stettin, the stranger, standing encircled by the
reapers, is thus addressed:


   "We'll stroke the gentleman
    With our naked sword,
    Wherewith we shear meadows and fields.
    We shear princes and lords.
    Labourers are often athirst;
    If the gentleman will stand beer and brandy
    The joke will soon be over.
    But, if our prayer he does not like,
    The sword has a right to strike."


On the threshing-floor strangers are also regarded as embodiments of
the corn-spirit, and are treated accordingly. At Wiedingharde in
Schleswig when a stranger comes to the threshing-floor he is asked,
"Shall I teach you the flail-dance?" If he says yes, they put the
arms of the threshing-flail round his neck as if he were a sheaf of
corn, and press them together so tight that he is nearly choked. In
some parishes of Wermland (Sweden), when a stranger enters the
threshing-floor where the threshers are at work, they say that "they
will teach him the threshing-song." Then they put a flail round his
neck and a straw rope about his body. Also, as we have seen, if a
stranger woman enters the threshing-floor, the threshers put a flail
round her body and a wreath of corn-stalks round her neck, and call
out, "See the Corn-woman! See! that is how the Corn-maiden looks!"

Thus in these harvest-customs of modern Europe the person who cuts,
binds, or threshes the last corn is treated as an embodiment of the
corn-spirit by being wrapt up in sheaves, killed in mimicry by
agricultural implements, and thrown into the water. These
coincidences with the Lityerses story seem to prove that the latter
is a genuine description of an old Phrygian harvest-custom. But
since in the modern parallels the killing of the personal
representative of the corn-spirit is necessarily omitted or at most
enacted only in mimicry, it is desirable to show that in rude
society human beings have been commonly killed as an agricultural
ceremony to promote the fertility of the fields. The following
examples will make this plain.



3. Human Sacrifices for the Crops

THE INDIANS of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, used to sacrifice human blood
and the hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The people of
Cañar (now Cuenca in Ecuador) used to sacrifice a hundred children
annually at harvest. The kings of Quito, the Incas of Peru, and for
a long time the Spaniards were unable to suppress the bloody rite.
At a Mexican harvest-festival, when the first-fruits of the season
were offered to the sun, a criminal was placed between two immense
stones, balanced opposite each other, and was crushed by them as
they fell together. His remains were buried, and a feast and dance
followed. This sacrifice was known as "the meeting of the stones."
We have seen that the ancient Mexicans also sacrificed human beings
at all the various stages in the growth of the maize, the age of the
victims corresponding to the age of the corn; for they sacrificed
new-born babes at sowing, older children when the grain had
sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old
men. No doubt the correspondence between the ages of the victims and
the state of the corn was supposed to enhance the efficacy of the
sacrifice.

The Pawnees annually sacrificed a human victim in spring when they
sowed their fields. The sacrifice was believed to have been enjoined
on them by the Morning Star, or by a certain bird which the Morning
Star had sent to them as its messenger. The bird was stuffed and
preserved as a powerful talisman. They thought that an omission of
this sacrifice would be followed by the total failure of the crops
of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The victim was a captive of either
sex. He was clad in the gayest and most costly attire, was fattened
on the choicest food, and carefully kept in ignorance of his doom.
When he was fat enough, they bound him to a cross in the presence of
the multitude, danced a solemn dance, then cleft his head with a
tomahawk and shot him with arrows. According to one trader, the
squaws then cut pieces of flesh from the victim's body, with which
they greased their hoes; but this was denied by another trader who
had been present at the ceremony. Immediately after the sacrifice
the people proceeded to plant their fields. A particular account has
been preserved of the sacrifice of a Sioux girl by the Pawnees in
April 1837 or 1838. The girl was fourteen or fifteen years old and
had been kept for six months and well treated. Two days before the
sacrifice she was led from wigwam to wigwam, accompanied by the
whole council of chiefs and warriors. At each lodge she received a
small billet of wood and a little paint, which she handed to the
warrior next to her. In this way she called at every wigwam,
receiving at each the same present of wood and paint. On the
twenty-second of April she was taken out to be sacrificed, attended
by the warriors, each of whom carried two pieces of wood which he
had received from her hands. Her body having been painted half red
and half black, she was attached to a sort of gibbet and roasted for
some time over a slow fire, then shot to death with arrows. The
chief sacrificer next tore out her heart and devoured it. While her
flesh was still warm it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put
in little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. There the
head chief took a piece of the flesh from a basket and squeezed a
drop of blood upon the newly-deposited grains of corn. His example
was followed by the rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with
the blood; it was then covered up with earth. According to one
account the body of the victim was reduced to a kind of paste, which
was rubbed or sprinkled not only on the maize but also on the
potatoes, the beans, and other seeds to fertilise them. By this
sacrifice they hoped to obtain plentiful crops.

A West African queen used to sacrifice a man and woman in the month
of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and their bodies
buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled. At Lagos
in Guinea it was the custom annually to impale a young girl alive
soon after the spring equinox in order to secure good crops. Along
with her were sacrificed sheep and goats, which, with yams, heads of
maize, and plantains, were hung on stakes on each side of her. The
victims were bred up for the purpose in the king's seraglio, and
their minds had been so powerfully wrought upon by the fetish men
that they went cheerfully to their fate. A similar sacrifice used to
be annually offered at Benin, in Guinea. The Marimos, a Bechuana
tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen is
generally a short, stout man. He is seized by violence or
intoxicated and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst the
wheat to serve as "seed" (so they phrase it). After his blood has
coagulated in the sun, it is burned along with the frontal bone, the
flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then scattered
over the ground to fertilise it. The rest of the body is eaten.

The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, offer a
human sacrifice before they sow their rice. The victim is a slave,
who is hewn to pieces in the forest. The natives of Bontoc in the
interior of Luzon, one of the Philippine Islands, are passionate
head-hunters. Their principal seasons for head-hunting are the times
of planting and reaping the rice. In order that the crop may turn
out well, every farm must get at least one human head at planting
and one at sowing. The head-hunters go out in twos or threes, lie in
wait for the victim, whether man or woman, cut off his or her head,
hands, and feet, and bring them back in haste to the village, where
they are received with great rejoicings. The skulls are at first
exposed on the branches of two or three dead trees which stand in an
open space of every village surrounded by large stones which serve
as seats. The people then dance round them and feast and get drunk.
When the flesh has decayed from the head, the man who cut it off
takes it home and preserves it as a relic, while his companions do
the same with the hands and the feet. Similar customs are observed
by the Apoyaos, another tribe in the interior of Luzon.

Among the Lhota Naga, one of the many savage tribes who inhabit the
deep rugged labyrinthine glens which wind into the mountains from
the rich valley of Brahmapootra, it used to be a common custom to
chop off the heads, hands, and feet of people they met with, and
then to stick up the severed extremities in their fields to ensure a
good crop of grain. They bore no ill-will whatever to the persons
upon whom they operated in this unceremonious fashion. Once they
flayed a boy alive, carved him in pieces, and distributed the flesh
among all the villagers, who put it into their corn-bins to avert
bad luck and ensure plentiful crops of grain. The Gonds of India, a
Dravidian race, kidnapped Brahman boys, and kept them as victims to
be sacrificed on various occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a
triumphal procession, one of the lads was slain by being punctured
with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then sprinkled over the
ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was devoured. The
Oraons or Uraons of Chota Nagpur worship a goddess called Anna
Kuari, who can give good crops and make a man rich, but to induce
her to do so it is necessary to offer human sacrifices. In spite of
the vigilance of the British Government these sacrifices are said to
be still secretly perpetrated. The victims are poor waifs and strays
whose disappearance attracts no notice. April and May are the months
when the catchpoles are out on the prowl. At that time strangers
will not go about the country alone, and parents will not let their
children enter the jungle or herd the cattle. When a catchpole has
found a victim, he cuts his throat and carries away the upper part
of the ring finger and the nose. The goddess takes up her abode in
the house of any man who has offered her a sacrifice, and from that
time his fields yield a double harvest. The form she assumes in the
house is that of a small child. When the householder brings in his
unhusked rice, he takes the goddess and rolls her over the heap to
double its size. But she soon grows restless and can only be
pacified with the blood of fresh human victims.

But the best known case of human sacrifices, systematically offered
to ensure good crops, is supplied by the Khonds or Kandhs, another
Dravidian race in Bengal. Our knowledge of them is derived from the
accounts written by British officers who, about the middle of the
nineteenth century, were engaged in putting them down. The
sacrifices were offered to the Earth Goddess. Tari Pennu or Bera
Pennu, and were believed to ensure good crops and immunity from all
disease and accidents. In particular, they were considered necessary
in the cultivation of turmeric, the Khonds arguing that the turmeric
could not have a deep red colour without the shedding of blood. The
victim or Meriah, as he was called, was acceptable to the goddess
only if he had been purchased, or had been born a victim--that is,
the son of a victim father, or had been devoted as a child by his
father or guardian. Khonds in distress often sold their children for
victims, "considering the beatification of their souls certain, and
their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable
possible." A man of the Panua tribe was once seen to load a Khond
with curses, and finally to spit in his face, because the Khond had
sold for a victim his own child, whom the Panua had wished to marry.
A party of Khonds, who saw this, immediately pressed forward to
comfort the seller of his child, saying, "Your child has died that
all the world may live, and the Earth Goddess herself will wipe that
spittle from your face." The victims were often kept for years
before they were sacrificed. Being regarded as consecrated beings,
they were treated with extreme affection, mingled with deference,
and were welcomed wherever they went. A Meriah youth, on attaining
maturity, was generally given a wife, who was herself usually a
Meriah or victim; and with her he received a portion of land and
farm-stock. Their offspring were also victims. Human sacrifices were
offered to the Earth Goddess by tribes, branches of tribes, or
villages, both at periodical festivals and on extraordinary
occasions. The periodical sacrifices were generally so arranged by
tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was
enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his
fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.

The mode of performing these tribal sacrifices was as follows. Ten
or twelve days before the sacrifice, the victim was devoted by
cutting off his hair, which, until then, had been kept unshorn.
Crowds of men and women assembled to witness the sacrifice; none
might be excluded, since the sacrifice was declared to be for all
mankind. It was preceded by several days of wild revelry and gross
debauchery. On the day before the sacrifice the victim, dressed in a
new garment, was led forth from the village in solemn procession,
with music and dancing, to the Meriah grove, a clump of high forest
trees standing a little way from the village and untouched by the
axe. There they tied him to a post, which was sometimes placed
between two plants of the sankissar shrub. He was then anointed with
oil, ghee, and turmeric, and adorned with flowers; and "a species of
reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish from adoration," was
paid to him throughout the day. A great struggle now arose to obtain
the smallest relic from his person; a particle of the turmeric paste
with which he was smeared, or a drop of his spittle, was esteemed of
sovereign virtue, especially by the women. The crowd danced round
the post to music, and addressing the earth, said, "O God, we offer
this sacrifice to you; give us good crops, seasons, and health";
then speaking to the victim they said, "We bought you with a price,
and did not seize you; now we sacrifice you according to custom, and
no sin rests with us."

On the last morning the orgies, which had been scarcely interrupted
during the night, were resumed, and continued till noon, when they
ceased, and the assembly proceeded to consummate the sacrifice. The
victim was again anointed with oil, and each person touched the
anointed part, and wiped the oil on his own head. In some places
they took the victim in procession round the village, from door to
door, where some plucked hair from his head, and others begged for a
drop of his spittle, with which they anointed their heads. As the
victim might not be bound nor make any show of resistance, the bones
of his arms and, if necessary, his legs were broken; but often this
precaution was rendered unnecessary by stupefying him with opium.
The mode of putting him to death varied in different places. One of
the commonest modes seems to have been strangulation, or squeezing
to death. The branch of a green tree was cleft several feet down the
middle; the victim's neck (in other places, his chest) was inserted
in the cleft, which the priest, aided by his assistants, strove with
all his force to close. Then he wounded the victim slightly with his
axe, whereupon the crowd rushed at the wretch and hewed the flesh
from the bones, leaving the head and bowels untouched. Sometimes he
was cut up alive. In Chinna Kimedy he was dragged along the fields,
surrounded by the crowd, who, avoiding his head and intestines,
hacked the flesh from his body with their knives till he died.
Another very common mode of sacrifice in the same district was to
fasten the victim to the proboscis of a wooden elephant, which
revolved on a stout post, and, as it whirled round, the crowd cut
the flesh from the victim while life remained. In some villages
Major Campbell found as many as fourteen of these wooden elephants,
which had been used at sacrifices. In one district the victim was
put to death slowly by fire. A low stage was formed, sloping on
either side like a roof; upon it they laid the victim, his limbs
wound round with cords to confine his struggles. Fires were then
lighted and hot brands applied, to make him roll up and down the
slopes of the stage as long as possible; for the more tears he shed
the more abundant would be the supply of rain. Next day the body was
cut to pieces.

The flesh cut from the victim was instantly taken home by the
persons who had been deputed by each village to bring it. To secure
its rapid arrival, it was sometimes forwarded by relays of men, and
conveyed with postal fleetness fifty or sixty miles. In each village
all who stayed at home fasted rigidly until the flesh arrived. The
bearer deposited it in the place of public assembly, where it was
received by the priest and the heads of families. The priest divided
it into two portions, one of which he offered to the Earth Goddess
by burying it in a hole in the ground with his back turned, and
without looking. Then each man added a little earth to bury it, and
the priest poured water on the spot from a hill gourd. The other
portion of flesh he divided into as many shares as there were heads
of houses present. Each head of a house rolled his shred of flesh in
leaves, and buried it in his favourite field, placing it in the
earth behind his back without looking. In some places each man
carried his portion of flesh to the stream which watered his fields,
and there hung it on a pole. For three days thereafter no house was
swept; and, in one district, strict silence was observed, no fire
might be given out, no wood cut, and no strangers received. The
remains of the human victim (namely, the head, bowels, and bones)
were watched by strong parties the night after the sacrifice; and
next morning they were burned, along with a whole sheep, on a
funeral pile. The ashes were scattered over the fields, laid as
paste over the houses and granaries, or mixed with the new corn to
preserve it from insects. Sometimes, however, the head and bones
were buried, not burnt. After the suppression of the human
sacrifices, inferior victims were substituted in some places; for
instance, in the capital of Chinna Kimedy a goat took the place of
the human victim. Others sacrifice a buffalo. They tie it to a
wooden post in a sacred grove, dance wildly round it with brandished
knives, then, falling on the living animal, hack it to shreds and
tatters in a few minutes, fighting and struggling with each other
for every particle of flesh. As soon as a man has secured a piece he
makes off with it at full speed to bury it in his fields, according
to ancient custom, before the sun has set, and as some of them have
far to go they must run very fast. All the women throw clods of
earth at the rapidly retreating figures of the men, some of them
taking very good aim. Soon the sacred grove, so lately a scene of
tumult, is silent and deserted except for a few people who remain to
guard all that is left of the buffalo, to wit, the head, the bones,
and the stomach, which are burned with ceremony at the foot of the
stake.

In these Khond sacrifices the Meriahs are represented by our
authorities as victims offered to propitiate the Earth Goddess. But
from the treatment of the victims both before and after death it
appears that the custom cannot be explained as merely a propitiatory
sacrifice. A part of the flesh certainly was offered to the Earth
Goddess, but the rest was buried by each householder in his fields,
and the ashes of the other parts of the body were scattered over the
fields, laid as paste on the granaries, or mixed with the new corn.
These latter customs imply that to the body of the Meriah there was
ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to grow,
quite independent of the indirect efficacy which it might have as an
offering to secure the good-will of the deity. In other words, the
flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to be endowed with a
magical or physical power of fertilising the land. The same
intrinsic power was ascribed to the blood and tears of the Meriah,
his blood causing the redness of the turmeric and his tears
producing rain; for it can hardly be doubted that, originally at
least, the tears were supposed to bring down the rain, not merely to
prognosticate it. Similarly the custom of pouring water on the
buried flesh of the Meriah was no doubt a rain-charm. Again, magical
power as an attribute of the Meriah appears in the sovereign virtue
believed to reside in anything that came from his person, as his
hair or spittle. The ascription of such power to the Meriah
indicates that he was much more than a mere man sacrificed to
propitiate a deity. Once more, the extreme reverence paid him points
to the same conclusion. Major Campbell speaks of the Meriah as
"being regarded as something more than mortal," and Major Macpherson
says, "A species of reverence, which it is not easy to distinguish
from adoration, is paid to him." In short, the Meriah seems to have
been regarded as divine. As such, he may originally have represented
the Earth Goddess or, perhaps, a deity of vegetation; though in
later times he came to be regarded rather as a victim offered to a
deity than as himself an incarnate god. This later view of the
Meriah as a victim rather than a divinity may perhaps have received
undue emphasis from the European writers who have described the
Khond religion. Habituated to the later idea of sacrifice as an
offering made to a god for the purpose of conciliating his favour,
European observers are apt to interpret all religious slaughter in
this sense, and to suppose that wherever such slaughter takes place,
there must necessarily be a deity to whom the carnage is believed by
the slayers to be acceptable. Thus their preconceived ideas may
unconsciously colour and warp their descriptions of savage rites.

The same custom of killing the representative of a god, of which
strong traces appear in the Khond sacrifices, may perhaps be
detected in some of the other human sacrifices described above. Thus
the ashes of the slaughtered Marimo were scattered over the fields;
the blood of the Brahman lad was put on the crop and field; the
flesh of the slain Naga was stowed in the corn-bin; and the blood of
the Sioux girl was allowed to trickle on the seed. Again, the
identification of the victim with the corn, in other words, the view
that he is an embodiment or spirit of the corn, is brought out in
the pains which seem to be taken to secure a physical correspondence
between him and the natural object which he embodies or represents.
Thus the Mexicans killed young victims for the young corn and old
ones for the ripe corn; the Marimos sacrifice, as "seed," a short,
fat man, the shortness of his stature corresponding to that of the
young corn, his fatness to the condition which it is desired that
the crops may attain; and the Pawnees fattened their victims
probably with the same view. Again, the identification of the victim
with the corn comes out in the African custom of killing him with
spades and hoes, and the Mexican custom of grinding him, like corn,
between two stones.

One more point in these savage customs deserves to be noted. The
Pawnee chief devoured the heart of the Sioux girl, and the Marimos
and Gonds ate the victim's flesh. If, as we suppose, the victim was
regarded as divine, it follows that in eating his flesh his
worshippers believed themselves to be partaking of the body of their
god.



4. The Corn-spirit slain in his Human Representatives

THE BARBAROUS rites just described offer analogies to the harvest
customs of Europe. Thus the fertilising virtue ascribed to the
corn-spirit is shown equally in the savage custom of mixing the
victim's blood or ashes with the seed-corn and the European custom
of mixing the grain from the last sheaf with the young corn in
spring. Again, the identification of the person with the corn
appears alike in the savage custom of adapting the age and stature
of the victim to the age and stature, whether actual or expected, of
the crop; in the Scotch and Styrian rules that when the corn-spirit
is conceived as the Maiden the last corn shall be cut by a young
maiden, but when it is conceived as the Corn-mother it shall be cut
by an old woman; in the warning given to old women in Lorraine to
save themselves when the Old Woman is being killed, that is, when
the last corn is being threshed; and in the Tyrolese expectation
that if the man who gives the last stroke at threshing is tall, the
next year's corn will be tall also. Further, the same identification
is implied in the savage custom of killing the representative of the
corn-spirit with hoes or spades or by grinding him between stones,
and in the European custom of pretending to kill him with the scythe
or the flail. Once more the Khond custom of pouring water on the
buried flesh of the victim is parallel to the European customs of
pouring water on the personal representative of the corn-spirit or
plunging him into a stream. Both the Khond and the European customs
are rain-charms.

To return now to the Lityerses story. It has been shown that in rude
society human beings have been commonly killed to promote the growth
of the crops. There is therefore no improbability in the supposition
that they may once have been killed for a like purpose in Phrygia
and Europe; and when Phrygian legend and European folk-custom,
closely agreeing with each other, point to the conclusion that men
were so slain, we are bound, provisionally at least, to accept the
conclusion. Further, both the Lityerses story and European
harvest-customs agree in indicating that the victim was put to death
as a representative of the corn-spirit, and this indication is in
harmony with the view which some savages appear to take of the
victim slain to make the crops flourish. On the whole, then, we may
fairly suppose that both in Phrygia and in Europe the representative
of the corn-spirit was annually killed upon the harvest-field.
Grounds have been already shown for believing that similarly in
Europe the representative of the tree-spirit was annually slain. The
proofs of these two remarkable and closely analogous customs are
entirely independent of each other. Their coincidence seems to
furnish fresh presumption in favour of both.

To the question, How was the representative of the corn-spirit
chosen? one answer has been already given. Both the Lityerses story
and European folk-custom show that passing strangers were regarded
as manifestations of the corn-spirit escaping from the cut or
threshed corn, and as such were seized and slain. But this is not
the only answer which the evidence suggests. According to the
Phrygian legend the victims of Lityerses were not simply passing
strangers, but persons whom he had vanquished in a reaping contest
and afterwards wrapt up in corn-sheaves and beheaded. This suggests
that the representative of the corn-spirit may have been selected by
means of a competition on the harvest-field, in which the vanquished
competitor was compelled to accept the fatal honour. The supposition
is countenanced by European harvest-customs. We have seen that in
Europe there is sometimes a contest amongst the reapers to avoid
being last, and that the person who is vanquished in this
competition, that is, who cuts the last corn, is often roughly
handled. It is true we have not found that a pretence is made of
killing him; but on the other hand we have found that a pretence is
made of killing the man who gives the last stroke at threshing, that
is, who is vanquished in the threshing contest. Now, since it is in
the character of representative of the corn-spirit that the thresher
of the last corn is slain in mimicry, and since the same
representative character attaches (as we have seen) to the cutter
and binder as well as to the thresher of the last corn, and since
the same repugnance is evinced by harvesters to be last in any one
of these labours, we may conjecture that a pretence has been
commonly made of killing the reaper and binder as well as the
thresher of the last corn, and that in ancient times this killing
was actually carried out. This conjecture is corroborated by the
common superstition that whoever cuts the last corn must die soon.
Sometimes it is thought that the person who binds the last sheaf on
the field will die in the course of next year. The reason for fixing
on the reaper, binder, or thresher of the last corn as the
representative of the corn-spirit may be this. The corn-spirit is
supposed to lurk as long as he can in the corn, retreating before
the reapers, the binders, and the threshers at their work. But when
he is forcibly expelled from his refuge in the last corn cut or the
last sheaf bound or the last grain threshed, he necessarily assumes
some other form than that of the corn-stalks, which had hitherto
been his garment or body. And what form can the expelled corn-spirit
assume more naturally than that of the person who stands nearest to
the corn from which he (the corn-spirit) has just been expelled? But
the person in question is necessarily the reaper, binder, or
thresher of the last corn. He or she, therefore, is seized and
treated as the corn-spirit himself.

Thus the person who was killed on the harvest-field as the
representative of the corn-spirit may have been either a passing
stranger or the harvester who was last at reaping, binding, or
threshing. But there is a third possibility, to which ancient legend
and modern folk-custom alike point. Lityerses not only put strangers
to death; he was himself slain, and apparently in the same way as he
had slain others, namely, by being wrapt in a corn-sheaf, beheaded,
and cast into the river; and it is implied that this happened to
Lityerses on his own land. Similarly in modern harvest-customs the
pretence of killing appears to be carried out quite as often on the
person of the master (farmer or squire) as on that of strangers. Now
when we remember that Lityerses was said to have been a son of the
King of Phrygia, and that in one account he is himself called a
king, and when we combine with this the tradition that he was put to
death, apparently as a representative of the corn-spirit, we are led
to conjecture that we have here another trace of the custom of
annually slaying one of those divine or priestly kings who are known
to have held ghostly sway in many parts of Western Asia and
particularly in Phrygia. The custom appears, as we have seen, to
have been so far modified in places that the king's son was slain in
the king's stead. Of the custom thus modified the story of Lityerses
would be, in one version at least, a reminiscence.

Turning now to the relation of the Phrygian Lityerses to the
Phrygian Attis, it may be remembered that at Pessinus--the seat of a
priestly kingship--the high-priest appears to have been annually
slain in the character of Attis, a god of vegetation, and that Attis
was described by an ancient authority as "a reaped ear of corn."
Thus Attis, as an embodiment of the corn-spirit, annually slain in
the person of his representative, might be thought to be ultimately
identical with Lityerses, the latter being simply the rustic
prototype out of which the state religion of Attis was developed. It
may have been so; but, on the other hand, the analogy of European
folk-custom warns us that amongst the same people two distinct
deities of vegetation may have their separate personal
representatives, both of whom are slain in the character of gods at
different times of the year. For in Europe, as we have seen, it
appears that one man was commonly slain in the character of the
tree-spirit in spring, and another in the character of the
corn-spirit in autumn. It may have been so in Phrygia also. Attis
was especially a tree-god, and his connexion with corn may have been
only such an extension of the power of a tree-spirit as is indicated
in customs like the Harvest-May. Again, the representative of Attis
appears to have been slain in spring; whereas Lityerses must have
been slain in summer or autumn, according to the time of the harvest
in Phrygia. On the whole, then, while we are not justified in
regarding Lityerses as the prototype of Attis, the two may be
regarded as parallel products of the same religious idea, and may
have stood to each other as in Europe the Old Man of harvest stands
to the Wild Man, the Leaf Man, and so forth, of spring. Both were
spirits or deities of vegetation, and the personal representatives
of both were annually slain. But whereas the Attis worship became
elevated into the dignity of a state religion and spread to Italy,
the rites of Lityerses seem never to have passed the limits of their
native Phrygia, and always retained their character of rustic
ceremonies performed by peasants on the harvest-field. At most a few
villages may have clubbed together, as amongst the Khonds, to
procure a human victim to be slain as representative of the
corn-spirit for their common benefit. Such victims may have been
drawn from the families of priestly kings or kinglets, which would
account for the legendary character of Lityerses as the son of a
Phrygian king or as himself a king. When villages did not so club
together, each village or farm may have procured its own
representative of the corn-spirit by dooming to death either a
passing stranger or the harvester who cut, bound, or threshed the
last sheaf. Perhaps in the olden time the practice of head-hunting
as a means of promoting the growth of the corn may have been as
common among the rude inhabitants of Europe and Western Asia as it
still is, or was till lately, among the primitive agricultural
tribes of Assam, Burma, the Philippine Islands, and the Indian
Archipelago. It is hardly necessary to add that in Phrygia, as in
Europe, the old barbarous custom of killing a man on the
harvest-field or the threshing-floor had doubtless passed into a
mere pretence long before the classical era, and was probably
regarded by the reapers and threshers themselves as no more than a
rough jest which the license of a harvest-home permitted them to
play off on a passing stranger, a comrade, or even on their master
himself.

I have dwelt on the Lityerses song at length because it affords so
many points of comparison with European and savage folk-custom. The
other harvest songs of Western Asia and Egypt, to which attention
has been called above, may now be dismissed much more briefly. The
similarity of the Bithynian Bormus to the Phrygian Lityerses helps
to bear out the interpretation which has been given of the latter.
Bormus, whose death or rather disappearance was annually mourned by
the reapers in a plaintive song, was, like Lityerses, a king's son
or at least the son of a wealthy and distinguished man. The reapers
whom he watched were at work on his own fields, and he disappeared
in going to fetch water for them; according to one version of the
story he was carried off by the nymphs, doubtless the nymphs of the
spring or pool or river whither he went to draw water. Viewed in the
light of the Lityerses story and of European folk-custom, this
disappearance of Bormus may be a reminiscence of the custom of
binding the farmer himself in a corn-sheaf and throwing him into the
water. The mournful strain which the reapers sang was probably a
lamentation over the death of the corn-spirit, slain either in the
cut corn or in the person of a human representative; and the call
which they addressed to him may have been a prayer that he might
return in fresh vigour next year.

The Phoenician Linus song was sung at the vintage, at least in the
west of Asia Minor, as we learn from Homer; and this, combined with
the legend of Syleus, suggests that in ancient times passing
strangers were handled by vintagers and vine-diggers in much the
same way as they are said to have been handled by the reaper
Lityerses. The Lydian Syleus, so ran the legend, compelled
passers-by to dig for him in his vineyard, till Hercules came and
killed him and dug up his vines by the roots. This seems to be the
outline of a legend like that of Lityerses; but neither ancient
writers nor modern folk-custom enable us to fill in the details.
But, further, the Linus song was probably sung also by Phoenician
reapers, for Herodotus compares it to the Maneros song, which, as we
have seen, was a lament raised by Egyptian reapers over the cut
corn. Further, Linus was identified with Adonis, and Adonis has some
claims to be regarded as especially a corn-deity. Thus the Linus
lament, as sung at harvest, would be identical with the Adonis
lament; each would be the lamentation raised by reapers over the
dead spirit of the corn. But whereas Adonis, like Attis, grew into a
stately figure of mythology, adored and mourned in splendid cities
far beyond the limits of his Phoenician home, Linus appears to have
remained a simple ditty sung by reapers and vintagers among the
corn-sheaves and the vines. The analogy of Lityerses and of
folk-custom, both European and savage, suggests that in Phoenicia
the slain corn-spirit--the dead Adonis--may formerly have been
represented by a human victim; and this suggestion is possibly
supported by the Harran legend that Tammuz (Adonis) was slain by his
cruel lord, who ground his bones in a mill and scattered them to the
wind. For in Mexico, as we have seen, the human victim at harvest
was crushed between two stones; and both in Africa and India the
ashes or other remains of the victim were scattered over the fields.
But the Harran legend may be only a mythical way of expressing the
grinding of corn in the mill and the scattering of the seed. It
seems worth suggesting that the mock king who was annually killed at
the Babylonian festival of the Sacaea on the sixteenth day of the
month Lous may have represented Tammuz himself. For the historian
Berosus, who records the festival and its date, probably used the
Macedonian calendar, since he dedicated his history to Antiochus
Soter; and in his day the Macedonian month Lous appears to have
corresponded to the Babylonian month Tammuz. If this conjecture is
right, the view that the mock king at the Sacaea was slain in the
character of a god would be established.

There is a good deal more evidence that in Egypt the slain
corn-spirit--the dead Osiris--was represented by a human victim,
whom the reapers slew on the harvest-field, mourning his death in a
dirge, to which the Greeks, through a verbal misunderstanding, gave
the name of Maneros. For the legend of Busiris seems to preserve a
reminiscence of human sacrifices once offered by the Egyptians in
connexion with the worship of Osiris. Busiris was said to have been
an Egyptian king who sacrificed all strangers on the altar of Zeus.
The origin of the custom was traced to a dearth which afflicted the
land of Egypt for nine years. A Cyprian seer informed Busiris that
the dearth would cease if a man were annually sacrificed to Zeus. So
Busiris instituted the sacrifice. But when Hercules came to Egypt,
and was being dragged to the altar to be sacrificed, he burst his
bonds and slew Busiris and his son. Here then is a legend that in
Egypt a human victim was annually sacrificed to prevent the failure
of the crops, and a belief is implied that an omission of the
sacrifice would have entailed a recurrence of that infertility which
it was the object of the sacrifice to prevent. So the Pawnees, as we
have seen, believed that an omission of the human sacrifice at
planting would have been followed by a total failure of their crops.
The name Busiris was in reality the name of a city, _pe-Asar,_ "the
house of Osiris," the city being so called because it contained the
grave of Osiris. Indeed some high modern authorities believe that
Busiris was the original home of Osiris, from which his worship
spread to other parts of Egypt. The human sacrifice were said to
have been offered at his grave, and the victims were red-haired men,
whose ashes were scattered abroad by means of winnowing-fans. This
tradition of human sacrifices offered at the tomb of Osiris is
confirmed by the evidence of the monuments.

In the light of the foregoing discussion the Egyptian tradition of
Busiris admits of a consistent and fairly probable explanation.
Osiris, the corn-spirit, was annually represented at harvest by a
stranger, whose red hair made him a suitable representative of the
ripe corn. This man, in his representative character, was slain on
the harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers, who prayed at the
same time that the corn-spirit might revive and return
(_mââ-ne-rha,_ Maneros) with renewed vigour in the following year.
Finally, the victim, or some part of him, was burned, and the ashes
scattered by winnowing-fans over the fields to fertilise them. Here
the choice of the victim on the ground of his resemblance to the
corn which he was to represent agrees with the Mexican and African
customs already described. Similarly the woman who died in the
character of the Corn-mother at the Mexican midsummer sacrifice had
her face painted red and yellow in token of the colours of the corn,
and she wore a pasteboard mitre surmounted by waving plumes in
imitation of the tassel of the maize. On the other hand, at the
festival of the Goddess of the White Maize the Mexicans sacrificed
lepers. The Romans sacrificed red-haired puppies in spring to avert
the supposed blighting influence of the Dog-star, believing that the
crops would thus grow ripe and ruddy. The heathen of Harran offered
to the sun, moon, and planets human victims who were chosen on the
ground of their supposed resemblance to the heavenly bodies to which
they were sacrificed; for example, the priests, clothed in red and
smeared with blood, offered a red-haired, red-cheeked man to "the
red planet Mars" in a temple which was painted red and draped with
red hangings. These and the like cases of assimilating the victim to
the god, or to the natural phenomenon which he represents, are based
ultimately on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, the
notion being that the object aimed at will be most readily attained
by means of a sacrifice which resembles the effect that it is
designed to bring about.

The story that the fragments of Osiris's body were scattered up and
down the land, and buried by Isis on the spots where they lay, may
very well be a reminiscence of a custom, like that observed by the
Khonds, of dividing the human victim in pieces and burying the
pieces, often at intervals of many miles from each other, in the
fields.

Thus, if I am right, the key to the mysteries of Osiris is furnished
by the melancholy cry of the Egyptian reapers, which down to Roman
times could be heard year after year sounding across the fields,
announcing the death of the corn-spirit, the rustic prototype of
Osiris. Similar cries, as we have seen, were also heard on all the
harvest-fields of Western Asia. By the ancients they are spoken of
as songs; but to judge from the analysis of the names Linus and
Maneros, they probably consisted only of a few words uttered in a
prolonged musical note which could be heard at a great distance.
Such sonorous and long-drawn cries, raised by a number of strong
voices in concert, must have had a striking effect, and could hardly
fail to arrest the attention of any wayfarer who happened to be
within hearing. The sounds, repeated again and again, could probably
be distinguished with tolerable ease even at a distance; but to a
Greek traveller in Asia or Egypt the foreign words would commonly
convey no meaning, and he might take them, not unnaturally, for the
name of some one (Maneros, Linus, Lityerses, Bormus) upon whom the
reapers were calling. And if his journey led him through more
countries than one, as Bithynia and Phrygia, or Phoenicia and Egypt,
while the corn was being reaped, he would have an opportunity of
comparing the various harvest cries of the different peoples. Thus
we can readily understand why these harvest cries were so often
noted and compared with each other by the Greeks. Whereas, if they
had been regular songs, they could not have been heard at such
distances, and therefore could not have attracted the attention of
so many travellers; and, moreover, even if the wayfarer were within
hearing of them, he could not so easily have picked out the words.

Down to recent times Devonshire reapers uttered cries of the same
sort, and performed on the field a ceremony exactly analogous to
that in which, if I am not mistaken, the rites of Osiris originated.
The cry and the ceremony are thus described by an observer who wrote
in the first half of the nineteenth century. "After the wheat is all
cut, on most farms in the north of Devon, the harvest people have a
custom of 'crying the neck.' I believe that this practice is seldom
omitted on any large farm in that part of the country. It is done in
this way. An old man, or some one else well acquainted with the
ceremonies used on the occasion (when the labourers are reaping the
last field of wheat), goes round to the shocks and sheaves, and
picks out a little bundle of all the best ears he can find; this
bundle he ties up very neat and trim, and plats and arranges the
straws very tastefully. This is called 'the neck' of wheat, or
wheaten-ears. After the field is cut out, and the pitcher once more
circulated, the reapers, binders, and the women stand round in a
circle. The person with 'the neck' stands in the centre, grasping it
with both hands. He first stoops and holds it near the ground, and
all the men forming the ring take off their hats, stooping and
holding them with both hands towards the ground. They then all begin
at once in a very prolonged and harmonious tone to cry 'The neck!'
at the same time slowly raising themselves upright, and elevating
their arms and hats above their heads; the person with 'the neck'
also raising it on high. This is done three times. They then change
their cry to 'Wee yen!'--'Way yen!'--which they sound in the same
prolonged and slow manner as before, with singular harmony and
effect, three times. This last cry is accompanied by the same
movements of the body and arms as in crying 'the neck.' . . . After
having thus repeated 'the neck' three times, and 'wee yen,' or 'way
yen' as often, they all burst out into a kind of loud and joyous
laugh, flinging up their hats and caps into the air, capering about
and perhaps kissing the girls. One of them then gets 'the neck' and
runs as hard as he can down to the farmhouse, where the dairymaid,
or one of the young female domestics, stands at the door prepared
with a pail of water. If he who holds 'the neck' can manage to get
into the house, in any way unseen, or openly, by any other way than
the door at which the girl stands with the pail of water, then he
may lawfully kiss her; but, if otherwise, he is regularly soused
with the contents of the bucket. On a fine still autumn evening the
'crying of the neck' has a wonderful effect at a distance, far finer
than that of the Turkish muezzin, which Lord Byron eulogises so
much, and which he says is preferable to all the bells of
Christendom. I have once or twice heard upwards of twenty men cry
it, and sometimes joined by an equal number of female voices. About
three years back, on some high grounds, where our people were
harvesting, I heard six or seven 'necks' cried in one night,
although I know that some of them were four miles off. They are
heard through the quiet evening air at a considerable distance
sometimes." Again, Mrs. Bray tells how, travelling in Devonshire,
"she saw a party of reapers standing in a circle on a rising ground,
holding their sickles aloft. One in the middle held up some ears of
corn tied together with flowers, and the party shouted three times
(what she writes as) 'Arnack, arnack, arnack, we _haven,_ we
_haven,_ we _haven._' They went home, accompanied by women and
children carrying boughs of flowers, shouting and singing. The
manservant who attended Mrs. Bray said 'it was only the people
making their games, as they always did, _to the spirit of
harvest._'" Here, as Miss Burne remarks, "'arnack, we haven!' is
obviously in the Devon dialect, 'a neck (or nack)! we have un!'"

Another account of this old custom, written at Truro in 1839, runs
thus: "Now, when all the corn was cut at Heligan, the farming men
and maidens come in front of the house, and bring with them a small
sheaf of corn, the last that has been cut, and this is adorned with
ribbons and flowers, and one part is tied quite tight, so as to look
like a neck. Then they cry out 'Our (my) side, my side,' as loud as
they can; then the dairymaid gives the neck to the head farming-man.
He takes it, and says, very loudly three times, 'I have him, I have
him, I have him.' Then another farming-man shouts very loudly, 'What
have ye? what have ye? what have ye?' Then the first says, 'A neck,
a neck, a neck.' And when he has said this, all the people make a
very great shouting. This they do three times, and after one famous
shout go away and eat supper, and dance, and sing songs." According
to another account, "all went out to the field when the last corn
was cut, the 'neck' was tied with ribbons and plaited, and they
danced round it, and carried it to the great kitchen, where
by-and-by the supper was. The words were as given in the previous
account, and 'Hip, hip, hack, heck, I have 'ee, I have 'ee, I have
'ee.' It was hung up in the hall." Another account relates that one
of the men rushed from the field with the last sheaf, while the rest
pursued him with vessels of water, which they tried to throw over
the sheaf before it could be brought into the barn.

In the foregoing customs a particular bunch of ears, generally the
last left standing, is conceived as the neck of the corn-spirit, who
is consequently beheaded when the bunch is cut down. Similarly in
Shropshire the name "neck," or "the gander's neck," used to be
commonly given to the last handful of ears left standing in the
middle of the field when all the rest of the corn was cut. It was
plaited together, and the reapers, standing ten or twenty paces off,
threw their sickles at it. Whoever cut it through was said to have
cut off the gander's neck. The "neck" was taken to the farmer's
wife, who was supposed to keep it in the house for good luck till
the next harvest came round. Near Trèves, the man who reaps the last
standing corn "cuts the goat's neck off." At Faslane, on the
Gareloch (Dumbartonshire), the last handful of standing corn was
sometimes called the "head." At Aurich, in East Friesland, the man
who reaps the last corn "cuts the hare's tail off." In mowing down
the last corner of a field French reapers sometimes call out, "We
have the cat by the tail." In Bresse (Bourgogne) the last sheaf
represented the fox. Beside it a score of ears were left standing to
form the tail, and each reaper, going back some paces, threw his
sickle at it. He who succeeded in severing it "cut off the fox's
tail," and a cry of "_You cou cou!_" was raised in his honour. These
examples leave no room to doubt the meaning of the Devonshire and
Cornish expression "the neck," as applied to the last sheaf. The
corn-spirit is conceived in human or animal form, and the last
standing corn is part of its body--its neck, its head, or its tail.
Sometimes, as we have seen, the last corn is regarded as the
navel-string. Lastly, the Devonshire custom of drenching with water
the person who brings in "the neck" is a raincharm, such as we have
had many examples of. Its parallel in the mysteries of Osiris was
the custom of pouring water on the image of Osiris or on the person
who represented him.




XLVIII. The Corn-Spirit as an Animal



1. Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit

IN SOME of the examples which I have cited to establish the meaning
of the term "neck" as applied to the last sheaf, the corn-spirit
appears in animal form as a gander, a goat, a hare, a cat, and a
fox. This introduces us to a new aspect of the corn-spirit, which we
must now examine. By doing so we shall not only have fresh examples
of killing the god, but may hope also to clear up some points which
remain obscure in the myths and worship of Adonis, Attis, Osiris,
Dionysus, Demeter, and Virbius.

Amongst the many animals whose forms the corn-spirit is supposed to
take are the wolf, dog, hare, fox, cock, goose, quail, cat, goat,
cow (ox, bull), pig, and horse. In one or other of these shapes the
corn-spirit is often believed to be present in the corn, and to be
caught or killed in the last sheaf. As the corn is being cut the
animal flees before the reapers, and if a reaper is taken ill on the
field, he is supposed to have stumbled unwittingly on the
corn-spirit, who has thus punished the profane intruder. It is said
"the Rye-wolf has got hold of him," "the Harvest-goat has given him
a push." The person who cuts the last corn or binds the last sheaf
gets the name of the animal, as the Rye-wolf, the Rye-sow, the
Oats-goat, and so forth, and retains the name sometimes for a year.
Also the animal is frequently represented by a puppet made out of
the last sheaf or of wood, flowers, and so on, which is carried home
amid rejoicings on the last harvest-waggon. Even where the last
sheaf is not made up in animal shape, it is often called the
Rye-wolf, the Hare, Goat, and so forth. Generally each kind of crop
is supposed to have its special animal, which is caught in the last
sheaf, and called the Rye-wolf, the Barley-wolf, the Oats-wolf, the
Pea-wolf, or the Potato-wolf, according to the crop; but sometimes
the figure of the animal is only made up once for all at getting in
the last crop of the whole harvest. Sometimes the creature is
believed to be killed by the last stroke of the sickle or scythe.
But oftener it is thought to live so long as there is corn still
unthreshed, and to be caught in the last sheaf threshed. Hence the
man who gives the last stroke with the flail is told that he has got
the Corn-sow, the Threshing-dog, or the like. When the threshing is
finished, a puppet is made in the form of the animal, and this is
carried by the thresher of the last sheaf to a neighbouring farm,
where the threshing is still going on. This again shows that the
corn-spirit is believed to live wherever the corn is still being
threshed. Sometimes the thresher of the last sheaf himself
represents the animal; and if the people of the next farm, who are
still threshing, catch him, they treat him like the animal he
represents, by shutting him up in the pig-sty, calling him with the
cries commonly addressed to pigs, and so forth. These general
statements will now be illustrated by examples.



2. The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog

WE begin with the corn-spirit conceived as a wolf or a dog. This
conception is common in France, Germany, and Slavonic countries.
Thus, when the wind sets the corn in wave-like motion the peasants
often say, "The Wolf is going over, or through, the corn," "the
Rye-wolf is rushing over the field," "the Wolf is in the corn," "the
mad Dog is in the corn," "the big Dog is there." When children wish
to go into the corn-fields to pluck ears or gather the blue
corn-flowers, they are warned not to do so, for "the big Dog sits in
the corn," or "the Wolf sits in the corn, and will tear you in
pieces," "the Wolf will eat you." The wolf against whom the children
are warned is not a common wolf, for he is often spoken of as the
Corn-wolf, Rye-wolf, or the like; thus they say, "The Rye-wolf will
come and eat you up, children," "the Rye-wolf will carry you off,"
and so forth. Still he has all the outward appearance of a wolf. For
in the neighbourhood of Feilenhof (East Prussia), when a wolf was
seen running through a field, the peasants used to watch whether he
carried his tail in the air or dragged it on the ground. If he
dragged it on the ground, they went after him, and thanked him for
bringing them a blessing, and even set tit-bits before him. But if
he carried his tail high, they cursed him and tried to kill him.
Here the wolf is the corn-spirit whose fertilising power is in his
tail.

Both dog and wolf appear as embodiments of the corn-spirit in
harvest-customs. Thus in some parts of Silesia the person who cuts
or binds the last sheaf is called the Wheat-dog or the Peas-pug. But
it is in the harvest-customs of the north-east of France that the
idea of the Corn-dog comes out most clearly. Thus when a harvester,
through sickness, weariness, or laziness, cannot or will not keep up
with the reaper in front of him, they say, "The White Dog passed
near him," "he has the White Bitch," or "the White Bitch has bitten
him." In the Vosges the Harvest-May is called the "Dog of the
harvest," and the person who cuts the last handful of hay or wheat
is said to "kill the Dog." About Lons-le-Saulnier, in the Jura, the
last sheaf is called the Bitch. In the neighbourhood of Verdun the
regular expression for finishing the reaping is, "They are going to
kill the Dog"; and at Epinal they say, according to the crop, "We
will kill the Wheat-dog, or the Rye-dog, or the Potato-dog." In
Lorraine it is said of the man who cuts the last corn, "He is
killing the Dog of the harvest." At Dux, in the Tyrol, the man who
gives the last stroke at threshing is said to "strike down the Dog";
and at Ahnebergen, near Stade, he is called, according to the crop,
Corn-pug, Rye-pug, Wheat-pug.

So with the wolf. In Silesia, when the reapers gather round the last
patch of standing corn to reap it they are said to be about "to
catch the Wolf." In various parts of Mecklenburg, where the belief
in the Corn-wolf is particularly prevalent, every one fears to cut
the last corn, because they say that the Wolf is sitting in it;
hence every reaper exerts himself to the utmost in order not to be
the last, and every woman similarly fears to bind the last sheaf
because "the Wolf is in it." So both among the reapers and the
binders there is a competition not to be the last to finish. And in
Germany generally it appears to be a common saying that "the Wolf
sits in the last sheaf." In some places they call out to the reaper,
"Beware of the Wolf"; or they say, "He is chasing the Wolf out of
the corn." In Mecklenburg the last bunch of standing corn is itself
commonly called the Wolf, and the man who reaps it "has the Wolf,"
the animal being described as the Rye-wolf, the Wheat-wolf, the
Barley-wolf, and so on according to the particular crop. The reaper
of the last corn is himself called Wolf or the Rye-wolf, if the crop
is rye, and in many parts of Mecklenburg he has to support the
character by pretending to bite the other harvesters or by howling
like a wolf. The last sheaf of corn is also called the Wolf or the
Rye-wolf or the Oats-wolf according to the crop, and of the woman
who binds it they say, "The Wolf is biting her," "She has the Wolf,"
"She must fetch the Wolf" (out of the corn). Moreover, she herself
is called Wolf; they cry out to her, "Thou art the Wolf," and she
has to bear the name for a whole year; sometimes, according to the
crop, she is called the Rye-wolf or the Potato-wolf. In the island
of Rügen not only is the woman who binds the last sheaf called Wolf,
but when she comes home she bites the lady of the house and the
stewardess, for which she receives a large piece of meat. Yet nobody
likes to be the Wolf. The same woman may be Rye-wolf, Wheat-wolf,
and Oats-wolf, if she happens to bind the last sheaf of rye, wheat,
and oats. At Buir, in the district of Cologne, it was formerly the
custom to give to the last sheaf the shape of a wolf. It was kept in
the barn till all the corn was threshed. Then it was brought to the
farmer and he had to sprinkle it with beer or brandy. At
Brunshaupten in Mecklenburg the young woman who bound the last sheaf
of wheat used to take a handful of stalks out of it and make "the
Wheat-wolf" with them; it was the figure of a wolf about two feet
long and half a foot high, the legs of the animal being represented
by stiff stalks and its tail and mane by wheat-ears. This Wheat-wolf
she carried back at the head of the harvesters to the village, where
it was set up on a high place in the parlour of the farm and
remained there for a long time. In many places the sheaf called the
Wolf is made up in human form and dressed in clothes. This indicates
a confusion of ideas between the corn-spirit conceived in human and
in animal form. Generally the Wolf is brought home on the last
waggon with joyful cries. Hence the last waggon-load itself receives
the name of the Wolf.

Again, the Wolf is supposed to hide himself amongst the cut corn in
the granary, until he is driven out of the last bundle by the
strokes of the flail. Hence at Wanzleben, near Magdeburg, after the
threshing the peasants go in procession, leading by a chain a man
who is enveloped in the threshed-out straw and is called the Wolf.
He represents the corn-spirit who has been caught escaping from the
threshed corn. In the district of Treves it is believed that the
Corn-wolf is killed at threshing. The men thresh the last sheaf till
it is reduced to chopped straw. In this way they think that the
Corn-wolf, who was lurking in the last sheaf, has been certainly
killed.

In France also the Corn-wolf appears at harvest. Thus they call out
to the reaper of the last corn, "You will catch the Wolf." Near
Chambéry they form a ring round the last standing corn, and cry,
"The Wolf is in there." In Finisterre, when the reaping draws near
an end, the harvesters cry, "There is the Wolf; we will catch him."
Each takes a swath to reap, and he who finishes first calls out,
"I've caught the Wolf." In Guyenne, when the last corn has been
reaped, they lead a wether all round the field. It is called "the
Wolf of the field." Its horns are decked with a wreath of flowers
and corn-ears, and its neck and body are also encircled with
garlands and ribbons. All the reapers march, singing, behind it.
Then it is killed on the field. In this part of France the last
sheaf is called the _coujoulage,_ which, in the patois, means a
wether. Hence the killing of the wether represents the death of the
corn-spirit, considered as present in the last sheaf; but two
different conceptions of the corn-spirit--as a wolf and as a
wether--are mixed up together.

Sometimes it appears to be thought that the Wolf, caught in the last
corn, lives during the winter in the farmhouse, ready to renew his
activity as corn-spirit in the spring. Hence at midwinter, when the
lengthening days begin to herald the approach of spring, the Wolf
makes his appearance once more. In Poland a man, with a wolf's skin
thrown over his head, is led about at Christmas; or a stuffed wolf
is carried about by persons who collect money. There are facts which
point to an old custom of leading about a man enveloped in leaves
and called the Wolf, while his conductors collected money.



3. The Corn-spirit as a Cock

ANOTHER form which the corn-spirit often assumes is that of a cock.
In Austria children are warned against straying in the corn-fields,
because the Corn-cock sits there, and will peck their eyes out. In
North Germany they say that "the Cock sits in the last sheaf"; and
at cutting the last corn the reapers cry, "Now we will chase out the
Cock." When it is cut they say, "We have caught the Cock." At
Braller, in Transylvania, when the reapers come to the last patch of
corn, they cry, "Here we shall catch the Cock." At Fürstenwalde,
when the last sheaf is about to be bound, the master releases a
cock, which he has brought in a basket, and lets it run over the
field. All the harvesters chase it till they catch it. Elsewhere the
harvesters all try to seize the last corn cut; he who succeeds in
grasping it must crow, and is called Cock. Among the Wends it is or
used to be customary for the farmer to hide a live cock under the
last sheaf as it lay on the field; and when the corn was being
gathered up, the harvester who lighted upon this sheaf had a right
to keep the cock, provided he could catch it. This formed the close
of the harvest-festival and was known as "the Cock-catching," and
the beer which was served out to the reapers at this time went by
the name of "Cock-beer." The last sheaf is called Cock, Cock-sheaf,
Harvest-cock, Harvest-hen, Autumn-hen. A distinction is made between
a Wheat-cock, Bean-cock, and so on, according to the crop. At
Wünschensuhl, in Thüringen, the last sheaf is made into the shape of
a cock, and called the Harvest-cock. A figure of a cock, made of
wood, pasteboard, ears of corn, or flowers, is borne in front of the
harvest-waggon, especially in Westphalia, where the cock carries in
his beak fruits of the earth of all kinds. Sometimes the image of
the cock is fastened to the top of a May-tree on the last
harvest-waggon. Elsewhere a live cock, or a figure of one, is
attached to a harvest-crown and carried on a pole. In Galicia and
elsewhere this live cock is fastened to the garland of corn-ears or
flowers, which the leader of the women-reapers carries on her head
as she marches in front of the harvest procession. In Silesia a live
cock is presented to the master on a plate. The harvest-supper is
called Harvest-cock, Stubble-cock, etc., and a chief dish at it, at
least in some places, is a cock. If a waggoner upsets a
harvest-waggon, it is said that "he has spilt the Harvest-cock," and
he loses the cock, that is, the harvest-supper. The harvest-waggon,
with the figure of the cock on it, is driven round the farmhouse
before it is taken to the barn. Then the cock is nailed over or at
the side of the house-door, or on the gable, and remains there till
next harvest. In East Friesland the person who gives the last stroke
at threshing is called the Clucking-hen, and grain is strewed before
him as if he were a hen.

Again, the corn-spirit is killed in the form of a cock. In parts of
Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Picardy the reapers place a live cock
in the corn which is to be cut last, and chase it over the field, or
bury it up to the neck in the ground; afterwards they strike off its
head with a sickle or scythe. In many parts of Westphalia, when the
harvesters bring the wooden cock to the farmer, he gives them a live
cock, which they kill with whips or sticks, or behead with an old
sword, or throw into the barn to the girls, or give to the mistress
to cook. It the Harvest-cock has not been spilt--that is, if no
waggon has been upset--the harvesters have the right to kill the
farmyard cock by throwing stones at it or beheading it. Where this
custom has fallen into disuse, it is still common for the farmer's
wife to make cockie-leekie for the harvesters, and to show them the
head of the cock which has been killed for the soup. In the
neighbourhood of Klausenburg, Transylvania, a cock is buried on the
harvest-field in the earth, so that only its head appears. A young
man then takes a scythe and cuts off the cock's head at a single
sweep. If he fails to do this, he is called the Red Cock for a whole
year, and people fear that next year's crop will be bad. Near
Udvarhely, in Transylvania, a live cock is bound up in the last
sheaf and killed with a spit. It is then skinned. The flesh is
thrown away, but the skin and feathers are kept till next year; and
in spring the grain from the last sheaf is mixed with the feathers
of the cock and scattered on the field which is to be tilled.
Nothing could set in a clearer light the identification of the cock
with the spirit of the corn. By being tied up in the last sheaf and
killed, the cock is identified with the corn, and its death with the
cutting of the corn. By keeping its feathers till spring, then
mixing them with the seed-corn taken from the very sheaf in which
the bird had been bound, and scattering the feathers together with
the seed over the field, the identity of the bird with the corn is
again emphasised, and its quickening and fertilising power, as an
embodiment of the corn-spirit, is intimated in the plainest manner.
Thus the corn-spirit, in the form of a cock, is killed at harvest,
but rises to fresh life and activity in spring. Again, the
equivalence of the cock to the corn is expressed, hardly less
plainly, in the custom of burying the bird in the ground, and
cutting off its head (like the ears of corn) with the scythe.



4. The Corn-spirit as a Hare

ANOTHER common embodiment of the corn-spirit is the hare. In
Galloway the reaping of the last standing corn is called "cutting
the Hare." The mode of cutting it is as follows. When the rest of
the corn has been reaped, a handful is left standing to form the
Hare. It is divided into three parts and plaited, and the ears are
tied in a knot. The reapers then retire a few yards and each throws
his or her sickle in turn at the Hare to cut it down. It must be cut
below the knot, and the reapers continue to throw their sickles at
it, one after the other, until one of them succeeds in severing the
stalks below the knot. The Hare is then carried home and given to a
maidservant in the kitchen, who places it over the kitchen-door on
the inside. Sometimes the Hare used to be thus kept till the next
harvest. In the parish of Minnigaff, when the Hare was cut, the
unmarried reapers ran home with all speed, and the one who arrived
first was the first to be married. In Germany also one of the names
for the last sheaf is the Hare. Thus in some parts of Anhalt, when
the corn has been reaped and only a few stalks are left standing,
they say, "The Hare will soon come," or the reapers cry to each
other, "Look how the Hare comes jumping out." In East Prussia they
say that the Hare sits in the last patch of standing corn, and must
be chased out by the last reaper. The reapers hurry with their work,
each being anxious not to have "to chase out the Hare"; for the man
who does so, that is, who cuts the last corn, is much laughed at. At
Aurich, as we have seen, an expression for cutting the last corn is
"to cut off the Hare's tail." "He is killing the Hare" is commonly
said of the man who cuts the last corn in Germany, Sweden, Holland,
France, and Italy. In Norway the man who is thus said to "kill the
Hare" must give "hare's blood," in the form of brandy, to his
fellows to drink. In Lesbos, when the reapers are at work in two
neighbouring fields, each party tries to finish first in order to
drive the Hare into their neighbour's field; the reapers who succeed
in doing so believe that next year the crop will be better. A small
sheaf of corn is made up and kept beside the holy picture till next
harvest.



5. The Corn-spirit as a Cat

AGAIN, the corn-spirit sometimes takes the form of a cat. Near Kiel
children are warned not to go into the corn-fields because "the Cat
sits there." In the Eisenach Oberland they are told "the Corn-cat
will come and fetch you," "the Corn-cat goes in the corn." In some
parts of Silesia at mowing the last corn they say, "The Cat is
caught"; and at threshing, the man who gives the last stroke is
called the Cat. In the neighbourhood of Lyons the last sheaf and the
harvest-supper are both called the Cat. About Vesoul when they cut
the last corn they say, "We have the Cat by the tail." At Briançon,
in Dauphiné, at the beginning of reaping, a cat is decked out with
ribbons, flowers, and ears of corn. It is called the Cat of the
ball-skin (_le chat de peau de balle_). If a reaper is wounded at
his work, they make the cat lick the wound. At the close of the
reaping the cat is again decked out with ribbons and ears of corn;
then they dance and make merry. When the dance is over the girls
solemnly strip the cat of its finery. At Grüneberg, in Silesia, the
reaper who cuts the last corn goes by the name of the Tom-cat. He is
enveloped in rye-stalks and green withes, and is furnished with a
long plaited tail. Sometimes as a companion he has a man similarly
dressed, who is called the (female) Cat. Their duty is to run after
people whom they see and to beat them with a long stick. Near Amiens
the expression for finishing the harvest is, "They are going to kill
the Cat"; and when the last corn is cut they kill a cat in the
farmyard. At threshing, in some parts of France, a live cat is
placed under the last bundle of corn to be threshed, and is struck
dead with the flails. Then on Sunday it is roasted and eaten as a
holiday dish. In the Vosges Mountains the close of haymaking or
harvest is called "catching the cat," "killing the dog," or more
rarely "catching the hare." The cat, the dog, or the hare is said to
be fat or lean according as the crop is good or bad. The man who
cuts the last handful of hay or of wheat is said to catch the cat or
the hare or to kill the dog.



6. The Corn-spirit as a Goat

FURTHER, the corn-spirit often appears in the form of a goat. In
some parts of Prussia, when the corn bends before the wind, they
say, "The Goats are chasing each other," "the wind is driving the
Goats through the corn," "the Goats are browsing there," and they
expect a very good harvest. Again they say, "The Oats-goat is
sitting in the oats-field," "the Corn-goat is sitting in the
rye-field." Children are warned not to go into the corn-fields to
pluck the blue corn-flowers, or amongst the beans to pluck pods,
because the Rye-goat, the Corn-goat, the Oats-goat, or the Bean-goat
is sitting or lying there, and will carry them away or kill them.
When a harvester is taken sick or lags behind his fellows at their
work, they call out, "The Harvest-goat has pushed him," "he has been
pushed by the Corn-goat." In the neighbourhood of Braunsberg (East
Prussia) at binding the oats every harvester makes haste "lest the
Corn-goat push him." At Oefoten, in Norway, each reaper has his
allotted patch to reap. When a reaper in the middle has not finished
reaping his piece after his neighbours have finished theirs, they
say of him, "He remains on the island." And if the laggard is a man,
they imitate the cry with which they call a he-goat; if a woman, the
cry with which they call a she-goat. Near Straubing, in Lower
Bavaria, it is said of the man who cuts the last corn that "he has
the Corn-goat, or the Wheat-goat, or the Oats-goat," according to
the crop. Moreover, two horns are set up on the last heap of corn,
and it is called "the horned Goat." At Kreutzburg, East Prussia,
they call out to the woman who is binding the last sheaf, "The Goat
is sitting in the sheaf." At Gablingen, in Swabia, when the last
field of oats upon a farm is being reaped, the reapers carve a goat
out of wood. Ears of oats are inserted in its nostrils and mouth,
and it is adorned with garlands of flowers. It is set up on the
field and called the Oats-goat. When the reaping approaches an end,
each reaper hastens to finish his piece first; he who is the last to
finish gets the Oats-goat. Again, the last sheaf is itself called
the Goat. Thus, in the valley of the Wiesent, Bavaria, the last
sheaf bound on the field is called the Goat, and they have a
proverb, "The field must bear a goat." At Spachbrücken, in Hesse,
the last handful of corn which is cut is called the Goat, and the
man who cuts it is much ridiculed. At Dürrenbüchig and about Mosbach
in Baden the last sheaf is also called the Goat. Sometimes the last
sheaf is made up in the form of a goat, and they say, "The Goat is
sitting in it." Again, the person who cuts or binds the last sheaf
is called the Goat. Thus, in parts of Mecklenburg they call out to
the woman who binds the last sheaf, "You are the Harvest-goat." Near
Uelzen, in Hanover, the harvest festival begins with "the bringing
of the Harvest-goat"; that is, the woman who bound the last sheaf is
wrapt in straw, crowned with a harvest-wreath, and brought in a
wheel-barrow to the village, where a round dance takes place. About
Luneburg, also, the woman who binds the last corn is decked with a
crown of corn-ears and is called the Corn-goat. At Münzesheim in
Baden the reaper who cuts the last handful of corn or oats is called
the Corn-goat or the Oats-goat. In the Canton St. Gall, Switzerland,
the person who cuts the last handful of corn on the field, or drives
the last harvest-waggon to the barn, is called the Corn-goat or the
Rye-goat, or simply the Goat. In the Canton Thurgau he is called
Corn-goat; like a goat he has a bell hung round his neck, is led in
triumph, and drenched with liquor. In parts of Styria, also, the man
who cuts the last corn is called Corn-goat, Oats-goat, or the like.
As a rule, the man who thus gets the name of Corn-goat has to bear
it a whole year till the next harvest.

According to one view, the corn-spirit, who has been caught in the
form of a goat or otherwise, lives in the farmhouse or barn over
winter. Thus, each farm has its own embodiment of the corn-spirit.
But, according to another view, the corn-spirit is the genius or
deity, not of the corn of one farm only, but of all the corn. Hence
when the corn on one farm is all cut, he flees to another where
there is still corn left standing. This idea is brought out in a
harvest-custom which was formerly observed in Skye. The farmer who
first finished reaping sent a man or woman with a sheaf to a
neighbouring farmer who had not finished; the latter in his turn,
when he had finished, sent on the sheaf to his neighbour who was
still reaping; and so the sheaf made the round of the farms till all
the corn was cut. The sheaf was called the _goabbir bhacagh,_ that
is, the Cripple Goat. The custom appears not to be extinct at the
present day, for it was reported from Skye not very many years ago.
The corn-spirit was probably thus represented as lame because he had
been crippled by the cutting of the corn. Sometimes the old woman
who brings home the last sheaf must limp on one foot.

But sometimes the corn-spirit, in the form of a goat, is believed to
be slain on the harvest-field by the sickle or scythe. Thus, in the
neighbourhood of Bernkastel, on the Moselle, the reapers determine
by lot the order in which they shall follow each other. The first is
called the fore-reaper, the last the tail-bearer. If a reaper
overtakes the man in front he reaps past him, bending round so as to
leave the slower reaper in a patch by himself. This patch is called
the Goat; and the man for whom "the Goat is cut" in this way, is
laughed and jeered at by his fellows for the rest of the day. When
the tail-bearer cuts the last ears of corn, it is said, "He is
cutting the Goat's neck off." In the neighbourhood of Grenoble,
before the end of the reaping, a live goat is adorned with flowers
and ribbons and allowed to run about the field. The reapers chase it
and try to catch it. When it is caught, the farmer's wife holds it
fast while the farmer cuts off its head. The goat's flesh serves to
furnish the harvest-supper. A piece of the flesh is pickled and kept
till the next harvest, when another goat is killed. Then all the
harvesters eat of the flesh. On the same day the skin of the goat is
made into a cloak, which the farmer, who works with his men, must
always wear at harvest-time if rain or bad weather sets in. But if a
reaper gets pains in his back, the farmer gives him the goat-skin to
wear. The reason for this seems to be that the pains in the back,
being inflicted by the corn-spirit, can also be healed by it.
Similarly, we saw that elsewhere, when a reaper is wounded at
reaping, a cat, as the representative of the corn-spirit, is made to
lick the wound. Esthonian reapers of the island of Mon think that
the man who cuts the first ears of corn at harvest will get pains in
his back, probably because the corn-spirit is believed to resent
especially the first wound; and, in order to escape pains in the
back, Saxon reapers in Transylvania gird their loins with the first
handful of ears which they cut. Here, again, the corn-spirit is
applied to for healing or protection, but in his original vegetable
form, not in the form of a goat or a cat.

Further, the corn-spirit under the form of a goat is sometimes
conceived as lurking among the cut corn in the barn, till he is
driven from it by the threshing-flail. Thus in Baden the last sheaf
to be threshed is called the Corn-goat, the Spelt-goat, or the
Oats-goat according to the kind of grain. Again, near Marktl, in
Upper Bavaria, the sheaves are called Straw-goats or simply Goats.
They are laid in a great heap on the open field and threshed by two
rows of men standing opposite each other, who, as they ply their
flails, sing a song in which they say that they see the Straw-goat
amongst the corn-stalks. The last Goat, that is, the last sheaf, is
adorned with a wreath of violets and other flowers and with cakes
strung together. It is placed right in the middle of the heap. Some
of the threshers rush at it and tear the best of it out; others lay
on with their flails so recklessly that heads are sometimes broken.
At Oberinntal, in the Tyrol, the last thresher is called Goat. So at
Haselberg, in West Bohemia, the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing oats is called the Oats-goat. At Tettnang, in Würtemburg,
the thresher who gives the last stroke to the last bundle of corn
before it is turned goes by the name of the He-goat, and it is said,
"He has driven the He-goat away." The person who, after the bundle
has been turned, gives the last stroke of all, is called the
She-goat. In this custom it is implied that the corn is inhabited by
a pair of corn-spirits, male and female.

Further, the corn-spirit, captured in the form of a goat at
threshing, is passed on to a neighbour whose threshing is not yet
finished. In Franche Comté, as soon as the threshing is over, the
young people set up a straw figure of a goat on the farmyard of a
neighbour who is still threshing. He must give them wine or money in
return. At Ellwangen, in Würtemburg, the effigy of a goat is made
out of the last bundle of corn at threshing; four sticks form its
legs, and two its horns. The man who gives the last stroke with the
flail must carry the Goat to the barn of a neighbour who is still
threshing and throw it down on the floor; if he is caught in the
act, they tie the Goat on his back. A similar custom is observed at
Indersdorf, in Upper Bavaria; the man who throws the straw Goat into
the neighbour's barn imitates the bleating of a goat; if they catch
him, they blacken his face and tie the Goat on his back. At Saverne,
in Alsace, when a farmer is a week or more behind his neighbours
with his threshing, they set a real stuffed goat or fox before his
door.

Sometimes the spirit of the corn in goat form is believed to be
killed at threshing. In the district of Traunstein, Upper Bavaria,
they think that the Oats-goat is in the last sheaf of oats. He is
represented by an old rake set up on end, with an old pot for a
head. The children are then told to kill the Oats-goat.



7. The Corn-spirit as a Bull, Cow, or Ox

ANOTHER form which the corn-spirit often assumes is that of a bull,
cow, or ox. When the wind sweeps over the corn they say at Conitz,
in West Prussia, "The Steer is running in the corn"; when the corn
is thick and strong in one spot, they say in some parts of East
Prussia, "The Bull is lying in the corn." When a harvester has
overstrained and lamed himself, they say in the Graudenz district of
West Prussia, "The Bull pushed him"; in Lorraine they say, "He has
the Bull." The meaning of both expressions is that he has
unwittingly lighted upon the divine corn-spirit, who has punished
the profane intruder with lameness. So near Chambéry when a reaper
wounds himself with his sickle, it is said that he has "the wound of
the Ox." In the district of Bunzlau (Silesia) the last sheaf is
sometimes made into the shape of a horned ox, stuffed with tow and
wrapt in corn-ears. This figure is called the Old Man. In some parts
of Bohemia the last sheaf is made up in human form and called the
Buffalo-bull. These cases show a confusion of the human with the
animal shape of the corn-spirit. The confusion is like that of
killing a wether under the name of a wolf. All over Swabia the last
bundle of corn on the field is called the Cow; the man who cuts the
last ears "has the Cow," and is himself called Cow or Barley-cow or
Oats-cow, according to the crop; at the harvest-supper he gets a
nosegay of flowers and corn-ears and a more liberal allowance of
drink than the rest. But he is teased and laughed at; so no one
likes to be the Cow. The Cow was sometimes represented by the figure
of a woman made out of ears of corn and corn-flowers. It was carried
to the farmhouse by the man who had cut the last handful of corn.
The children ran after him and the neighbours turned out to laugh at
him, till the farmer took the Cow from him. Here again the confusion
between the human and the animal form of the corn-spirit is
apparent. In various parts of Switzerland the reaper who cuts the
last ears of corn is called Wheat-cow, Corn-cow, Oats-cow, or
Corn-steer, and is the butt of many a joke. On the other hand, in
the district of Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria, when a farmer is later of
getting in his harvest than his neighbours, they set up on his land
a Straw-bull, as it is called. This is a gigantic figure of a bull
made of stubble on a framework of wood and adorned with flowers and
leaves. Attached to it is a label on which are scrawled doggerel
verses in ridicule of the man on whose land the Straw-bull is set
up.

Again, the corn-spirit in the form of a bull or ox is killed on the
harvest-field at the close of the reaping. At Pouilly, near Dijon,
when the last ears of corn are about to be cut, an ox adorned with
ribbons, flowers, and ears of corn is led all round the field,
followed by the whole troop of reapers dancing. Then a man disguised
as the Devil cuts the last ears of corn and immediately slaughters
the ox. Part of the flesh of the animal is eaten at the
harvest-supper; part is pickled and kept till the first day of
sowing in spring. At Pont à Mousson and elsewhere on the evening of
the last day of reaping, a calf adorned with flowers and ears of
corn is led thrice round the farmyard, being allured by a bait or
driven by men with sticks, or conducted by the farmer's wife with a
rope. The calf chosen for this ceremony is the calf which was born
first on the farm in the spring of the year. It is followed by all
the reapers with their tools. Then it is allowed to run free; the
reapers chase it, and whoever catches it is called King of the Calf.
Lastly, it is solemnly killed; at Lunéville the man who acts as
butcher is the Jewish merchant of the village.

Sometimes again the corn-spirit hides himself amongst the cut corn
in the barn to reappear in bull or cow form at threshing. Thus at
Wurmlingen, in Thüringen, the man who gives the last stroke at
threshing is called the Cow, or rather the Barley-cow, Oats-cow,
Peas-cow, or the like, according to the crop. He is entirely
enveloped in straw; his head is surmounted by sticks in imitation of
horns, and two lads lead him by ropes to the well to drink. On the
way thither he must low like a cow, and for a long time afterwards
he goes by the name of the Cow. At Obermedlingen, in Swabia, when
the threshing draws near an end, each man is careful to avoid giving
the last stroke. He who does give it "gets the Cow," which is a
straw figure dressed in an old ragged petticoat, hood, and
stockings. It is tied on his back with a straw-rope; his face is
blackened, and being bound with straw-ropes to a wheelbarrow he is
wheeled round the village. Here, again, we meet with that confusion
between the human and animal shape of the corn-spirit which we have
noted in other customs. In Canton Schaffhausen the man who threshes
the last corn is called the Cow; in Canton Thurgau, the Corn-bull;
in Canton Zurich, the Thresher-cow. In the last-mentioned district
he is wrapt in straw and bound to one of the trees in the orchard.
At Arad, in Hungary, the man who gives the last stroke at threshing
is enveloped in straw and a cow's hide with the horns attached to
it. At Pessnitz, in the district of Dresden, the man who gives the
last stroke with the flail is called Bull. He must make a straw-man
and set it up before a neighbour's window. Here, apparently, as in
so many cases, the corn-spirit is passed on to a neighbour who has
not finished threshing. So at Herbrechtingen, in Thüringen, the
effigy of a ragged old woman is flung into the barn of the farmer
who is last with his threshing. The man who throws it in cries,
"There is the Cow for you." If the threshers catch him they detain
him over night and punish him by keeping him from the
harvest-supper. In these latter customs the confusion between the
human and the animal shape of the corn-spirit meets us again.

Further, the corn-spirit in bull form is sometimes believed to be
killed at threshing. At Auxerre, in threshing the last bundle of
corn, they call out twelve times, "We are killing the Bull." In the
neighbourhood of Bordeaux, where a butcher kills an ox on the field
immediately after the close of the reaping, it is said of the man
who gives the last stroke at threshing that "he has killed the
Bull." At Chambéry the last sheaf is called the sheaf of the Young
Ox, and a race takes place to it in which all the reapers join. When
the last stroke is given at threshing they say that "the Ox is
killed"; and immediately thereupon a real ox is slaughtered by the
reaper who cut the last corn. The flesh of the ox is eaten by the
threshers at supper.

We have seen that sometimes the young corn-spirit, whose task it is
to quicken the corn of the coming year, is believed to be born as a
Corn-baby on the harvest-field. Similarly in Berry the young
corn-spirit is sometimes supposed to be born on the field in calf
form; for when a binder has not rope enough to bind all the corn in
sheaves, he puts aside the wheat that remains over and imitates the
lowing of a cow. The meaning is that "the sheaf has given birth to a
calf." In Puy-de-Dôme when a binder cannot keep up with the reaper
whom he or she follows, they say "He (or she) is giving birth to the
Calf." In some parts of Prussia, in similar circumstances, they call
out to the woman, "The Bull is coming," and imitate the bellowing of
a bull. In these cases the woman is conceived as the Corn-cow or old
corn-spirit, while the supposed calf is the Corn-calf or young
corn-spirit. In some parts of Austria a mythical calf
(_Muhkälbchen_) is believed to be seen amongst the sprouting corn in
spring and to push the children; when the corn waves in the wind
they say, "The Calf is going about." Clearly, as Mannhardt observes,
this calf of the spring-time is the same animal which is afterwards
believed to be killed at reaping.



8. The Corn-spirit as a Horse or Mare

SOMETIMES the corn-spirit appears in the shape of a horse or mare.
Between Kalw and Stuttgart, when the corn bends before the wind,
they say, "There runs the Horse." At Bohlingen, near Radolfzell in
Baden, the last sheaf of oats is called the Oats-stallion. In
Hertfordshire, at the end of the reaping, there is or used to be
observed a ceremony called "crying the Mare." The last blades of
corn left standing on the field are tied together and called the
Mare. The reapers stand at a distance and throw their sickles at it;
he who cuts it through "has the prize, with acclamations and good
cheer." After it is cut the reapers cry thrice with a loud voice, "I
have her!" Others answer thrice, "What have you?"--"A Mare! a Mare!
a Mare!"--"Whose is she?" is next asked thrice. "A. B.'s," naming
the owner thrice. "Whither will you send her?"--"To C. D.," naming
some neighbour who has not reaped all his corn. In this custom the
corn-spirit in the form of a mare is passed on from a farm where the
corn is all cut to another farm where it is still standing, and
where therefore the corn-spirit may be supposed naturally to take
refuge. In Shropshire the custom is similar. The farmer who finishes
his harvest last, and who therefore cannot send the Mare to any one
else, is said "to keep her all winter." The mocking offer of the
Mare to a laggard neighbour was sometimes responded to by a mocking
acceptance of her help. Thus an old man told an inquirer, "While we
wun at supper, a mon cumm'd wi' a autar [halter] to fatch her away."
At one place a real mare used to be sent, but the man who rode her
was subjected to some rough treatment at the farmhouse to which he
paid his unwelcome visit.

In the neighbourhood of Lille the idea of the corn-spirit in horse
form in clearly preserved. When a harvester grows weary at his work,
it is said, "He has the fatigue of the Horse." The first sheaf,
called the "Cross of the Horse," is placed on a cross of boxwood in
the barn, and the youngest horse on the farm must tread on it. The
reapers dance round the last blades of corn, crying, "See the
remains of the Horse." The sheaf made out of these last blades is
given to the youngest horse of the parish (_commune_) to eat. This
youngest horse of the parish clearly represents, as Mannhardt says,
the corn-spirit of the following year, the Corn-foal, which absorbs
the spirit of the old Corn-horse by eating the last corn cut; for,
as usual, the old corn-spirit takes his final refuge in the last
sheaf. The thresher of the last sheaf is said to "beat the Horse."



9. The Corn-spirit as a Pig (Boar or Sow)

THE LAST animal embodiment of the corn-spirit which we shall notice
is the pig (boar or sow). In Thüringen, when the wind sets the young
corn in motion, they sometimes say, "The Boar is rushing through the
corn." Amongst the Esthonians of the island of Oesel the last sheaf
is called the Ryeboar, and the man who gets it is saluted with a cry
of "You have the Rye-boar on your back!" In reply he strikes up a
song, in which he prays for plenty. At Kohlerwinkel, near Augsburg,
at the close of the harvest, the last bunch of standing corn is cut
down, stalk by stalk, by all the reapers in turn. He who cuts the
last stalk "gets the Sow," and is laughed at. In other Swabian
villages also the man who cuts the last corn "has the Sow," or "has
the Rye-sow." At Bohlingen, near Radolfzell in Baden, the last sheaf
is called the Rye-sow or the Wheat-sow, according to the crop; and
at Röhrenbach in Baden the person who brings the last armful for the
last sheaf is called the Corn-sow or the Oats-sow. At Friedingen, in
Swabia, the thresher who gives the last stroke is called
Sow--Barley-sow, Corn-sow, or the like, according to the crop. At
Onstmettingen the man who gives the last stroke at threshing "has
the Sow"; he is often bound up in a sheaf and dragged by a rope
along the ground. And, generally, in Swabia the man who gives the
last stroke with the flail is called Sow. He may, however, rid
himself of this invidious distinction by passing on to a neighbour
the straw-rope, which is the badge of his position as Sow. So he
goes to a house and throws the straw-rope into it, crying, "There, I
bring you the Sow." All the inmates give chase; and if they catch
him they beat him, shut him up for several hours in the pig-sty, and
oblige him to take the "Sow" away again. In various parts of Upper
Bavaria the man who gives the last stroke at threshing must "carry
the Pig"--that is, either a straw effigy of a pig or merely a bundle
of straw-ropes. This he carries to a neighbouring farm where the
threshing is not finished, and throws it into the barn. If the
threshers catch him they handle him roughly, beating him, blackening
or dirtying his face, throwing him into filth, binding the Sow on
his back, and so on; if the bearer of the Sow is a woman they cut
off her hair. At the harvest supper or dinner the man who "carried
the Pig" gets one or more dumplings made in the form of pigs. When
the dumplings are served up by the maidservant, all the people at
table cry "Süz, süz, süz !" that being the cry used in calling pigs.
Sometimes after dinner the man who "carried the Pig" has his face
blackened, and is set on a cart and drawn round the village by his
fellows, followed by a crowd crying "Süz, süz, süz !" as if they
were calling swine. Sometimes, after being wheeled round the
village, he is flung on the dunghill.

Again, the corn-spirit in the form of a pig plays his part at
sowing-time as well as at harvest. At Neuautz, in Courland, when
barley is sown for the first time in the year, the farmer's wife
boils the chine of a pig along with the tail, and brings it to the
sower on the field. He eats of it, but cuts off the tail and sticks
it in the field; it is believed that the ears of corn will then grow
as long as the tail. Here the pig is the corn-spirit, whose
fertilising power is sometimes supposed to lie especially in his
tail. As a pig he is put in the ground at sowing-time, and as a pig
he reappears amongst the ripe corn at harvest. For amongst the
neighbouring Esthonians, as we have seen, the last sheaf is called
the Rye-boar. Somewhat similar customs are observed in Germany. In
the Salza district, near Meiningen, a certain bone in the pig is
called "the Jew on the winnowing-fan." The flesh of this bone is
boiled on Shrove Tuesday, but the bone is put amongst the ashes
which the neighbours exchange as presents on St. Peter's Day (the
twenty-second of February), and then mix with the seedcorn. In the
whole of Hesse, Meiningen, and other districts, people eat pea-soup
with dried pig-ribs on Ash Wednesday or Candlemas. The ribs are then
collected and hung in the room till sowing-time, when they are
inserted in the sown field or in the seed-bag amongst the flax seed.
This is thought to be an infallible specific against earth-fleas and
moles, and to cause the flax to grow well and tall.

But the idea of the corn-spirit as embodied in pig form is nowhere
more clearly expressed than in the Scandinavian custom of the Yule
Boar. In Sweden and Denmark at Yule (Christmas) it is the custom to
bake a loaf in the form of a boar-pig. This is called the Yule Boar.
The corn of the last sheaf is often used to make it. All through
Yule the Yule Boar stands on the table. Often it is kept till the
sowing-time in spring, when part of it is mixed with the seed-corn
and part given to the ploughman and plough-horses or ploughoxen to
eat, in the expectation of a good harvest. In this custom the
corn-spirit, immanent in the last sheaf, appears at midwinter in the
form of a boar made from the corn of the last sheaf; and his
quickening influence on the corn is shown by mixing part of the Yule
Boar with the seed-corn, and giving part of it to the ploughman and
his cattle to eat. Similarly we saw that the Corn-wolf makes his
appearance at mid-winter, the time when the year begins to verge
towards spring. Formerly a real boar was sacrificed at Christmas,
and apparently also a man in the character of the Yule Boar. This,
at least, may perhaps be inferred from a Christmas custom still
observed in Sweden. A man is wrapt up in a skin, and carries a wisp
of straw in his mouth, so that the projecting straws look like the
bristles of a boar. A knife is brought, and an old woman, with her
face blackened, pretends to sacrifice him.

On Christmas Eve in some parts of the Esthonian island of Oesel they
bake a long cake with the two ends turned up. It is called the
Christmas Boar, and stands on the table till the morning of New
Year's Day, when it is distributed among the cattle. In other parts
of the island the Christmas Boar is not a cake but a little pig born
in March, which the housewife fattens secretly, often without the
knowledge of the other members of the family. On Christmas Eve the
little pig is secretly killed, then roasted in the oven, and set on
the table standing on all fours, where it remains in this posture
for several days. In other parts of the island, again, though the
Christmas cake has neither the name nor the shape of a boar, it is
kept till the New Year, when half of it is divided among all the
members and all the quadrupeds of the family. The other half of the
cake is kept till sowing-time comes round, when it is similarly
distributed in the morning among human beings and beasts. In other
parts of Esthonia, again, the Christmas Boar, as it is called, is
baked of the first rye cut at harvest; it has a conical shape and a
cross is impressed on it with a pig's bone or a key, or three dints
are made in it with a buckle or a piece of charcoal. It stands with
a light beside it on the table all through the festal season. On New
Year's Day and Epiphany, before sunrise, a little of the cake is
crumbled with salt and given to the cattle. The rest is kept till
the day when the cattle are driven out to pasture for the first time
in spring. It is then put in the herdsman's bag, and at evening is
divided among the cattle to guard them from magic and harm. In some
places the Christmas Boar is partaken of by farm-servants and cattle
at the time of the barley sowing, for the purpose of thereby
producing a heavier crop.



10. On the Animal Embodiments of the Corn-spirit

SO much for the animal embodiments of the corn-spirit as they are
presented to us in the folk-customs of Northern Europe. These
customs bring out clearly the sacramental character of the
harvest-supper. The corn-spirit is conceived as embodied in an
animal; this divine animal is slain, and its flesh and blood are
partaken of by the harvesters. Thus the cock, the hare, the cat, the
goat, and the OX are eaten sacramentally by the harvester, and the
pig is eaten sacramentally by ploughmen in spring. Again, as a
substitute for the real flesh of the divine being, bread or
dumplings are made in his image and eaten sacramentally; thus,
pig-shaped dumplings are eaten by the harvesters, and loaves made in
boar-shape (the Yule Boar) are eaten in spring by the ploughman and
his cattle.

The reader has probably remarked the complete parallelism between
the conceptions of the corn-spirit in human and in animal form. The
parallel may be here briefly resumed. When the corn waves in the
wind it is said either that the Corn-mother or that the Corn-wolf,
etc., is passing through the corn. Children are warned against
straying in corn-fields either because the Corn-mother or because
the Corn-wolf, etc., is there. In the last corn cut or the last
sheaf threshed either the Corn-mother or the Corn-wolf, etc., is
supposed to be present. The last sheaf is itself called either the
Corn-mother or the Corn-wolf, etc., and is made up in the shape
either of a woman or of a wolf, etc. The person who cuts, binds, or
threshes the last sheaf is called either the Old Woman or the Wolf,
etc., according to the name bestowed on the sheaf itself. As in some
places a sheaf made in human form and called the Maiden, the Mother
of the Maize, etc., is kept from one harvest to the next in order to
secure a continuance of the corn-spirit's blessing, so in some
places the Harvest-cock and in others the flesh of the goat is kept
for a similar purpose from one harvest to the next. As in some
places the grain taken from the Corn-mother is mixed with the
seed-corn in spring to make the crop abundant, so in some places the
feathers of the cock, and in Sweden the Yule Boar, are kept till
spring and mixed with the seed-corn for a like purpose. As part of
the Corn-mother or Maiden is given to the cattle at Christmas or to
the horses at the first ploughing, so part of the Yule Boar is given
to the ploughing horses or oxen in spring. Lastly, the death of the
corn-spirit is represented by killing or pretending to kill either
his human or his animal representative; and the worshippers partake
sacramentally either of the actual body and blood of the
representative of the divinity, or of bread made in his likeness.

Other animal forms assumed by the corn-spirit are the fox, stag,
roe, sheep, bear, ass, mouse, quail, stork, swan, and kite. If it is
asked why the corn-spirit should be thought to appear in the form of
an animal and of so many different animals, we may reply that to
primitive man the simple appearance of an animal or bird among the
corn is probably enough to suggest a mysterious link between the
creature and the corn; and when we remember that in the old days,
before fields were fenced in, all kinds of animals must have been
free to roam over them, we need not wonder that the corn-spirit
should have been identified even with large animals like the horse
and cow, which nowadays could not, except by a rare accident, be
found straying in an English corn-field. This explanation applies
with peculiar force to the very common case in which the animal
embodiment of the corn-spirit is believed to lurk in the last
standing corn. For at harvest a number of wild animals, such as
hares, rabbits, and partridges, are commonly driven by the progress
of the reaping into the last patch of standing corn, and make their
escape from it as it is being cut down. So regularly does this
happen that reapers and others often stand round the last patch of
corn armed with sticks or guns, with which they kill the animals as
they dart out of their last refuge among the stalks. Now, primitive
man, to whom magical changes of shape seem perfectly credible, finds
it most natural that the spirit of the corn, driven from his home in
the ripe grain, should make his escape in the form of the animal
which is seen to rush out of the last patch of corn as it falls
under the scythe of the reaper. Thus the identification of the
corn-spirit with an animal is analogous to the identification of him
with a passing stranger. As the sudden appearance of a stranger near
the harvest-field or threshing-floor is, to the primitive mind,
enough to identify him as the spirit of the corn escaping from the
cut or threshed corn, so the sudden appearance of an animal issuing
from the cut corn is enough to identify it with the corn-spirit
escaping from his ruined home. The two identifications are so
analogous that they can hardly be dissociated in any attempt to
explain them. Those who look to some other principle than the one
here suggested for the explanation of the latter identification are
bound to show that their theory covers the former identification
also.




XLIX. Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals



1. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull

HOWEVER we may explain it, the fact remains that in peasant
folk-lore the corn-spirit is very commonly conceived and represented
in animal form. May not this fact explain the relation in which
certain animals stood to the ancient deities of vegetation,
Dionysus, Demeter, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris?

To begin with Dionysus. We have seen that he was represented
sometimes as a goat and sometimes as a bull. As a goat he can hardly
be separated from the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs, and
Silenuses, all of whom are closely associated with him and are
represented more or less completely in the form of goats. Thus, Pan
was regularly portrayed in sculpture and painting with the face and
legs of a goat. The Satyrs were depicted with pointed goat-ears, and
sometimes with sprouting horns and short tails. They were sometimes
spoken of simply as goats; and in the drama their parts were played
by men dressed in goatskins. Silenus is represented in art clad in a
goatskin. Further, the Fauns, the Italian counterpart of the Greek
Pans and Satyrs, are described as being half goats, with goat-feet
and goat-horns. Again, all these minor goat-formed divinities
partake more or less clearly of the character of woodland deities.
Thus, Pan was called by the Arcadians the Lord of the Wood. The
Silenuses kept company with the tree-nymphs. The Fauns are expressly
designated as woodland deities; and their character as such is still
further brought out by their association, or even identification,
with Silvanus and the Silvanuses, who, as their name of itself
indicates, are spirits of the woods. Lastly, the association of the
Satyrs with the Silenuses, Fauns, and Silvanuses, proves that the
Satyrs also were woodland deities. These goat-formed spirits of the
woods have their counterparts in the folk-lore of Northern Europe.
Thus, the Russian wood-spirits, called _Ljeschie_ (from _ljes,_
"wood"), are believed to appear partly in human shape, but with the
horns, ears, and legs of goats. The _Ljeschi_ can alter his stature
at pleasure; when he walks in the wood he is as tall as the trees;
when he walks in the meadows he is no higher than the grass. Some of
the _Ljeschie_ are spirits of the corn as well as of the wood;
before harvest they are as tall as the corn-stalks, but after it
they shrink to the height of the stubble. This brings out--what we
have remarked before--the close connexion between tree-spirits and
corn-spirits, and shows how easily the former may melt into the
latter. Similarly the Fauns, though wood-spirits, were believed to
foster the growth of the crops. We have already seen how often the
corn-spirit is represented in folk-custom as a goat. On the whole,
then, as Mannhardt argues, the Pans, Satyrs, and Fauns perhaps
belong to a widely diffused class of wood-spirits conceived in
goat-form. The fondness of goats for straying in woods and nibbling
the bark of trees, to which indeed they are most destructive, is an
obvious and perhaps sufficient reason why wood-spirits should so
often be supposed to take the form of goats. The inconsistency of a
god of vegetation subsisting upon the vegetation which he
personifies is not one to strike the primitive mind. Such
inconsistencies arise when the deity, ceasing to be immanent in the
vegetation, comes to be regarded as its owner or lord; for the idea
of owning the vegetation naturally leads to that of subsisting on
it. Sometimes the corn-spirit, originally conceived as immanent in
the corn, afterwards comes to be regarded as its owner, who lives on
it and is reduced to poverty and want by being deprived of it. Hence
he is often known as "the Poor Man" or "the Poor Woman."
Occasionally the last sheaf is left standing on the field for "the
Poor Old Woman" or for "the Old Rye-woman."

Thus the representation of wood-spirits in the form of goats appears
to be both widespread and, to the primitive mind, natural. Therefore
when we find, as we have done, that Dionysus--a tree-god--is
sometimes represented in goat-form, we can hardly avoid concluding
that this representation is simply a part of his proper character as
a tree-god and is not to be explained by the fusion of two distinct
and independent worships, in one of which he originally appeared as
a tree-god and in the other as a goat.

Dionysus was also figured, as we have seen, in the shape of a bull.
After what has gone before we are naturally led to expect that his
bull form must have been only another expression for his character
as a deity of vegetation, especially as the bull is a common
embodiment of the corn-spirit in Northern Europe; and the close
association of Dionysus with Demeter and Persephone in the mysteries
of Eleusis shows that he had at least strong agricultural
affinities.

The probability of this view will be somewhat increased if it can be
shown that in other rites than those of Dionysus the ancients slew
an OX as a representative of the spirit of vegetation. This they
appear to have done in the Athenian sacrifice known as "the murder
of the OX" (_bouphonia_). It took place about the end of June or
beginning of July, that is, about the time when the threshing is
nearly over in Attica. According to tradition the sacrifice was
instituted to procure a cessation of drought and dearth which had
afflicted the land. The ritual was as follows. Barley mixed with
wheat, or cakes made of them, were laid upon the bronze altar of
Zeus Polieus on the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and
the OX which went up to the altar and ate the offering on it was
sacrificed. The axe and knife with which the beast was slain had
been previously wetted with water brought by maidens called
"water-carriers." The weapons were then sharpened and handed to the
butchers, one of whom felled the OX with the axe and another cut its
throat with the knife. As soon as he had felled the OX, the former
threw the axe from him and fled; and the man who cut the beast's
throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime the OX was skinned
and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with
straw and sewed up; next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and
yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then took place
in an ancient law-court presided over by the King (as he was called)
to determine who had murdered the OX. The maidens who had brought
the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife; the
men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had
handed these implements to the butchers; the men who had handed the
implements to the butchers blamed the butchers; and the butchers
laid the blame on the axe and knife, which were accordingly found
guilty, condemned, and cast into the sea.

The name of this sacrifice,-- "the _murder_ of the OX,"--the pains
taken by each person who had a hand in the slaughter to lay the
blame on some one else, together with the formal trial and
punishment of the axe or knife or both, prove that the OX was here
regarded not merely as a victim offered to a god, but as itself a
sacred creature, the slaughter of which was sacrilege or murder.
This is borne out by a statement of Varro that to kill an OX was
formerly a capital crime in Attica. The mode of selecting the victim
suggests that the OX which tasted the corn was viewed as the
corn-deity taking possession of his own. This interpretation is
supported by the following custom. In Beauce, in the district of
Orleans, on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of April they make a
straw man called "the great _mondard._" For they say that the old
_mondard_ is now dead and it is necessary to make a new one. The
straw man is carried in solemn procession up and down the village
and at last is placed upon the oldest apple-tree. There he remains
till the apples are gathered, when he is taken down and thrown into
the water, or he is burned and his ashes cast into water. But the
person who plucks the first fruit from the tree succeeds to the
title of "the great _mondard._" Here the straw figure, called "the
great _mondard_" and placed on the oldest apple-tree in spring,
represents the spirit of the tree, who, dead in winter, revives when
the apple-blossoms appear on the boughs. Thus the person who plucks
the first fruit from the tree and thereby receives the name of "the
great _mondard_" must be regarded as a representative of the
tree-spirit. Primitive peoples are usually reluctant to taste the
annual first-fruits of any crop, until some ceremony has been
performed which makes it safe and pious for them to do so. The
reason of this reluctance appears to be a belief that the
first-fruits either belong to or actually contain a divinity.
Therefore when a man or animal is seen boldly to appropriate the
sacred first-fruits, he or it is naturally regarded as the divinity
himself in human or animal form taking possession of his own. The
time of the Athenian sacrifice, which fell about the close of the
threshing, suggests that the wheat and barley laid upon the altar
were a harvest offering; and the sacramental character of the
subsequent repast--all partaking of the flesh of the divine
animal--would make it parallel to the harvest-suppers of modern
Europe, in which, as we have seen, the flesh of the animal which
stands for the corn-spirit is eaten by the harvesters. Again, the
tradition that the sacrifice was instituted in order to put an end
to drought and famine is in favour of taking it as a harvest
festival. The resurrection of the corn-spirit, enacted by setting up
the stuffed OX and yoking it to the plough, may be compared with the
resurrection of the tree-spirit in the person of his representative,
the Wild Man.

The OX appears as a representative of the corn-spirit in other parts
of the world. At Great Bassam, in Guinea, two oxen are slain
annually to procure a good harvest. If the sacrifice is to be
effectual, it is necessary that the oxen should weep. So all the
women of the village sit in front of the beasts, chanting, "The OX
will weep; yes, he will weep!" From time to time one of the women
walks round the beasts, throwing manioc meal or palm wine upon them,
especially into their eyes. When tears roll down from the eyes of
the oxen, the people dance, singing, "The OX weeps! the OX weeps!"
Then two men seize the tails of the beasts and cut them off at one
blow. It is believed that a great misfortune will happen in the
course of the year if the tails are not severed at one blow. The
oxen are afterwards killed, and their flesh is eaten by the chiefs.
Here the tears of the oxen, like those of the human victims amongst
the Khonds and the Aztecs, are probably a rain-charm. We have
already seen that the virtue of the corn-spirit, embodied in animal
form, is sometimes supposed to reside in the tail, and that the last
handful of corn is sometimes conceived as the tail of the
corn-spirit. In the Mithraic religion this conception is graphically
set forth in some of the numerous sculptures which represent Mithras
kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a knife into its flank;
for on certain of these monuments the tail of the bull ends in three
stalks of corn, and in one of them corn-stalks instead of blood are
seen issuing from the wound inflicted by the knife. Such
representations certainly suggest that the bull, whose sacrifice
appears to have formed a leading feature in the Mithraic ritual, was
conceived, in one at least of its aspects, as an incarnation of the
corn-spirit.

Still more clearly does the ox appear as a personification of the
corn-spirit in a ceremony which is observed in all the provinces and
districts of China to welcome the approach of spring. On the first
day of spring, usually on the third or fourth of February, which is
also the beginning of the Chinese New Year, the governor or prefect
of the city goes in procession to the east gate of the city, and
sacrifices to the Divine Husbandman, who is represented with a
bull's head on the body of a man. A large effigy of an ox, cow, or
buffalo has been prepared for the occasion, and stands outside of
the east gate, with agricultural implements beside it. The figure is
made of differently-coloured pieces of paper pasted on a framework
either by a blind man or according to the directions of a
necromancer. The colours of the paper prognosticate the character of
the coming year; if red prevails, there will be many fires; if
white, there will be floods and rain; and so with the other colours.
The mandarins walk slowly round the ox, beating it severely at each
step with rods of various hues. It is filled with five kinds of
grain, which pour forth when the effigy is broken by the blows of
the rods. The paper fragments are then set on fire, and a scramble
takes place for the burning fragments, because the people believe
that whoever gets one of them is sure to be fortunate throughout the
year. A live buffalo is next killed, and its flesh is divided among
the mandarins. According to one account, the effigy of the ox is
made of clay, and, after being beaten by the governor, is stoned by
the people till they break it in pieces, "from which they expect an
abundant year." Here the corn-spirit appears to be plainly
represented by the corn-filled ox, whose fragments may therefore be
supposed to bring fertility with them.

On the whole we may perhaps conclude that both as a goat and as a
bull Dionysus was essentially a god of vegetation. The Chinese and
European customs which I have cited may perhaps shed light on the
custom of rending a live bull or goat at the rites of Dionysus. The
animal was torn in fragments, as the Khond victim was cut in pieces,
in order that the worshippers might each secure a portion of the
life-giving and fertilising influence of the god. The flesh was
eaten raw as a sacrament, and we may conjecture that some of it was
taken home to be buried in the fields, or otherwise employed so as
to convey to the fruits of the earth the quickening influence of the
god of vegetation. The resurrection of Dionysus, related in his
myth, may have been enacted in his rites by stuffing and setting up
the slain ox, as was done at the Athenian _bouphonia._



2. Demeter, the Pig and the Horse

PASSING next to the corn-goddess Demeter, and remembering that in
European folk-lore the pig is a common embodiment of the
corn-spirit, we may now ask whether the pig, which was so closely
associated with Demeter, may not have been originally the goddess
herself in animal form. The pig was sacred to her; in art she was
portrayed carrying or accompanied by a pig; and the pig was
regularly sacrificed in her mysteries, the reason assigned being
that the pig injures the corn and is therefore an enemy of the
goddess. But after an animal has been conceived as a god, or a god
as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we have seen, that the god
sloughs off his animal form and becomes purely anthropomorphic; and
that then the animal, which at first had been slain in the character
of the god, comes to be viewed as a victim offered to the god on the
ground of its hostility to the deity; in short, the god is
sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. This
happened to Dionysus, and it may have happened to Demeter also. And
in fact the rites of one of her festivals, the Thesmophoria, bear
out the view that originally the pig was an embodiment of the
corn-goddess herself, either Demeter or her daughter and double
Persephone. The Attic Thesmophoria was an autumn festival,
celebrated by women alone in October, and appears to have
represented with mourning rites the descent of Persephone (or
Demeter) into the lower world, and with joy her return from the
dead. Hence the name Descent or Ascent variously applied to the
first, and the name _Kalligeneia_ (fair-born) applied to the third
day of the festival. Now it was customary at the Thesmophoria to
throw pigs, cakes of dough, and branches of pine-trees into "the
chasms of Demeter and Persephone," which appear to have been sacred
caverns or vaults. In these caverns or vaults there were said to be
serpents, which guarded the caverns and consumed most of the flesh
of the pigs and dough-cakes which were thrown in.
Afterwards--apparently at the next annual festival--the decayed
remains of the pigs, the cakes, and the pine-branches were fetched
by women called "drawers," who, after observing rules of ceremonial
purity for three days, descended into the caverns, and, frightening
away the serpents by clapping their hands, brought up the remains
and placed them on the altar. Whoever got a piece of the decayed
flesh and cakes, and sowed it with the seed-corn in his field, was
believed to be sure of a good crop.

To explain the rude and ancient ritual of the Thesmophoria the
following legend was told. At the moment when Pluto carried off
Persephone, a swineherd called Eubuleus chanced to be herding his
swine on the spot, and his herd was engulfed in the chasm down which
Pluto vanished with Persephone. Accordingly at the Thesmophoria pigs
were annually thrown into caverns to commemorate the disappearance
of the swine of Eubuleus. It follows from this that the casting of
the pigs into the vaults at the Thesmophoria formed part of the
dramatic representation of Persephone's descent into the lower
world; and as no image of Persephone appears to have been thrown in,
we may infer that the descent of the pigs was not so much an
accompaniment of her descent as the descent itself, in short, that
the pigs were Persephone. Afterwards when Persephone or Demeter (for
the two are equivalent) took on human form, a reason had to be found
for the custom of throwing pigs into caverns at her festival; and
this was done by saying that when Pluto carried off Persephone there
happened to be some swine browsing near, which were swallowed up
along with her. The story is obviously a forced and awkward attempt
to bridge over the gulf between the old conception of the
corn-spirit as a pig and the new conception of her as an
anthropomorphic goddess. A trace of the older conception survived in
the legend that when the sad mother was searching for traces of the
vanished Persephone, the footprints of the lost one were obliterated
by the footprints of a pig; originally, we may conjecture, the
footprints of the pig were the footprints of Persephone and of
Demeter herself. A consciousness of the intimate connexion of the
pig with the corn lurks in the legend that the swineherd Eubuleus
was a brother of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter first imparted the
secret of the corn. Indeed, according to one version of the story,
Eubuleus himself received, jointly with his brother Triptolemus, the
gift of the corn from Demeter as a reward for revealing to her the
fate of Persephone. Further, it is to be noted that at the
Thesmophoria the women appear to have eaten swine's flesh. The meal,
if I am right, must have been a solemn sacrament or communion, the
worshippers partaking of the body of the god.

As thus explained, the Thesmophoria has its analogies in the
folk-customs of Northern Europe which have been already described.
Just as at the Thesmophoria--an autumn festival in honour of the
corn-goddess--swine's flesh was partly eaten, partly kept in caverns
till the following year, when it was taken up to be sown with the
seed-corn in the fields for the purpose of securing a good crop; so
in the neighbourhood of Grenoble the goat killed on the
harvest-field is partly eaten at the harvest-supper, partly pickled
and kept till the next harvest; so at Pouilly the ox killed on the
harvest-field is partly eaten by the harvesters, partly pickled and
kept till the first day of sowing in spring, probably to be then
mixed with the seed, or eaten by the ploughmen, or both; so at
Udvarhely the feathers of the cock which is killed in the last sheaf
at harvest are kept till spring, and then sown with the seed on the
field; so in Hesse and Meiningen the flesh of pigs is eaten on Ash
Wednesday or Candlemas, and the bones are kept till sowing-time,
when they are put into the field sown or mixed with the seed in the
bag; so, lastly, the corn from the last sheaf is kept till
Christmas, made into the Yule Boar, and afterwards broken and mixed
with the seed-corn at sowing in spring. Thus, to put it generally,
the corn-spirit is killed in animal form in autumn; part of his
flesh is eaten as a sacrament by his worshippers; and part of it is
kept till next sowing-time or harvest as a pledge and security for
the continuance or renewal of the corn-spirit's energies.

If persons of fastidious taste should object that the Greeks never
could have conceived Demeter and Persephone to be embodied in the
form of pigs, it may be answered that in the cave of Phigalia in
Arcadia the Black Demeter was portrayed with the head and mane of a
horse on the body of a woman. Between the portraits of a goddess as
a pig, and the portrait of her as a woman with a horse's head, there
is little to choose in respect of barbarism. The legend told of the
Phigalian Demeter indicates that the horse was one of the animal
forms assumed in ancient Greece, as in modern Europe, by the
cornspirit. It was said that in her search for her daughter, Demeter
assumed the form of a mare to escape the addresses of Poseidon, and
that, offended at his importunity, she withdrew in dudgeon to a cave
not far from Phigalia in the highlands of Western Arcadia. There,
robed in black, she tarried so long that the fruits of the earth
were perishing, and mankind would have died of famine if Pan had not
soothed the angry goddess and persuaded her to quit the cave. In
memory of this event, the Phigalians set up an image of the Black
Demeter in the cave; it represented a woman dressed in a long robe,
with the head and mane of a horse. The Black Demeter, in whose
absence the fruits of the earth perish, is plainly a mythical
expression for the bare wintry earth stripped of its summer mantle
of green.



3. Attis, Adonis, and the Pig

PASSING now to Attis and Adonis, we may note a few facts which seem
to show that these deities of vegetation had also, like other
deities of the same class, their animal embodiments. The worshippers
of Attis abstained from eating the flesh of swine. This appears to
indicate that the pig was regarded as an embodiment of Attis. And
the legend that Attis was killed by a boar points in the same
direction. For after the examples of the goat Dionysus and the pig
Demeter it may almost be laid down as a rule that an animal which is
said to have injured a god was originally the god himself. Perhaps
the cry of "Hyes Attes! Hyes Attes!" which was raised by the
worshippers of Attis, may be neither more nor less than "Pig Attis!
Pig Attis!"--_hyes_ being possibly a Phrygian form of the Greek
_hy¯s,_ "a pig."

In regard to Adonis, his connexion with the boar was not always
explained by the story that he had been killed by the animal.
According to another story, a boar rent with his tusk the bark of
the tree in which the infant Adonis was born. According to yet
another story, he perished at the hands of Hephaestus on Mount
Lebanon while he was hunting wild boars. These variations in the
legend serve to show that, while the connexion of the boar with
Adonis was certain, the reason of the connexion was not understood,
and that consequently different stories were devised to explain it.
Certainly the pig ranked as a sacred animal among the Syrians. At
the great religious metropolis of Hierapolis on the Euphrates pigs
were neither sacrificed nor eaten, and if a man touched a pig he was
unclean for the rest of the day. Some people said this was because
the pigs were unclean; others said it was because the pigs were
sacred. This difference of opinion points to a hazy state of
religious thought in which the ideas of sanctity and uncleanness are
not yet sharply distinguished, both being blent in a sort of
vaporous solution to which we give the name of taboo. It is quite
consistent with this that the pig should have been held to be an
embodiment of the divine Adonis, and the analogies of Dionysus and
Demeter make it probable that the story of the hostility of the
animal to the god was only a late misapprehension of the old view of
the god as embodied in a pig. The rule that pigs were not sacrificed
or eaten by worshippers of Attis and presumably of Adonis, does not
exclude the possibility that in these rituals the pig was slain on
solemn occasions as a representative of the god and consumed
sacramentally by the worshippers. Indeed, the sacramental killing
and eating of an animal implies that the animal is sacred, and that,
as a general rule, it is spared.

The attitude of the Jews to the pig was as ambiguous as that of the
heathen Syrians towards the same animal. The Greeks could not decide
whether the Jews worshipped swine or abominated them. On the one
hand they might not eat swine; but on the other hand they might not
kill them. And if the former rule speaks for the uncleanness, the
latter speaks still more strongly for the sanctity of the animal.
For whereas both rules may, and one rule must, be explained on the
supposition that the pig was sacred; neither rule must, and one rule
cannot, be explained on the supposition that the pig was unclean.
If, therefore, we prefer the former supposition, we must conclude
that, originally at least, the pig was revered rather than abhorred
by the Israelites. We are confirmed in this opinion by observing
that down to the time of Isaiah some of the Jews used to meet
secretly in gardens to eat the flesh of swine and mice as a
religious rite. Doubtless this was a very ancient ceremony, dating
from a time when both the pig and the mouse were venerated as
divine, and when their flesh was partaken of sacramentally on rare
and solemn occasions as the body and blood of gods. And in general
it may perhaps be said that all so-called unclean animals were
originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they were
divine.



4. Osiris, the Pig and the Bull

IN ANCIENT Egypt, within historical times, the pig occupied the same
dubious position as in Syria and Palestine, though at first sight
its uncleanness is more prominent than its sanctity. The Egyptians
are generally said by Greek writers to have abhorred the pig as a
foul and loathsome animal. If a man so much as touched a pig in
passing, he stepped into the river with all his clothes on, to wash
off the taint. To drink pig's milk was believed to cause leprosy to
the drinker. Swineherds, though natives of Egypt, were forbidden to
enter any temple, and they were the only men who were thus excluded.
No one would give his daughter in marriage to a swineherd, or marry
a swineherd's daughter; the swineherds married among themselves. Yet
once a year the Egyptians sacrificed pigs to the moon and to Osiris,
and not only sacrificed them, but ate of their flesh, though on any
other day of the year they would neither sacrifice them nor taste of
their flesh. Those who were too poor to offer a pig on this day
baked cakes of dough, and offered them instead. This can hardly be
explained except by the supposition that the pig was a sacred animal
which was eaten sacramentally by his worshippers once a year.

The view that in Egypt the pig was sacred is borne out by the very
facts which, to moderns, might seem to prove the contrary. Thus the
Egyptians thought, as we have seen, that to drink pig's milk
produced leprosy. But exactly analogous views are held by savages
about the animals and plants which they deem most sacred. Thus in
the island of Wetar (between New Guinea and Celebes) people believe
themselves to be variously descended from wild pigs, serpents,
crocodiles, turtles, dogs, and eels; a man may not eat an animal of
the kind from which he is descended; if he does so, he will become a
leper, and go mad. Amongst the Omaha Indians of North America men
whose totem is the elk, believe that if they ate the flesh of the
male elk they would break out in boils and white spots in different
parts of their bodies. In the same tribe men whose totem is the red
maize, think that if they ate red maize they would have running
sores all round their mouths. The Bush negroes of Surinam, who
practise totemism, believe that if they ate the _capiaï_ (an animal
like a pig) it would give them leprosy; perhaps the _capiaï_ is one
of their totems. The Syrians, in antiquity, who esteemed fish
sacred, thought that if they ate fish their bodies would break out
in ulcers, and their feet and stomach would swell up. The Chasas of
Orissa believe that if they were to injure their totemic animal they
would be attacked by leprosy and their line would die out. These
examples prove that the eating of a sacred animal is often believed
to produce leprosy or other skin-diseases; so far, therefore, they
support the view that the pig must have been sacred in Egypt, since
the effect of drinking its milk was believed to be leprosy.

Again, the rule that, after touching a pig, a man had to wash
himself and his clothes, also favours the view of the sanctity of
the pig. For it is a common belief that the effect of contact with a
sacred object must be removed, by washing or otherwise, before a man
is free to mingle with his fellows. Thus the Jews wash their hands
after reading the sacred scriptures. Before coming forth from the
tabernacle after the sin-offering, the high priest had to wash
himself, and put off the garments which he had worn in the holy
place. It was a rule of Greek ritual that, in offering an expiatory
sacrifice, the sacrificer should not touch the sacrifice, and that,
after the offering was made, he must wash his body and his clothes
in a river or spring before he could enter a city or his own house.
The Polynesians felt strongly the need of ridding themselves of the
sacred contagion, if it may be so called, which they caught by
touching sacred objects. Various ceremonies were performed for the
purpose of removing this contagion. We have seen, for example, how
in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything
personally belonging to him, had to perform a certain ceremony
before he could feed himself with his hands; otherwise it was
believed that he would swell up and die, or at least be afflicted
with scrofula or some other disease. We have seen, too, what fatal
effects are supposed to follow, and do actually follow, from contact
with a sacred object in New Zealand. In short, primitive man
believes that what is sacred is dangerous; it is pervaded by a sort
of electrical sanctity which communicates a shock to, even if it
does not kill, whatever comes in contact with it. Hence the savage
is unwilling to touch or even to see that which he deems peculiarly
holy. Thus Bechuanas, of the Crocodile clan, think it "hateful and
unlucky" to meet or see a crocodile; the sight is thought to cause
inflammation of the eyes. Yet the crocodile is their most sacred
object; they call it their father, swear by it, and celebrate it in
their festivals. The goat is the sacred animal of the Madenassana
Bushmen; yet "to look upon it would be to render the man for the
time impure, as well as to cause him undefined uneasiness." The Elk
clan, among the Omaha Indians, believe that even to touch the male
elk would be followed by an eruption of boils and white spots on the
body. Members of the Reptile clan in the same tribe think that if
one of them touches or smells a snake, it will make his hair white.
In Samoa people whose god was a butterfly believed that if they
caught a butterfly it would strike them dead. Again, in Samoa the
reddish-seared leaves of the banana-tree were commonly used as
plates for handing food; but if any member of the Wild Pigeon family
had used banana leaves for this purpose, it was supposed that he
would suffer from rheumatic swellings or an eruption all over the
body like chicken-pox. The Mori clan of the Bhils in Central India
worship the peacock as their totem and make offerings of grain to
it; yet members of the clan believe that were they even to set foot
on the tracks of a peacock they would afterwards suffer from some
disease, and if a woman sees a peacock she must veil her face and
look away. Thus the primitive mind seems to conceive of holiness as
a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will shun as far as
possible, and of which, if he should chance to be infected by it, he
will carefully disinfect himself by some form of ceremonial
purification.

In the light of these parallels the beliefs and customs of the
Egyptians touching the pig are probably to be explained as based
upon an opinion of the extreme sanctity rather than of the extreme
uncleanness of the animal; or rather, to put it more correctly, they
imply that the animal was looked on, not simply as a filthy and
disgusting creature, but as a being endowed with high supernatural
powers, and that as such it was regarded with that primitive
sentiment of religious awe and fear in which the feelings of
reverence and abhorrence are almost equally blended. The ancients
themselves seem to have been aware that there was another side to
the horror with which swine seemed to inspire the Egyptians. For the
Greek astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus, who resided fourteen
months in Egypt and conversed with the priests, was of opinion that
the Egyptians spared the pig, not out of abhorrence, but from a
regard to its utility in agriculture; for, according to him, when
the Nile had subsided, herds of swine were turned loose over the
fields to tread the seed down into the moist earth. But when a being
is thus the object of mixed and implicitly contradictory feelings,
he may be said to occupy a position of unstable equilibrium. In
course of time one of the contradictory feelings is likely to
prevail over the other, and according as the feeling which finally
predominates is that of reverence or abhorrence, the being who is
the object of it will rise into a god or sink into a devil. The
latter, on the whole, was the fate of the pig in Egypt. For in
historical times the fear and horror of the pig seem certainly to
have outweighed the reverence and worship of which he may once have
been the object, and of which, even in his fallen state, he never
quite lost trace. He came to be looked on as an embodiment of Set or
Typhon, the Egyptian devil and enemy of Osiris. For it was in the
shape of a black pig that Typhon injured the eye of the god Horus,
who burned him and instituted the sacrifice of the pig, the sun-god
Ra having declared the beast abominable. Again, the story that
Typhon was hunting a boar when he discovered and mangled the body of
Osiris, and that this was the reason why pigs were sacrificed once a
year, is clearly a modernised version of an older story that Osiris,
like Adonis and Attis, was slain or mangled by a boar, or by Typhon
in the form of a boar. Thus, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris
might naturally be interpreted as vengeance inflicted on the hostile
animal that had slain or mangled the god. But, in the first place,
when an animal is thus killed as a solemn sacrifice once and once
only in the year, it generally or always means that the animal is
divine, that he is spared and respected the rest of the year as a
god and slain, when he is slain, also in the character of a god. In
the second place, the examples of Dionysus and Demeter, if not of
Attis and Adonis, have taught us that the animal which is sacrificed
to a god on the ground that he is the god's enemy may have been, and
probably was, originally the god himself. Therefore, the annual
sacrifice of a pig to Osiris, coupled with the alleged hostility of
the animal to the god, tends to show, first, that originally the pig
was a god, and, second, that he was Osiris. At a later age, when
Osiris became anthropomorphic and his original relation to the pig
had been forgotten, the animal was first distinguished from him, and
afterwards opposed as an enemy to him by mythologists who could
think of no reason for killing a beast in connexion with the worship
of a god except that the beast was the god's enemy; or, as Plutarch
puts it, not that which is dear to the gods, but that which is the
contrary, is fit to be sacrificed. At this later stage the havoc
which a wild boar notoriously makes amongst the corn would supply a
plausible reason for regarding him as the foe of the corn-spirit,
though originally, if I am right, the very freedom with which the
boar ranged at will through the corn led people to identify him with
the corn-spirit, to whom he was afterwards opposed as an enemy.

The view which identifies the pig with Osiris derives not a little
support from the sacrifice of pigs to him on the very day on which,
according to tradition, Osiris himself was killed; for thus the
killing of the pig was the annual representation of the killing of
Osiris, just as the throwing of the pigs into the caverns at the
Thesmophoria was an annual representation of the descent of
Persephone into the lower world; and both customs are parallel to
the European practice of killing a goat, cock, and so forth, at
harvest as a representative of the corn-spirit.

Again, the theory that the pig, originally Osiris himself,
afterwards came to be regarded as an embodiment of his enemy Typhon,
is supported by the similar relation of red-haired men and red oxen
to Typhon. For in regard to the red-haired men who were burned and
whose ashes were scattered with winnowing-fans, we have seen fair
grounds for believing that originally, like the red-haired puppies
killed at Rome in spring, they were representatives of the
corn-spirit himself that is, of Osiris, and were slain for the
express purpose of making the corn turn red or golden. Yet at a
later time these men were explained to be representatives, not of
Osiris, but of his enemy Typhon, and the killing of them was
regarded as an act of vengeance inflicted on the enemy of the god.
Similarly, the red oxen sacrificed by the Egyptians were said to be
offered on the ground of their resemblance to Typhon; though it is
more likely that originally they were slain on the ground of their
resemblance to the corn-spirit Osiris. We have seen that the ox is a
common representative of the corn-spirit and is slain as such on the
harvest-field.

Osiris was regularly identified with the bull Apis of Memphis and
the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis. But it is hard to say whether these
bulls were embodiments of him as the corn-spirit, as the red oxen
appear to have been, or whether they were not in origin entirely
distinct deities who came to be fused with Osiris at a later time.
The universality of the worship of these two bulls seems to put them
on a different footing from the ordinary sacred animals whose
worships were purely local. But whatever the original relation of
Apis to Osiris may have been, there is one fact about the former
which ought not to be passed over in a disquisition on the custom of
killing a god. Although the bull Apis was worshipped as a god with
much pomp and profound reverence, he was not suffered to live beyond
a certain length of time which was prescribed by the sacred books,
and on the expiry of which he was drowned in a holy spring. The
limit, according to Plutarch, was twenty-five years; but it cannot
always have been enforced, for the tombs of the Apis bulls have been
discovered in modern times, and from the inscriptions on them it
appears that in the twenty-second dynasty two of the holy steers
lived more than twenty-six years.



5. Virbius and the Horse

WE are now in a position to hazard a conjecture as to the meaning of
the tradition that Virbius, the first of the divine Kings of the
Wood at Aricia, had been killed in the character of Hippolytus by
horses. Having found, first, that spirits of the corn are not
infrequently represented in the form of horses; and, second, that
the animal which in later legends is said to have injured the god
was sometimes originally the god himself, we may conjecture that the
horses by which Virbius or Hippolytus was said to have been slain
were really embodiments of him as a deity of vegetation. The myth
that he had been killed by horses was probably invented to explain
certain features in his worship, amongst others the custom of
excluding horses from his sacred grove. For myth changes while
custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did
before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have
been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long attempt to
reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an
absurd practice. In the case before us we may be sure that the myth
is more modern than the custom and by no means represents the
original reason for excluding horses from the grove. From their
exclusion it might be inferred that horses could not be the sacred
animals or embodiments of the god of the grove. But the inference
would be rash. The goat was at one time a sacred animal or
embodiment of Athena, as may be inferred from the practice of
representing the goddess clad in a goat-skin (_aegis_). Yet the goat
was neither sacrificed to her as a rule, nor allowed to enter her
great sanctuary, the Acropolis at Athens. The reason alleged for
this was that the goat injured the olive, the sacred tree of Athena.
So far, therefore, the relation of the goat to Athena is parallel to
the relation of the horse to Virbius, both animals being excluded
from the sanctuary on the ground of injury done by them to the god.
But from Varro we learn that there was an exception to the rule
which excluded the goat from the Acropolis. Once a year, he says,
the goat was driven on to the Acropolis for a necessary sacrifice.
Now, as has been remarked before, when an animal is sacrificed once
and once only in the year, it is probably slain, not as a victim
offered to the god, but as a representative of the god himself.
Therefore we may infer that if a goat was sacrificed on the
Acropolis once a year, it was sacrificed in the character of Athena
herself; and it may be conjectured that the skin of the sacrificed
animal was placed on the statue of the goddess and formed the
_aegis,_ which would thus be renewed annually. Similarly at Thebes
in Egypt rams were sacred and were not sacrificed. But on one day in
the year a ram was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of
the god Ammon. Now, if we knew the ritual of the Arician grove
better, we might find that the rule of excluding horses from it,
like the rule of excluding goats from the Acropolis at Athens, was
subject to an annual exception, a horse being once a year taken into
the grove and sacrificed as an embodiment of the god Virbius. By the
usual misunderstanding the horse thus killed would come in time to
be regarded as an enemy offered up in sacrifice to the god whom he
had injured, like the pig which was sacrificed to Demeter and Osiris
or the goat which was sacrificed to Dionysus, and possibly to
Athena. It is so easy for a writer to record a rule without noticing
an exception that we need not wonder at finding the rule of the
Arician grove recorded without any mention of an exception such as I
suppose. If we had had only the statements of Athenaeus and Pliny,
we should have known only the rule which forbade the sacrifice of
goats to Athena and excluded them from the Acropolis, without being
aware of the important exception which the fortunate preservation of
Varro's work has revealed to us.

The conjecture that once a year a horse may have been sacrificed in
the Arician grove as a representative of the deity of the grove
derives some support from the similar sacrifice of a horse which
took place once a year at Rome. On the fifteenth of October in each
year a chariot-race was run on the Field of Mars. Stabbed with a
spear, the right-hand horse of the victorious team was then
sacrificed to Mars for the purpose of ensuring good crops, and its
head was cut off and adorned with a string of loaves. Thereupon the
inhabitants of two wards--the Sacred Way and the Subura--contended
with each other who should get the head. If the people of the Sacred
Way got it, they fastened it to a wall of the king's house; if the
people of the Subura got it, they fastened it to the Mamilian tower.
The horse's tail was cut off and carried to the king's house with
such speed that the blood dripped on the hearth of the house.
Further, it appears that the blood of the horse was caught and
preserved till the twenty-first of April, when the Vestal Virgins
mixed it with the blood of the unborn calves which had been
sacrificed six days before. The mixture was then distributed to
shepherds, and used by them for fumigating their flocks.

In this ceremony the decoration of the horse's head with a string of
loaves, and the alleged object of the sacrifice, namely, to procure
a good harvest, seem to indicate that the horse was killed as one of
those animal representatives of the corn-spirit of which we have
found so many examples. The custom of cutting off the horse's tail
is like the African custom of cutting off the tails of the oxen and
sacrificing them to obtain a good crop. In both the Roman and the
African custom the animal apparently stands for the corn-spirit, and
its fructifying power is supposed to reside especially in its tail.
The latter idea occurs, as we have seen, in European folk-lore.
Again, the practice of fumigating the cattle in spring with the
blood of the horse may be compared with the practice of giving the
Old Wife, the Maiden, or the _clyack_ sheaf as fodder to the horses
in spring or the cattle at Christmas, and giving the Yule Boar to
the ploughing oxen or horses to eat in spring. All these usages aim
at ensuring the blessing of the corn-spirit on the homestead and its
inmates and storing it up for another year.

The Roman sacrifice of the October horse, as it was called, carries
us back to the early days when the Subura, afterwards a low and
squalid quarter of the great metropolis, was still a separate
village, whose inhabitants engaged in a friendly contest on the
harvest-field with their neighbours of Rome, then a little rural
town. The Field of Mars on which the ceremony took place lay beside
the Tiber, and formed part of the king's domain down to the
abolition of the monarchy. For tradition ran that at the time when
the last of the kings was driven from Rome, the corn stood ripe for
the sickle on the crown lands beside the river; but no one would eat
the accursed grain and it was flung into the river in such heaps
that, the water being low with the summer heat, it formed the
nucleus of an island. The horse sacrifice was thus an old autumn
custom observed upon the king's corn-fields at the end of the
harvest. The tail and blood of the horse, as the chief parts of the
corn-spirit's representative, were taken to the king's house and
kept there; just as in Germany the harvest-cock is nailed on the
gable or over the door of the farmhouse; and as the last sheaf, in
the form of the Maiden, is carried home and kept over the fireplace
in the Highlands of Scotland. Thus the blessing of the corn-spirit
was brought to the king's house and hearth and, through them, to the
community of which he was the head. Similarly in the spring and
autumn customs of Northern Europe the May-pole is sometimes set up
in front of the house of the mayor or burgomaster, and the last
sheaf at harvest is brought to him as the head of the village. But
while the tail and blood fell to the king, the neighbouring village
of the Subura, which no doubt once had a similar ceremony of its
own, was gratified by being allowed to compete for the prize of the
horse's head. The Mamilian tower, to which the Suburans nailed the
horse's head when they succeeded in carrying it off, appears to have
been a peel-tower or keep of the old Mamilian family, the magnates
of the village. The ceremony thus performed on the king's fields and
at his house on behalf of the whole town and of the neighbouring
village presupposes a time when each township performed a similar
ceremony on its own fields. In the rural districts of Latium the
villages may have continued to observe the custom, each on its own
land, long after the Roman hamlets had merged their separate
harvest-homes in the common celebration on the king's lands. There
is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred
grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have been the
scene of a common harvest celebration, at which a horse was
sacrificed with the same rude rites on behalf of the neighbouring
villages. The horse would represent the fructifying spirit both of
the tree and of the corn, for the two ideas melt into each other, as
we see in customs like the Harvest-May.




L. Eating the God



1. The Sacrament of First-Fruits

WE have now seen that the corn-spirit is represented sometimes in
human, sometimes in animal form, and that in both cases he is killed
in the person of his representative and eaten sacramentally. To find
examples of actually killing the human representative of the
corn-spirit we had naturally to go to savage races; but the
harvest-suppers of our European peasants have furnished unmistakable
examples of the sacramental eating of animals as representatives of
the corn-spirit. But further, as might have been anticipated, the
new corn is itself eaten sacramentally, that is, as the body of the
corn-spirit. In Wermland, Sweden, the farmer's wife uses the grain
of the last sheaf to bake a loaf in the shape of a little girl; this
loaf is divided amongst the whole household and eaten by them. Here
the loaf represents the corn-spirit conceived as a maiden; just as
in Scotland the corn-spirit is similarly conceived and represented
by the last sheaf made up in the form of a woman and bearing the
name of the Maiden. As usual, the corn-spirit is believed to reside
in the last sheaf; and to eat a loaf made from the last sheaf is,
therefore, to eat the corn-spirit itself. Similarly at La Palisse,
in France, a man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is
carried on the last harvest-waggon. The tree and the dough-man are
taken to the mayor's house and kept there till the vintage is over.
Then the close of the harvest is celebrated by a feast at which the
mayor breaks the dough-man in pieces and gives the pieces to the
people to eat.

In these examples the corn-spirit is represented and eaten in human
shape. In other cases, though the new corn is not baked in loaves of
human shape, still the solemn ceremonies with which it is eaten
suffice to indicate that it is partaken of sacramentally, that is,
as the body of the corn-spirit. For example, the following
ceremonies used to be observed by Lithuanian peasants at eating the
new corn. About the time of the autumn sowing, when all the corn had
been got in and the threshing had begun, each farmer held a festival
called Sabarios, that is, "the mixing or throwing together." He took
nine good handfuls of each kind of crop--wheat, barley, oats, flax,
beans, lentils, and the rest; and each handful he divided into three
parts. The twentyseven portions of each grain were then thrown on a
heap and all mixed up together. The grain used had to be that which
was first threshed and winnowed and which had been set aside and
kept for this purpose. A part of the grain thus mixed was employed
to bake little loaves, one for each of the household; the rest was
mixed with more barley or oats and made into beer. The first beer
brewed from this mixture was for the drinking of the farmer, his
wife, and children; the second brew was for the servants. The beer
being ready, the farmer chose an evening when no stranger was
expected. Then he knelt down before the barrel of beer, drew a
jugful of the liquor and poured it on the bung of the barrel,
saying, "O fruitful earth, make rye and barley and all kinds of corn
to flourish." Next he took the jug to the parlour, where his wife
and children awaited him. On the floor of the parlour lay bound a
black or white or speckled (not a red) cock and a hen of the same
colour and of the same brood, which must have been hatched within
the year. Then the farmer knelt down, with the jug in his hand, and
thanked God for the harvest and prayed for a good crop next year.
Next all lifted up their hands and said, "O God, and thou, O earth,
we give you this cock and hen as a free-will offering." With that
the farmer killed the fowls with the blows of a wooden spoon, for he
might not cut their heads off. After the first prayer and after
killing each of the birds he poured out a third of the beer. Then
his wife boiled the fowls in a new pot which had never been used
before. After that, a bushel was set, bottom upwards, on the floor,
and on it were placed the little loaves mentioned above and the
boiled fowls. Next the new beer was fetched, together with a ladle
and three mugs, none of which was used except on this occasion. When
the farmer had ladled the beer into the mugs, the family knelt down
round the bushel. The father then uttered a prayer and drank off the
three mugs of beer. The rest followed his example. Then the loaves
and the flesh of the fowls were eaten, after which the beer went
round again, till every one had emptied each of the three mugs nine
times. None of the food should remain over; but if anything did
happen to be left, it was consumed next morning with the same
ceremonies. The bones were given to the dog to eat; if he did not
eat them all up, the remains were buried under the dung in the
cattle-stall. This ceremony was observed at the beginning of
December. On the day on which it took place no bad word might be
spoken.

Such was the custom about two hundred years or more ago. At the
present day in Lithuania, when new potatoes or loaves made from the
new corn are being eaten, all the people at table pull each other's
hair. The meaning of this last custom is obscure, but a similar
custom was certainly observed by the heathen Lithuanians at their
solemn sacrifices. Many of the Esthonians of the island of Oesel
will not eat bread baked of the new corn till they have first taken
a bite at a piece of iron. The iron is here plainly a charm,
intended to render harmless the spirit that is in the corn. In
Sutherlandshire at the present day, when the new potatoes are dug
all the family must taste them, otherwise "the spirits in them [the
potatoes] take offence, and the potatoes would not keep." In one
part of Yorkshire it is still customary for the clergyman to cut the
first corn; and my informant believes that the corn so cut is used
to make the communion bread. If the latter part of the custom is
correctly reported (and analogy is all in its favour), it shows how
the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which
is doubtless far older than Christianity.

The Aino or Ainu of Japan are said to distinguish various kinds of
millet as male and female respectively, and these kinds, taken
together, are called "the divine husband and wife cereal" (_Umurek
haru kamui_). "Therefore before millet is pounded and made into
cakes for general eating, the old men have a few made for themselves
first to worship. When they are ready they pray to them very
earnestly and say: 'O thou cereal deity, we worship thee. Thou hast
grown very well this year, and thy flavour will be sweet. Thou art
good. The goddess of fire will be glad, and we also shall rejoice
greatly. O thou god, O thou divine cereal, do thou nourish the
people. I now partake of thee. I worship thee and give thee thanks.'
After having thus prayed, they, the worshippers, take a cake and eat
it, and from this time the people may all partake of the new millet.
And so with many gestures of homage and words of prayer this kind of
food is dedicated to the well-being of the Ainu. No doubt the cereal
offering is regarded as a tribute paid to a god, but that god is no
other than the seed itself; and it is only a god in so far as it is
beneficial to the human body."

At the close of the rice harvest in the East Indian island of Buru,
each clan meets at a common sacramental meal, to which every member
of the clan is bound to contribute a little of the new rice. This
meal is called "eating the soul of the rice," a name which clearly
indicates the sacramental character of the repast. Some of the rice
is also set apart and offered to the spirits. Amongst the Alfoors of
Minahassa, in Celebes, the priest sows the first rice-seed and
plucks the first ripe rice in each field. This rice he roasts and
grinds into meal, and gives some of it to each of the household.
Shortly before the rice-harvest in Boland Mongondo, another district
of Celebes, an offering is made of a small pig or a fowl. Then the
priest plucks a little rice, first on his own field and next on
those of his neighbours. All the rice thus plucked by him he dries
along with his own, and then gives it back to the respective owners,
who have it ground and boiled. When it is boiled the women take it
back, with an egg, to the priest, who offers the egg in sacrifice
and returns the rice to the women. Of this rice every member of the
family, down to the youngest child, must partake. After this
ceremony every one is free to get in his rice.

Amongst the Burghers or Badagas, a tribe of the Neilgherry Hills in
Southern India, the first handful of seed is sown and the first
sheaf reaped by a Curumbar, a man of a different tribe, the members
of which the Burghers regard as sorcerers. The grain contained in
the first sheaf "is that day reduced to meal, made into cakes, and,
being offered as a first-fruit oblation, is, together with the
remainder of the sacrificed animal, partaken of by the Burgher and
the whole of his family, as the meat of a federal offering and
sacrifice." Among the Hindoos of Southern India the eating of the
new rice is the occasion of a family festival called Pongol. The new
rice is boiled in a new pot on a fire which is kindled at noon on
the day when, according to Hindoo astrologers, the sun enters the
tropic of Capricorn. The boiling of the pot is watched with great
anxiety by the whole family, for as the milk boils, so will the
coming year be. If the milk boils rapidly, the year will be
prosperous; but it will be the reverse if the milk boils slowly.
Some of the new boiled rice is offered to the image of Ganesa; then
every one partakes of it. In some parts of Northern India the
festival of the new crop is known as _Navan,_ that is, "new grain."
When the crop is ripe, the owner takes the omens, goes to the field,
plucks five or six ears of barley in the spring crop and one of the
millets in the autumn harvest. This is brought home, parched, and
mixed with coarse sugar, butter, and curds. Some of it is thrown on
the fire in the name of the village gods and deceased ancestors; the
rest is eaten by the family.

The ceremony of eating the new yams at Onitsha, on the Niger, is
thus described: "Each headman brought out six yams, and cut down
young branches of palm-leaves and placed them before his gate,
roasted three of the yams, and got some kola-nuts and fish. After
the yam is roasted, the _Libia,_ or country doctor, takes the yam,
scrapes it into a sort of meal, and divides it into halves; he then
takes one piece, and places it on the lips of the person who is
going to eat the new yam. The eater then blows up the steam from the
hot yam, and afterwards pokes the whole into his mouth, and says, 'I
thank God for being permitted to eat the new yam'; he then begins to
chew it heartily, with fish likewise."

Among the Nandi of British East Africa, when the eleusine grain is
ripening in autumn, every woman who owns a corn-field goes out into
it with her daughters, and they all pluck some of the ripe grain.
Each of the women then fixes one grain in her necklace and chews
another, which she rubs on her forehead, throat, and breast. No mark
of joy escapes them; sorrowfully they cut a basketful of the new
corn, and carrying it home place it in the loft to dry. As the
ceiling is of wickerwork, a good deal of the grain drops through the
crevices and falls into the fire, where it explodes with a crackling
noise. The people make no attempt to prevent this waste; for they
regard the crackling of the grain in the fire as a sign that the
souls of the dead are partaking of it. A few days later porridge is
made from the new grain and served up with milk at the evening meal.
All the members of the family take some of the porridge and dab it
on the walls and roofs of the huts; also they put a little in their
mouths and spit it out towards the east and on the outside of the
huts. Then, holding up some of the grain in his hand, the head of
the family prays to God for health and strength, and likewise for
milk, and everybody present repeats the words of the prayer after
him.

Amongst the Caffres of Natal and Zululand, no one may eat of the new
fruits till after a festival which marks the beginning of the Caffre
year and falls at the end of December or the beginning of January.
All the people assemble at the king's kraal, where they feast and
dance. Before they separate the "dedication of the people" takes
place. Various fruits of the earth, as corn, mealies, and pumpkins,
mixed with the flesh of a sacrificed animal and with "medicine," are
boiled in great pots, and a little of this food is placed in each
man's mouth by the king himself. After thus partaking of the
sanctified fruits, a man is himself sanctified for the whole year,
and may immediately get in his crops. It is believed that if any man
were to partake of the new fruits before the festival, he would die;
if he were detected, he would be put to death, or at least all his
cattle would be taken from him. The holiness of the new fruits is
well marked by the rule that they must be cooked in a special pot
which is used only for this purpose, and on a new fire kindled by a
magician through the friction of two sticks which are called
"husband and wife."

Among the Bechuanas it is a rule that before they partake of the new
crops they must purify themselves. The purification takes place at
the commencement of the new year on a day in January which is fixed
by the chief. It begins in the great kraal of the tribe, where all
the adult males assemble. Each of them takes in his hand leaves of a
gourd called by the natives _lerotse_ (described as something
between a pumpkin and a vegetable marrow); and having crushed the
leaves he anoints with the expressed juice his big toes and his
navel; many people indeed apply the juice to all the joints of their
body, but the better-informed say that this is a vulgar departure
from ancient custom. After this ceremony in the great kraal every
man goes home to his own kraal, assembles all the members of his
family, men, women, and children, and smears them all with the juice
of the _lerotse_ leaves. Some of the leaves are also pounded, mixed
with milk in a large wooden dish, and given to the dogs to lap up.
Then the porridge plate of each member of the family is rubbed with
the _lerotse_ leaves. When this purification has been completed, but
not before, the people are free to eat of the new crops.

The Bororo Indians of Brazil think that it would be certain death to
eat the new maize before it has been blessed by the medicine-man.
The ceremony of blessing it is as follows. The half-ripe husk is
washed and placed before the medicine-man, who by dancing and
singing for several hours, and by incessant smoking, works himself
up into a state of ecstasy, whereupon he bites into the husk,
trembling in every limb and uttering shrieks from time to time. A
similar ceremony is performed whenever a large animal or a large
fish is killed. The Bororo are firmly persuaded that were any man to
touch unconsecrated maize or meat, before the ceremony had been
completed, he and his whole tribe would perish.

Amongst the Creek Indians of North America, the _busk_ or festival
of first-fruits was the chief ceremony of the year. It was held in
July or August, when the corn was ripe, and marked the end of the
old year and the beginning of the new one. Before it took place,
none of the Indians would eat or even handle any part of the new
harvest. Sometimes each town had its own busk; sometimes several
towns united to hold one in common. Before celebrating the busk, the
people provided themselves with new clothes and new household
utensils and furniture; they collected their old clothes and
rubbish, together with all the remaining grain and other old
provisions, cast them together in one common heap, and consumed them
with fire. As a preparation for the ceremony, all the fires in the
village were extinguished, and the ashes swept clean away. In
particular, the hearth or altar of the temple was dug up and the
ashes carried out. Then the chief priest put some roots of the
button-snake plant, with some green tobacco leaves and a little of
the new fruits, at the bottom of the fireplace, which he afterwards
commanded to be covered up with white clay, and wetted over with
clean water. A thick arbour of green branches of young trees was
then made over the altar. Meanwhile the women at home were cleaning
out their houses, renewing the old hearths, and scouring all the
cooking vessels that they might be ready to receive the new fire and
the new fruits. The public or sacred square was carefully swept of
even the smallest crumbs of previous feasts, "for fear of polluting
the first-fruit offerings." Also every vessel that had contained or
had been used about any food during the expiring year was removed
from the temple before sunset. Then all the men who were not known
to have violated the law of the first-fruit offering and that of
marriage during the year were summoned by a crier to enter the holy
square and observe a solemn fast. But the women (except six old
ones), the children, and all who had not attained the rank of
warriors were forbidden to enter the square. Sentinels were also
posted at the corners of the square to keep out all persons deemed
impure and all animals. A strict fast was then observed for two
nights and a day, the devotees drinking a bitter decoction of
button-snake root "in order to vomit and purge their sinful bodies."
That the people outside the square might also be purified, one of
the old men laid down a quantity of green tobacco at a corner of the
square; this was carried off by an old woman and distributed to the
people without, who chewed and swallowed it "in order to afflict
their souls." During this general fast, the women, children, and men
of weak constitution were allowed to eat after mid-day, but not
before. On the morning when the fast ended, the women brought a
quantity of the old year's food to the outside of the sacred square.
These provisions were then fetched in and set before the famished
multitude, but all traces of them had to be removed before noon.
When the sun was declining from the meridian, all the people were
commanded by the voice of a crier to stay within doors, to do no bad
act, and to be sure to extinguish and throw away every spark of the
old fire. Universal silence now reigned. Then the high priest made
the new fire by the friction of two pieces of wood, and placed it on
the altar under the green arbour. This new fire was believed to
atone for all past crimes except murder. Next a basket of new fruits
was brought; the high priest took out a little of each sort of
fruit, rubbed it with bear's oil, and offered it, together with some
flesh, "to the bountiful holy spirit of fire, as a first-fruit
offering, and an annual oblation for sin." He also consecrated the
sacred emetics (the button-snake root and the cassina or
black-drink) by pouring a little of them into the fire. The persons
who had remained outside now approached, without entering, the
sacred square; and the chief priest thereupon made a speech,
exhorting the people to observe their old rites and customs,
announcing that the new divine fire had purged away the sins of the
past year, and earnestly warning the women that, if any of them had
not extinguished the old fire, or had contracted any impurity, they
must forthwith depart, "lest the divine fire should spoil both them
and the people." Some of the new fire was then set down outside the
holy square; the women carried it home joyfully, and laid it on
their unpolluted hearths. When several towns had united to celebrate
the festival, the new fire might thus be carried for several miles.
The new fruits were then dressed on the new fires and eaten with
bear's oil, which was deemed indispensable. At one point of the
festival the men rubbed the new corn between their hands, then on
their faces and breasts. During the festival which followed, the
warriors, dressed in their wild martial array, their heads covered
with white down and carrying white feathers in their hands, danced
round the sacred arbour, under which burned the new fire. The
ceremonies lasted eight days, during which the strictest continence
was practised. Towards the conclusion of the festival the warriors
fought a mock battle; then the men and women together, in three
circles, danced round the sacred fire. Lastly, all the people
smeared themselves with white clay and bathed in running water. They
came out of the water believing that no evil could now befall them
for what they had done amiss in the past. So they departed in joy
and peace.

To this day, also, the remnant of the Seminole Indians of Florida, a
people of the same stock as the Creeks, hold an annual purification
and festival called the Green Corn Dance, at which the new corn is
eaten. On the evening of the first day of the festival they quaff a
nauseous "Black Drink," as it is called, which acts both as an
emetic and a purgative; they believe that he who does not drink of
this liquor cannot safely eat the new green corn, and besides that
he will be sick at some time in the year. While the liquor is being
drunk, the dancing begins, and the medicine-men join in it. Next day
they eat of the green corn; the following day they fast, probably
from fear of polluting the sacred food in their stomachs by contact
with common food; but the third day they hold a great feast.

Even tribes which do not till the ground sometimes observe analogous
ceremonies when they gather the first wild fruits or dig the first
roots of the season. Thus among the Salish and Tinneh Indians of
North-West America, "before the young people eat the first berries
or roots of the season, they always addressed the fruit or plant,
and begged for its favour and aid. In some tribes regular
First-fruit ceremonies were annually held at the time of picking the
wild fruit or gathering the roots, and also among the salmon-eating
tribes when the run of the 'sockeye' salmon began. These ceremonies
were not so much thanksgivings, as performances to ensure a
plentiful crop or supply of the particular object desired, for if
they were not properly and reverently carried out there was danger
of giving offence to the 'spirits' of the objects, and being
deprived of them." For example, these Indians are fond of the young
shoots or suckers of the wild raspberry, and they observe a solemn
ceremony at eating the first of them in season. The shoots are
cooked in a new pot: the people assemble and stand in a great circle
with closed eyes, while the presiding chief or medicine-man invokes
the spirit of the plant, begging that it will be propitious to them
and grant them a good supply of suckers. After this part of the
ceremony is over the cooked suckers are handed to the presiding
officer in a newly carved dish, and a small portion is given to each
person present, who reverently and decorously eats it.

The Thompson Indians of British Columbia cook and eat the sunflower
root (_Balsamorrhiza sagittata,_ Nutt.), but they used to regard it
as a mysterious being, and observed a number of taboos in connexion
with it; for example, women who were engaged in digging or cooking
the root must practice continence, and no man might come near the
oven where the women were baking the root. When young people ate the
first berries, roots, or other products of the season, they
addressed a prayer to the Sunflower-Root as follows: "I inform thee
that I intend to eat thee. Mayest thou always help me to ascend, so
that I may always be able to reach the tops of mountains, and may I
never be clumsy! I ask this from thee, Sunflower-Root. Thou art the
greatest of all in mystery." To omit this prayer would make the
eater lazy and cause him to sleep long in the morning.

These customs of the Thompson and other Indian tribes of North-West
America are instructive, because they clearly indicate the motive,
or at least one of the motives, which underlies the ceremonies
observed at eating the first fruits of the season. That motive in
the case of these Indians is simply a belief that the plant itself
is animated by a conscious and more or less powerful spirit, who
must be propitiated before the people can safely partake of the
fruits or roots which are supposed to be part of his body. Now if
this is true of wild fruits and roots, we may infer with some
probability that it is also true of cultivated fruits and roots,
such as yams, and in particular that it holds good of the cereals,
such as wheat, barley, oats, rice, and maize. In all cases it seems
reasonable to infer that the scruples which savages manifest at
eating the first fruits of any crop, and the ceremonies which they
observe before they overcome their scruples, are due at least in
large measure to a notion that the plant or tree is animated by a
spirit or even a deity, whose leave must be obtained, or whose
favour must be sought, before it is possible to partake with safety
of the new crop. This indeed is plainly affirmed of the Aino: they
call the millet "the divine cereal," "the cereal deity," and they
pray to and worship him before they will eat of the cakes made from
the new millet. And even where the indwelling divinity of the first
fruits is not expressly affirmed, it appears to be implied both by
the solemn preparations made for eating them and by the danger
supposed to be incurred by persons who venture to partake of them
without observing the prescribed ritual. In all such cases,
accordingly, we may not improperly describe the eating of the new
fruits as a sacrament or communion with a deity, or at all events
with a powerful spirit.

Among the usages which point to this conclusion are the custom of
employing either new or specially reserved vessels to hold the new
fruits, and the practice of purifying the persons of the
communicants before it is lawful to engage in the solemn act of
communion with the divinity. Of all the modes of purification
adopted on these occasions none perhaps brings out the sacramental
virtue of the rite so clearly as the Creek and Seminole practice of
taking a purgative before swallowing the new corn. The intention is
thereby to prevent the sacred food from being polluted by contact
with common food in the stomach of the eater. For the same reason
Catholics partake of the Eucharist fasting; and among the pastoral
Masai of Eastern Africa the young warriors, who live on meat and
milk exclusively, are obliged to eat nothing but milk for so many
days and then nothing but meat for so many more, and before they
pass from the one food to the other they must make sure that none of
the old food remains in their stomachs; this they do by swallowing a
very powerful purgative and emetic.

In some of the festivals which we have examined, the sacrament of
first-fruits is combined with a sacrifice or presentation of them to
gods or spirits, and in course of time the sacrifice of first-fruits
tends to throw the sacrament into the shade, if not to supersede it.
The mere fact of offering the first-fruits to the gods or spirits
comes now to be thought a sufficient preparation for eating the new
corn; the higher powers having received their share, man is free to
enjoy the rest. This mode of viewing the new fruits implies that
they are regarded no longer as themselves instinct with divine life,
but merely as a gift bestowed by the gods upon man, who is bound to
express his gratitude and homage to his divine benefactors by
returning to them a portion of their bounty.



2. Eating the God among the Aztecs

THE CUSTOM of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god was
practised by the Aztecs before the discovery and conquest of Mexico
by the Spaniards. Twice a year, in May and December, an image of the
great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli or Vitzilipuztli was made of
dough, then broken in pieces, and solemnly eaten by his worshippers.
The May ceremony is thus described by the historian Acosta: "The
Mexicans in the month of May made their principal feast to their god
Vitzilipuztli, and two days before this feast, the virgins whereof I
have spoken (the which were shut up and secluded in the same temple
and were as it were religious women) did mingle a quantity of the
seed of beets with roasted maize, and then they did mould it with
honey, making an idol of that paste in bigness like to that of wood,
putting instead of eyes grains of green glass, of blue or white; and
for teeth grains of maize set forth with all the ornament and
furniture that I have said. This being finished, all the noblemen
came and brought it an exquisite and rich garment, like unto that of
the idol, wherewith they did attire it. Being thus clad and deckt,
they did set it in an azured chair and in a litter to carry it on
their shoulders. The morning of this feast being come, an hour
before day all the maidens came forth attired in white, with new
ornaments, the which that day were called the Sisters of their god
Vitzilipuztli, they came crowned with garlands of maize roasted and
parched, being like unto azahar or the flower of orange; and about
their necks they had great chains of the same, which went
bauldrick-wise under their left arm. Their cheeks were dyed with
vermilion, their arms from the elbow to the wrist were covered with
red parrots' feathers." Young men, dressed in red robes and crowned
like the virgins with maize, then carried the idol in its litter to
the foot of the great pyramid-shaped temple, up the steep and narrow
steps of which it was drawn to the music of flutes, trumpets,
cornets, and drums. "While they mounted up the idol all the people
stood in the court with much reverence and fear. Being mounted to
the top, and that they had placed it in a little lodge of roses
which they held ready, presently came the young men, which strewed
many flowers of sundry kinds, wherewith they filled the temple both
within and without. This done, all the virgins came out of their
convent, bringing pieces of paste compounded of beets and roasted
maize, which was of the same paste whereof their idol was made and
compounded, and they were of the fashion of great bones. They
delivered them to the young men, who carried them up and laid them
at the idol's feet, wherewith they filled the whole place that it
could receive no more. They called these morsels of paste the flesh
and bones of Vitzilipuztli. Having laid abroad these bones,
presently came all the ancients of the temple, priests, Levites, and
all the rest of the ministers, according to their dignities and
antiquities (for herein there was a strict order amongst them) one
after another, with their veils of diverse colours and works, every
one according to his dignity and office, having garlands upon their
heads and chains of flowers about their necks; after them came their
gods and goddesses whom they worshipped, of diverse figures, attired
in the same livery; then putting themselves in order about those
morsels and pieces of paste, they used certain ceremonies with
singing and dancing. By means whereof they were blessed and
consecrated for the flesh and bones of this idol. This ceremony and
blessing (whereby they were taken for the flesh and bones of the
idol) being ended, they honoured those pieces in the same sort as
their god. . . . All the city came to this goodly spectacle, and
there was a commandment very strictly observed throughout all the
land, that the day of the feast of the idol of Vitzilipuztli they
should eat no other meat but this paste, with honey, whereof the
idol was made. And this should be eaten at the point of day, and
they should drink no water nor any other thing till after noon: they
held it for an ill sign, yea, for sacrilege to do the contrary: but
after the ceremonies ended, it was lawful for them to eat anything.
During the time of this ceremony they hid the water from their
little children, admonishing all such as had the use of reason not
to drink any water; which, if they did, the anger of God would come
upon them, and they should die, which they did observe very
carefully and strictly. The ceremonies, dancing, and sacrifice
ended, the went to unclothe themselves, and the priests and
superiors of the temple took the idol of paste, which they spoiled
of all the ornaments it had, and made many pieces, as well of the
idol itself as of the truncheons which they consecrated, and then
they gave them to the people in manner of a communion, beginning
with the greater, and continuing unto the rest, both men, women, and
little children, who received it with such tears, fear, and
reverence as it was an admirable thing, saying that they did eat the
flesh and bones of God, where-with they were grieved. Such as had
any sick folks demanded thereof for them, and carried it with great
reverence and veneration."

From this interesting passage we learn that the ancient Mexicans,
even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, were fully
acquainted with the doctrine of transubstantiation and acted upon it
in the solemn rites of their religion. They believed that by
consecrating bread their priests could turn it into the very body of
their god, so that all who thereupon partook of the consecrated
bread entered into a mystic communion with the deity by receiving a
portion of his divine substance into themselves. The doctrine of
transubstantiation, or the magical conversion of bread into flesh,
was also familiar to the Aryans of ancient India long before the
spread and even the rise of Christianity. The Brahmans taught that
the rice-cakes offered in sacrifice were substitutes for human
beings, and that they were actually converted into the real bodies
of men by the manipulation of the priest. We read that "when it (the
rice-cake) still consists of rice-meal, it is the hair. When he
pours water on it, it becomes skin. When he mixes it, it becomes
flesh: for then it becomes consistent; and consistent also is the
flesh. When it is baked, it becomes bone: for then it becomes
somewhat hard; and hard is the bone. And when he is about to take it
off (the fire) and sprinkles it with butter, he changes it into
marrow. This is the completeness which they call the fivefold animal
sacrifice."

Now, too, we can perfectly understand why on the day of their solemn
communion with the deity the Mexicans refused to eat any other food
than the consecrated bread which they revered as the very flesh and
bones of their God, and why up till noon they might drink nothing at
all, not even water. They feared no doubt to defile the portion of
God in their stomachs by contact with common things. A similar pious
fear led the Creek and Seminole Indians, as we saw, to adopt the
more thoroughgoing expedient of rinsing out their bodies by a strong
purgative before they dared to partake of the sacrament of
first-fruits.

At the festival of the winter solstice in December the Aztecs killed
their god Huitzilopochtli in effigy first and ate him afterwards. As
a preparation for this solemn ceremony an image of the deity in the
likeness of a man was fashioned out of seeds of various sorts, which
were kneaded into a dough with the blood of children. The bones of
the god were represented by pieces of acacia wood. This image was
placed on the chief altar of the temple, and on the day of the
festival the king offered incense to it. Early next day it was taken
down and set on its feet in a great hall. Then a priest, who bore
the name and acted the part of the god Quetzalcoatl, took a
flint-tipped dart and hurled it into the breast of the dough-image,
piercing it through and through. This was called "killing the god
Huitzilopochtli so that his body might be eaten." One of the priests
cut out the heart of the image and gave it to the king to eat. The
rest of the image was divided into minute pieces, of which every man
great and small, down to the male children in the cradle, receive
one to eat. But no woman might taste a morsel. The ceremony was
called _teoqualo,_ that is, "god is eaten."

At another festival the Mexicans made little images like men, which
stood for the cloud-capped mountains. These images were moulded of a
paste of various seeds and were dressed in paper ornaments. Some
people fashioned five, others ten, others as many as fifteen of
them. Having been made, they were placed in the oratory of each
house and worshipped. Four times in the course of the night
offerings of food were brought to them in tiny vessels; and people
sang and played the flute before them through all the hours of
darkness. At break of day the priests stabbed the images with a
weaver's instrument, cut off their heads, and tore out their hearts,
which they presented to the master of the house on a green saucer.
The bodies of the images were then eaten by all the family,
especially by the servants, "in order that by eating them they might
be preserved from certain distempers, to which those persons who
were negligent of worship to those deities conceived themselves to
be subject."



3. Many Manii at Aricia

WE are now able to suggest an explanation of the proverb "There are
many Manii at Aricia." Certain loaves made in the shape of men were
called by the Romans _maniae,_ and it appears that this kind of loaf
was especially made at Aricia. Now, Mania, the name of one of these
loaves, was also the name of the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, to
whom woollen effigies of men and women were dedicated at the
festival of the Compitalia. These effigies were hung at the doors of
all the houses in Rome; one effigy was hung up for every free person
in the house, and one effigy, of a different kind, for every slave.
The reason was that on this day the ghosts of the dead were believed
to be going about, and it was hoped that, either out of good nature
or through simple inadvertence, they would carry off the effigies at
the door instead of the living people in the house. According to
tradition, these woollen figures were substitutes for a former
custom of sacrificing human beings. Upon data so fragmentary and
uncertain, it is impossible to build with confidence; but it seems
worth suggesting that the loaves in human form, which appear to have
been baked at Aricia, were sacramental bread, and that in the old
days, when the divine King of the Wood was annually slain, loaves
were made in his image, like the paste figures of the gods in
Mexico, and were eaten sacramentally by his worshippers. The Mexican
sacraments in honour of Huitzilopochtli were also accompanied by the
sacrifice of human victims. The tradition that the founder of the
sacred grove at Aricia was a man named Manius, from whom many Manii
were descended, would thus be an etymological myth invented to
explain the name _maniae_ as applied to these sacramental loaves. A
dim recollection of the original connexion of the loaves with human
sacrifices may perhaps be traced in the story that the effigies
dedicated to Mania at the Compitalia were substitutes for human
victims. The story itself, however, is probably devoid of
foundation, since the practice of putting up dummies to divert the
attention of ghosts or demons from living people is not uncommon.

For example, the Tibetans stand in fear of innumerable earth-demons,
all of whom are under the authority of Old Mother Khön-ma. This
goddess, who may be compared to the Roman Mania, the Mother or
Grandmother of Ghosts, is dressed in golden-yellow robes, holds a
golden noose in her hand, and rides on a ram. In order to bar the
dwelling-house against the foul fiends, of whom Old Mother Khön-ma
is mistress, an elaborate structure somewhat resembling a chandelier
is fixed above the door on the outside of the house. It contains a
ram's skull, a variety of precious objects such as gold-leaf,
silver, and turquoise, also some dry food, such as rice, wheat, and
pulse, and finally images or pictures of a man, a woman, and a
house. "The object of these figures of a man, wife, and house is to
deceive the demons should they still come in spite of this offering,
and to mislead them into the belief that the foregoing pictures are
the inmates of the house, so that they may wreak their wrath on
these bits of wood and to save the real human occupants." When all
is ready, a priest prays to Old Mother Khön-ma that she would be
pleased to accept these dainty offerings and to close the open doors
of the earth, in order that the demons may not come forth to infest
and injure the household.

Again, effigies are often employed as a means of preventing or
curing sickness; the demons of disease either mistake the effigies
for living people or are persuaded or compelled to enter them,
leaving the real men and women well and whole. Thus the Alfoors of
Minahassa, in Celebes, will sometimes transport a sick man to
another house, while they leave on his bed a dummy made up of a
pillow and clothes. This dummy the demon is supposed to mistake for
the sick man, who consequently recovers. Cure or prevention of this
sort seems to find especial favour with the natives of Borneo. Thus,
when an epidemic is raging among them, the Dyaks of the Katoengouw
River set up wooden images at their doors in the hope that the
demons of the plague may be deluded into carrying off the effigies
instead of the people. Among the Oloh Ngadju of Borneo, when a sick
man is supposed to be suffering from the assaults of a ghost,
puppets of dough or rice-meal are made and thrown under the house as
substitutes for the patient, who thus rids himself of the ghost. In
certain of the western districts of Borneo if a man is taken
suddenly and violently sick, the physician, who in this part of the
world is generally an old woman, fashions a wooden image and brings
it seven times into contact with the sufferer's head, while she
says: "This image serves to take the place of the sick man;
sickness, pass over into the image." Then, with some rice, salt, and
tobacco in a little basket, the substitute is carried to the spot
where the evil spirit is supposed to have entered into the man.
There it is set upright on the ground, after the physician has
invoked the spirit as follows: "O devil, here is an image which
stands instead of the sick man. Release the soul of the sick man and
plague the image, for it is indeed prettier and better than he."
Batak magicians can conjure the demon of disease out of the
patient's body into an image made out of a banana-tree with a human
face and wrapt up in magic herbs; the image is then hurriedly
removed and thrown away or buried beyond the boundaries of the
village. Sometimes the image, dressed as a man or a woman according
to the sex of the patient, is deposited at a cross-road or other
thoroughfare, in the hope that some passer-by, seeing it, may start
and cry out, "Ah! So-and-So is dead"; for such an exclamation is
supposed to delude the demon of disease into a belief that he has
accomplished his fell purpose, so he takes himself off and leaves
the sufferer to get well. The Mai Darat, a Sakai tribe of the Malay
Peninsula, attribute all kinds of diseases to the agency of spirits
which they call _nyani;_ fortunately, however, the magician can
induce these maleficent beings to come out of the sick person and
take up their abode in rude figures of grass, which are hung up
outside the houses in little bell-shaped shrines decorated with
peeled sticks. During an epidemic of small-pox the Ewe negroes will
sometimes clear a space outside of the town, where they erect a
number of low mounds and cover them with as many little clay figures
as there are people in the place. Pots of food and water are also
set out for the refreshment of the spirit of small-pox who, it is
hoped, will take the clay figures and spare the living folk; and to
make assurance doubly sure the road into the town is barricaded
against him.

With these examples before us we may surmise that the woollen
effigies, which at the festival of the Compitalia might be seen
hanging at the doors of all the houses in ancient Rome, were not
substitutes for human victims who had formerly been sacrificed at
this season, but rather vicarious offerings presented to the Mother
or Grandmother of Ghosts, in the hope that on her rounds through the
city she would accept or mistake the effigies for the inmates of the
house and so spare the living for another year. It is possible that
the puppets made of rushes, which in the month of May the pontiffs
and Vestal Virgins annually threw into the Tiber from the old
Sublician bridge at Rome, had originally the same significance; that
is, they may have been designed to purge the city from demoniac
influence by diverting the attention of the demons from human beings
to the puppets and then toppling the whole uncanny crew, neck and
crop, into the river, which would soon sweep them far out to sea. In
precisely the same way the natives of Old Calabar used periodically
to rid their town of the devils which infested it by luring the
unwary demons into a number of lamentable scarecrows, which they
afterwards flung into the river. This interpretation of the Roman
custom is supported to some extent by the evidence of Plutarch, who
speaks of the ceremony as "the greatest of purifications."




LI. Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet

THE PRACTICE of killing a god has now been traced amongst peoples
who have reached the agricultural stage of society. We have seen
that the spirit of the corn, or of other cultivated plants, is
commonly represented either in human or in animal form, and that in
some places a custom has prevailed of killing annually either the
human or the animal representative of the god. One reason for thus
killing the corn-spirit in the person of his representative has been
given implicitly in an earlier part of this work: we may suppose
that the intention was to guard him or her (for the corn-spirit is
often feminine) from the enfeeblement of old age by transferring the
spirit, while still hale and hearty, to the person of a youthful and
vigorous successor. Apart from the desirability of renewing his
divine energies, the death of the corn-spirit may have been deemed
inevitable under the sickles or the knives of the reapers, and his
worshippers may accordingly have felt bound to acquiesce in the sad
necessity. But, further, we have found a widespread custom of eating
the god sacramentally, either in the shape of the man or animal who
represents the god, or in the shape of bread made in human or animal
form. The reasons for thus partaking of the body of the god are,
from the primitive standpoint, simple enough. The savage commonly
believes that by eating the flesh of an animal or man he acquires
not only the physical, but even the moral and intellectual qualities
which were characteristic of that animal or man; so when the
creature is deemed divine, our simple savage naturally expects to
absorb a portion of its divinity along with its material substance.
It may be well to illustrate by instances this common faith in the
acquisition of virtues or vices of many kinds through the medium of
animal food, even when there is no pretence that the viands consist
of the body or blood of a god. The doctrine forms part of the widely
ramified system of sympathetic or homoeopathic magic.

Thus, for example, the Creeks, Cherokee, and kindred tribes of North
American Indians "believe that nature is possest of such a property
as to transfuse into men and animals the qualities, either of the
food they use, or of those objects that are presented to their
senses; he who feeds on venison is, according to their physical
system, swifter and more sagacious than the man who lives on the
flesh of the clumsy bear, or helpless dunghill fowls, the
slow-footed tame cattle, or the heavy wallowing swine. This is the
reason that several of their old men recommend, and say, that
formerly their greatest chieftains observed a constant rule in their
diet, and seldom ate of any animal of a gross quality, or heavy
motion of body, fancying it conveyed a dullness through the whole
system, and disabled them from exerting themselves with proper
vigour in their martial, civil, and religious duties." The Zaparo
Indians of Ecuador "will, unless from necessity, in most cases not
eat any heavy meats, such as tapir and peccary, but confine
themselves to birds, monkeys, deer, fish, etc., principally because
they argue that the heavier meats make them unwieldy, like the
animals who supply the flesh, impeding their agility, and unfitting
them for the chase." Similarly some of the Brazilian Indians would
eat no beast, bird, or fish that ran, flew, or swam slowly, lest by
partaking of its flesh they should lose their ability and be unable
to escape from their enemies. The Caribs abstained from the flesh of
pigs lest it should cause them to have small eyes like pigs; and
they refused to partake of tortoises from a fear that if they did so
they would become heavy and stupid like the animal. Among the Fans
of West Africa men in the prime of life never eat tortoises for a
similar reason; they imagine that if they did so, their vigour and
fleetness of foot would be gone. But old men may eat tortoises
freely, because having already lost the power of running they can
take no harm from the flesh of the slow-footed creature.

While many savages thus fear to eat the flesh of slow-footed animals
lest they should themselves become slow-footed, the Bushmen of South
Africa purposely ate the flesh of such creatures, and the reason
which they gave for doing so exhibits a curious refinement of savage
philosophy. They imagined that the game which they pursued would be
influenced sympathetically by the food in the body of the hunter, so
that if he had eaten of swift-footed animals, the quarry would be
swift-footed also and would escape him; whereas if he had eaten of
slow-footed animals, the quarry would also be slow-footed, and he
would be able to overtake and kill it. For that reason hunters of
gemsbok particularly avoided eating the flesh of the swift and agile
springbok; indeed they would not even touch it with their hands,
because they believed the springbok to be a very lively creature
which did not go to sleep at night, and they thought that if they
ate springbok, the gemsbok which they hunted would likewise not be
willing to go to sleep, even at night. How, then, could they catch
it?

The Namaquas abstain from eating the flesh of hares, because they
think it would make them faint-hearted as a hare. But they eat the
flesh of the lion, or drink the blood of the leopard or lion, to get
the courage and strength of these beasts. The Bushmen will not give
their children a jackal's heart to eat, lest it should make them
timid like the jackal; but they give them a leopard's heart to eat
to make them brave like the leopard. When a Wagogo man of East
Africa kills a lion, he eats the heart in order to become brave like
a lion; but he thinks that to eat the heart of a hen would make him
timid. When a serious disease has attacked a Zulu kraal, the
medicine-man takes the bone of a very old dog, or the bone of an old
cow, bull, or other very old animal, and administers it to the
healthy as well as to the sick people, in order that they may live
to be as old as the animal of whose bone they have partaken. So to
restore the aged Aeson to youth, the witch Medea infused into his
veins a decoction of the liver of the long-lived deer and the head
of a crow that had outlived nine generations of men.

Among the Dyaks of North-West Borneo young men and warriors may not
eat venison, because it would make them as timid as deer; but the
women and very old men are free to eat it. However, among the Kayans
of the same region, who share the same view as to the ill effect of
eating venison, men will partake of the dangerous viand provided it
is cooked in the open air, for then the timid spirit of the animal
is supposed to escape at once into the jungle and not to enter into
the eater. The Aino believe that the heart of the water-ousel is
exceedingly wise, and that in speech the bird is most eloquent.
Therefore whenever he is killed, he should be at once torn open and
his heart wrenched out and swallowed before it has time to grow cold
or suffer damage of any kind. If a man swallows it thus, he will
become very fluent and wise, and will be able to argue down all his
adversaries. In Northern India people fancy that if you eat the
eyeballs of an owl you will be able like an owl to see in the dark.

When the Kansas Indians were going to war, a feast used to be held
in the chief's hut, and the principal dish was dog's flesh, because,
said the Indians, the animal who is so brave that he will let
himself be cut in pieces in defence of his master, must needs
inspire valour. Men of the Buru and Aru Islands, East Indies, eat
the flesh of dogs in order to be bold and nimble in war. Amongst the
Papuans of the Port Moresby and Motumotu districts, New Guinea,
young lads eat strong pig, wallaby, and large fish, in order to
acquire the strength of the animal or fish. Some of the natives of
Northern Australia fancy that by eating the flesh of the kangaroo or
emu they are enabled to jump or run faster than before. The Miris of
Assam prize tiger's flesh as food for men; it gives them strength
and courage. But "it is not suited for women; it would make them too
strong-minded." In Corea the bones of tigers fetch a higher price
than those of leopards as a means of inspiring courage. A Chinaman
in Seoul bought and ate a whole tiger to make himself brave and
fierce. In Norse legend, Ingiald, son of King Aunund, was timid in
his youth, but after eating the heart of a wolf he became very bold;
Hialto gained strength and courage by eating the heart of a bear and
drinking its blood.

In Morocco lethargic patients are given ants to swallow, and to eat
lion's flesh will make a coward brave; but people abstain from
eating the hearts of fowls, lest thereby they should be rendered
timid. When a child is late in learning to speak, the Turks of
Central Asia will give it the tongues of certain birds to eat. A
North American Indian thought that brandy must be a decoction of
hearts and tongues, "because," said he, "after drinking it I fear
nothing, and I talk wonderfully." In Java there is a tiny earthworm
which now and then utters a shrill sound like that of the alarum of
a small clock. Hence when a public dancing girl has screamed herself
hoarse in the exercise of her calling, the leader of the troop makes
her eat some of these worms, in the belief that thus she will regain
her voice and will, after swallowing them, be able to scream as
shrilly as ever. The people of Darfur, in Central Africa, think that
the liver is the seat of the soul, and that a man may enlarge his
soul by eating the liver of an animal. "Whenever an animal is killed
its liver is taken out and eaten, but the people are most careful
not to touch it with their hands, as it is considered sacred; it is
cut up in small pieces and eaten raw, the bits being conveyed to the
mouth on the point of a knife, or the sharp point of a stick. Any
one who may accidentally touch the liver is strictly forbidden to
partake of it, which prohibition is regarded as a great misfortune
for him." Women are not allowed to eat liver, because they have no
soul.

Again, the flesh and blood of dead men are commonly eaten and drunk
to inspire bravery, wisdom, or other qualities for which the men
themselves were remarkable, or which are supposed to have their
special seat in the particular part eaten. Thus among the mountain
tribes of South-Eastern Africa there are ceremonies by which the
youths are formed into guilds or lodges, and among the rites of
initiation there is one which is intended to infuse courage,
intelligence, and other qualities into the novices. Whenever an
enemy who has behaved with conspicuous bravery is killed, his liver,
which is considered the seat of valour; his ears, which are supposed
to be the seat of intelligence; the skin of his forehead, which is
regarded as the seat of perseverance; his testicles, which are held
to be the seat of strength; and other members, which are viewed as
the seat of other virtues, are cut from his body and baked to
cinders. The ashes are carefully kept in the horn of a bull, and,
during the ceremonies observed at circumcision, are mixed with other
ingredients into a kind of paste, which is administered by the
tribal priest to the youths. By this means the strength, valour,
intelligence, and other virtues of the slain are believed to be
imparted to the eaters. When Basutos of the mountains have killed a
very brave foe, they immediately cut out his heart and eat it,
because this is supposed to give them his courage and strength in
battle. When Sir Charles M'Carthy was killed by the Ashantees in
1824, it is said that his heart was devoured by the chiefs of the
Ashantee army, who hoped by this means to imbibe his courage. His
flesh was dried and parcelled out among the lower officers for the
same purpose, and his bones were long kept at Coomassie as national
fetishes. The Nauras Indians of New Granada ate the hearts of
Spaniards when they had the opportunity, hoping thereby to make
themselves as dauntless as the dreaded Castilian chivalry. The Sioux
Indians used to reduce to powder the heart of a valiant enemy and
swallow the powder, hoping thus to appropriate the dead man's
valour.

But while the human heart is thus commonly eaten for the sake of
imbuing the eater with the qualities of its original owner, it is
not, as we have already seen, the only part of the body which is
consumed for this purpose. Thus warriors of the Theddora and Ngarigo
tribes of South-Eastern Australia used to eat the hands and feet of
their slain enemies, believing that in this way they acquired some
of the qualities and courage of the dead. The Kamilaroi of New South
Wales ate the liver as well as the heart of a brave man to get his
courage. In Tonquin also there is a popular superstition that the
liver of a brave man makes brave any who partake of it. With a like
intent the Chinese swallow the bile of notorious bandits who have
been executed. The Dyaks of Sarawak used to eat the palms of the
hands and the flesh of the knees of the slain in order to steady
their own hands and strengthen their own knees. The Tolalaki,
notorious head-hunters of Central Celebes, drink the blood and eat
the brains of their victims that they may become brave. The Italones
of the Philippine Islands drink the blood of their slain enemies,
and eat part of the back of their heads and of their entrails raw to
acquire their courage. For the same reason the Efugaos, another
tribe of the Philippines, suck the brains of their foes. In like
manner the Kai of German New Guinea eat the brains of the enemies
they kill in order to acquire their strength. Among the Kimbunda of
Western Africa, when a new king succeeds to the throne, a brave
prisoner of war is killed in order that the king and nobles may eat
his flesh, and so acquire his strength and courage. The notorious
Zulu chief Matuana drank the gall of thirty chiefs, whose people he
had destroyed, in the belief that it would make him strong. It is a
Zulu fancy that by eating the centre of the forehead and the eyebrow
of an enemy they acquire the power of looking steadfastly at a foe.
Before every warlike expedition the people of Minahassa in Celebes
used to take the locks of hair of a slain foe and dabble them in
boiling water to extract the courage; this infusion of bravery was
then drunk by the warriors. In New Zealand "the chief was an _atua_
[god], but there were powerful and powerless gods; each naturally
sought to make himself one of the former; the plan therefore adopted
was to incorporate the spirits of others with their own; thus, when
a warrior slew a chief, he immediately gouged out his eyes and
swallowed them, the _atua tonga,_ or divinity, being supposed to
reside in that organ; thus he not only killed the body, but also
possessed himself of the soul of his enemy, and consequently the
more chiefs he slew the greater did his divinity become."

It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake
of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By
eating the body of the god he shares in the god's attributes and
powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body;
when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so
by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of
the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the
rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a
solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard
to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating
bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity.
"When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus," says Cicero, "we use a
common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so
insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?"



LII. Killing the Divine Animal



1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard

IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that many communities which have
progressed so far as to subsist mainly by agriculture have been in
the habit of killing and eating their farinaceous deities either in
their proper form of corn, rice, and so forth, or in the borrowed
shapes of animals and men. It remains to show that hunting and
pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peoples, have been in the
habit of killing the beings whom they worship. Among the worshipful
beings or gods, if indeed they deserve to be dignified by that name,
whom hunters and shepherds adore and kill are animals pure and
simple, not animals regarded as embodiments of other supernatural
beings. Our first example is drawn from the Indians of California,
who living in a fertile country under a serene and temperate sky,
nevertheless rank near the bottom of the savage scale. The
Acagchemem tribe adored the great buzzard, and once a year they
celebrated a great festival called _Panes_ or bird-feast in its
honour. The day selected for the festival was made known to the
public on the evening before its celebration and preparations were
at once made for the erection of a special temple (_vanquech_),
which seems to have been a circular or oval enclosure of stakes with
the stuffed skin of a coyote or prairie-wolf set up on a hurdle to
represent the god Chinigchinich. When the temple was ready, the bird
was carried into it in solemn procession and laid on an altar
erected for the purpose. Then all the young women, whether married
or single, began to run to and fro, as if distracted, some in one
direction and some in another, while the elders of both sexes
remained silent spectators of the scene, and the captains, tricked
out in paint and feathers, danced round their adored bird. These
ceremonies being concluded, they seized upon the bird and carried it
to the principal temple, all the assembly uniting in the grand
display, and the captains dancing and singing at the head of the
procession. Arrived at the temple, they killed the bird without
losing a drop of its blood. The skin was removed entire and
preserved with the feathers as a relic or for the purpose of making
the festal garment or _paelt._ The carcase was buried in a hole in
the temple, and the old women gathered round the grave weeping and
moaning bitterly, while they threw various kinds of seeds or pieces
of food on it, crying out, "Why did you run away? Would you not have
been better with us? you would have made _pinole_ (a kind of gruel)
as we do, and if you had not run away, you would not have become a
_Panes,_" and so on. When this ceremony was concluded, the dancing
was resumed and kept up for three days and nights. They said that
the _Panes_ was a woman who had run off to the mountains and there
been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich. They believed
that though they sacrificed the bird annually, she came to life
again and returned to her home in the mountains. Moreover, they
thought that "as often as the bird was killed, it became multiplied;
because every year all the different Capitanes celebrated the same
feast of _Panes,_ and were firm in the opinion that the birds
sacrificed were but one and the same female."

The unity in multiplicity thus postulated by the Californians is
very noticeable and helps to explain their motive for killing the
divine bird. The notion of the life of a species as distinct from
that of an individual, easy and obvious as it seems to us, appears
to be one which the Californian savage cannot grasp. He is unable to
conceive the life of the species otherwise than as an individual
life, and therefore as exposed to the same dangers and calamities
which menace and finally destroy the life of the individual.
Apparently he imagines that a species left to itself will grow old
and die like an individual, and that therefore some step must be
taken to save from extinction the particular species which he
regards as divine. The only means he can think of to avert the
catastrophe is to kill a member of the species in whose veins the
tide of life is still running strong and has not yet stagnated among
the fens of old age. The life thus diverted from one channel will
flow, he fancies, more freshly and freely in a new one; in other
words, the slain animal will revive and enter on a new term of life
with all the spring and energy of youth. To us this reasoning is
transparently absurd, but so too is the custom. A similar confusion,
it may be noted, between the individual life and the life of the
species was made by the Samoans. Each family had for its god a
particular species of animal; yet the death of one of these animals,
for example an owl, was not the death of the god, "he was supposed
to be yet alive, and incarnate in all the owls in existence."



2. Killing the Sacred Ram

THE RUDE Californian rite which we have just considered has a close
parallel in the religion of ancient Egypt. The Thebans and all other
Egyptians who worshipped the Theban god Ammon held rams to be
sacred, and would not sacrifice them. But once a year at the
festival of Ammon they killed a ram, skinned it, and clothed the
image of the god in the skin. Then they mourned over the ram and
buried it in a sacred tomb. The custom was explained by a story that
Zeus had once exhibited himself to Hercules clad in the fleece and
wearing the head of a ram. Of course the ram in this case was simply
the beast-god of Thebes, as the wolf was the beast-god of Lycopolis,
and the goat was the beast-god of Mendes. In other words, the ram
was Ammon himself. On the monuments, it is true, Ammon appears in
semi-human form with the body of a man and the head of a ram. But
this only shows that he was in the usual chrysalis state through
which beast-gods regularly pass before they emerge as full-blown
anthropomorphic gods. The ram, therefore, was killed, not as a
sacrifice to Ammon, but as the god himself, whose identity with the
beast is plainly shown by the custom of clothing his image in the
skin of the slain ram. The reason for thus killing the ram-god
annually may have been that which I have assigned for the general
custom of killing a god and for the special Californian custom of
killing the divine buzzard. As applied to Egypt, this explanation is
supported by the analogy of the bull-god Apis, who was not suffered
to outlive a certain term of years. The intention of thus putting a
limit to the life of the human god was, as I have argued, to secure
him from the weakness and frailty of age. The same reasoning would
explain the custom--probably an older one--of putting the beast-god
to death annually, as was done with the ram of Thebes.

One point in the Theban ritual--the application of the skin to the
image of the god--deserves particular attention. If the god was at
first the living ram, his representation by an image must have
originated later. But how did it originate? One answer to this
question is perhaps furnished by the practice of preserving the skin
of the animal which is slain as divine. The Californians, as we have
seen, preserved the skin of the buzzard; and the skin of the goat,
which is killed on the harvest-field as a representative of the
corn-spirit, is kept for various superstitious purposes. The skin in
fact was kept as a token or memorial of the god, or rather as
containing in it a part of the divine life, and it had only to be
stuffed or stretched upon a frame to become a regular image of him.
At first an image of this kind would be renewed annually, the new
image being provided by the skin of the slain animal. But from
annual images to permanent images the transition is easy. We have
seen that the older custom of cutting a new May-tree every year was
superseded by the practice of maintaining a permanent May-pole,
which was, however, annually decked with fresh leaves and flowers,
and even surmounted each year by a fresh young tree. Similarly when
the stuffed skin, as a representative of the god, was replaced by a
permanent image of him in wood, stone, or metal, the permanent image
was annually clad in the fresh skin of the slain animal. When this
stage had been reached, the custom of killing the ram came naturally
to be interpreted as a sacrifice offered to the image, and was
explained by a story like that of Ammon and Hercules.



3. Killing the Sacred Serpent

WEST AFRICA appears to furnish another example of the annual killing
of a sacred animal and the preservation of its skin. The negroes of
Issapoo, in the island of Fernando Po, regard the cobra-capella as
their guardian deity, who can do them good or ill, bestow riches or
inflict disease and death. The skin of one of these reptiles is hung
tail downwards from a branch of the highest tree in the public
square, and the placing of it on the tree is an annual ceremony. As
soon as the ceremony is over, all children born within the past year
are carried out and their hands made to touch the tail of the
serpent's skin. The latter custom is clearly a way of placing the
infants under the protection of the tribal god. Similarly in
Senegambia a python is expected to visit every child of the Python
clan within eight days after birth; and the Psylli, a Snake clan of
ancient Africa, used to expose their infants to snakes in the belief
that the snakes would not harm true-born children of the clan.



4. Killing the Sacred Turtles

IN THE CALIFORNIAN, Egyptian, and Fernando Po customs the worship of
the animal seems to have no relation to agriculture, and may
therefore be presumed to date from the hunting or pastoral stage of
society. The same may be said of the following custom, though the
Zuni Indians of New Mexico, who practise it, are now settled in
walled villages or towns of a peculiar type, and practise
agriculture and the arts of pottery and weaving. But the Zuni custom
is marked by certain features which appear to place it in a somewhat
different class from the preceding cases. It may be well therefore
to describe it at full length in the words of an eye-witness.

"With midsummer the heat became intense. My brother [_i.e._ adopted
Indian brother] and I sat, day after day, in the cool under-rooms of
our house,--the latter [_sic_] busy with his quaint forge and crude
appliances, working Mexican coins over into bangles, girdles,
ear-rings, buttons, and what not, for savage ornament. Though his
tools were wonderfully rude, the work he turned out by dint of
combined patience and ingenuity was remarkably beautiful. One day as
I sat watching him, a procession of fifty men went hastily down the
hill, and off westward over the plain. They were solemnly led by a
painted and shell-bedecked priest, and followed by the torch-bearing
Shu-lu-wit-si or God of Fire. After they had vanished, I asked old
brother what it all meant.

"'They are going,' said he, 'to the city of Ka-ka and the home of
our others.'

"Four days after, towards sunset, costumed and masked in the
beautiful paraphernalia of the Ka-k'ok-shi, or 'Good Dance,' they
returned in file up the same pathway, each bearing in his arms a
basket filled with living, squirming turtles, which he regarded and
carried as tenderly as a mother would her infant. Some of the
wretched reptiles were carefully wrapped in soft blankets, their
heads and forefeet protruding,--and, mounted on the backs of the
plume-bedecked pilgrims, made ludicrous but solemn caricatures of
little children in the same position. While I was at supper upstairs
that evening, the governor's brother-in-law came in. He was welcomed
by the family as if a messenger from heaven. He bore in his
tremulous fingers one of the much abused and rebellious turtles.
Paint still adhered to his hands and bare feet, which led me to
infer that he had formed one of the sacred embassy.

"'So you went to Ka-thlu-el-lon, did you?' I asked.

"'E'e,' replied the weary man, in a voice husky with long chanting,
as he sank, almost exhausted, on a roll of skins which had been
placed for him, and tenderly laid the turtle on the floor. No sooner
did the creature find itself at liberty than it made off as fast as
its lame legs would take it. Of one accord, the family forsook dish,
spoon, and drinking-cup, and grabbing from a sacred meal-bowl whole
handfuls of the contents, hurriedly followed the turtle about the
room, into dark corners, around water-jars, behind the
grinding-troughs, and out into the middle of the floor again,
praying and scattering meal on its back as they went. At last,
strange to say, it approached the foot-sore man who had brought it.

"'Ha!' he exclaimed with emotion; 'see it comes to me again; ah,
what great favours the fathers of all grant me this day,' and,
passing his hand gently over the sprawling animal, he inhaled from
his palm deeply and long, at the same time invoking the favour of
the gods. Then he leaned his chin upon his hand, and with large,
wistful eyes regarded his ugly captive as it sprawled about,
blinking its meal-bedimmed eyes, and clawing the smooth floor in
memory of its native element. At this juncture I ventured a
question:

"'Why do you not let him go, or give him some water?'

"Slowly the man turned his eyes toward me, an odd mixture of pain,
indignation, and pity on his face, while the worshipful family
stared at me with holy horror.

"'Poor younger brother!' he said at last, 'know you not how precious
it is? It die? It will _not_ die; I tell you, it cannot die.'

"'But it will die if you don't feed it and give it water.'

"'I tell you it _cannot_ die; it will only change houses to-morrow,
and go back to the home of its brothers. Ah, well! How should _you_
know?' he mused. Turning to the blinded turtle again: 'Ah! my poor
dear lost child or parent, my sister or brother to have been! Who
knows which? Maybe my own great-grandfather or mother!' And with
this he fell to weeping most pathetically, and, tremulous with sobs,
which were echoed by the women and children, he buried his face in
his hands. Filled with sympathy for his grief, however mistaken, I
raised the turtle to my lips and kissed its cold shell; then
depositing it on the floor, hastily left the grief-stricken family
to their sorrows. Next day, with prayers and tender beseechings,
plumes, and offerings, the poor turtle was killed, and its flesh and
bones were removed and deposited in the little river, that it might
'return once more to eternal life among its comrades in the dark
waters of the lake of the dead.' The shell, carefully scraped and
dried, was made into a dance-rattle, and, covered by a piece of
buckskin, it still hangs from the smoke-stained rafters of my
brother's house. Once a Navajo tried to buy it for a ladle; loaded
with indignant reproaches, he was turned cut of the house. Were any
one to venture the suggestion that the turtle no longer lived, his
remark would cause a flood of tears, and he would be reminded that
it had only 'changed houses and gone to live for ever in the home of
"our lost others."'"

In this custom we find expressed in the clearest way a belief in the
transmigration of human souls into the bodies of turtles. The theory
of transmigration is held by the Moqui Indians, who belong to the
same race as the Zunis. The Moquis are divided into totem clans--the
Bear clan, Deer clan, Wolf clan, Hare clan, and so on; they believe
that the ancestors of the clans were bears, deer, wolves, hares, and
so forth; and that at death the members of each clan become bears,
deer, and so on according to the particular clan to which they
belonged. The Zuni are also divided into clans, the totems of which
agree closely with those of the Moquis, and one of their totems is
the turtle. Thus their belief in transmigration into the turtle is
probably one of the regular articles of their totem faith. What then
is the meaning of killing a turtle in which the soul of a kinsman is
believed to be present? Apparently the object is to keep up a
communication with the other world in which the souls of the
departed are believed to be assembled in the form of turtles. It is
a common belief that the spirits of the dead return occasionally to
their old homes; and accordingly the unseen visitors are welcomed
and feasted by the living, and then sent upon their way. In the Zuni
ceremony the dead are fetched home in the form of turtles, and the
killing of the turtles is the way of sending back the souls to the
spirit-land. Thus the general explanation given above of the custom
of killing a god seems inapplicable to the Zuni custom, the true
meaning of which is somewhat obscure. Nor is the obscurity which
hangs over the subject entirely dissipated by a later and fuller
account which we possess of the ceremony. From it we learn that the
ceremony forms part of the elaborate ritual which these Indians
observe at the midsummer solstice for the purpose of ensuring an
abundant supply of rain for the crops. Envoys are despatched to
bring "their otherselves, the tortoises," from the sacred lake
Kothluwalawa, to which the souls of the dead are believed to repair.
When the creatures have thus been solemnly brought to Zuni, they are
placed in a bowl of water and dances are performed beside them by
men in costume, who personate gods and goddesses. "After the
ceremonial the tortoises are taken home by those who caught them and
are hung by their necks to the rafters till morning, when they are
thrown into pots of boiling water. The eggs are considered a great
delicacy. The meat is seldom touched except as a medicine, which is
curative for cutaneous diseases. Part of the meat is deposited in
the river with _kóhakwa_ (white shell beads) and turquoise beads as
offerings to Council of the Gods." This account at all events
confirms the inference that the tortoises are supposed to be
reincarnations of the human dead, for they are called the
"otherselves" of the Zuni; indeed, what else should they be than the
souls of the dead in the bodies of tortoises seeing that they come
from the haunted lake? As the principal object of the prayers
uttered and of the dances performed at these midsummer ceremonies
appears to be to procure rain for the crops, it may be that the
intention of bringing the tortoises to Zuni and dancing before them
is to intercede with the ancestral spirit, incarnate in the animals,
that they may be pleased to exert their power over the waters of
heaven for the benefit of their living descendants.



5. Killing the Sacred Bear

DOUBT also hangs at first sight over the meaning of the
bear-sacrifice offered by the Aino or Ainu, a primitive people who
are found in the Japanese island of Yezo or Yesso, as well as in
Saghalien and the southern of the Kurile Islands. It is not quite
easy to define the attitude of the Aino towards the bear. On the one
hand they give it the name of _kamui_ or "god"; but as they apply
the same word to strangers, it may mean no more than a being
supposed to be endowed with superhuman, or at all events
extraordinary, powers. Again, it is said that "the bear is their
chief divinity"; "in the religion of the Aino the bear plays a chief
part"; "amongst the animals it is especially the bear which receives
an idolatrous veneration"; "they worship it after their fashion";
"there is no doubt that this wild beast inspires more of the feeling
which prompts worship than the inanimate forces of nature, and the
Aino may be distinguished as bear-worshippers." Yet, on the other
hand, they kill the bear whenever they can; "in bygone years the
Ainu considered bear-hunting the most manly and useful way in which
a person could possibly spend his time"; "the men spend the autumn,
winter, and spring in hunting deer and bears. Part of their tribute
or taxes is paid in skins, and they subsist on the dried meat";
bear's flesh is indeed one of their staple foods; they eat it both
fresh and salted; and the skins of bears furnish them with clothing.
In fact, the worship of which writers on this subject speak appears
to be paid chiefly to the dead animal. Thus, although they kill a
bear whenever they can, "in the process of dissecting the carcass
they endeavor to conciliate the deity, whose representative they
have slain, by making elaborate obeisances and deprecatory
salutations"; "when a bear has been killed the Ainu sit down and
admire it, make their salaams to it, worship it, and offer presents
of _inao_"; "when a bear is trapped or wounded by an arrow, the
hunters go through an apologetic or propitiatory ceremony." The
skulls of slain bears receive a place of honour in their huts, or
are set up on sacred posts outside the huts, and are treated with
much respect: libations of millet beer, and of _sake,_ an
intoxicating liquor, are offered to them; and they are addressed as
"divine preservers" or "precious divinities." The skulls of foxes
are also fastened to the sacred posts outside the huts; they are
regarded as charms against evil spirits, and are consulted as
oracles. Yet it is expressly said, "The live fox is revered just as
little as the bear; rather they avoid it as much as possible,
considering it a wily animal." The bear can hardly, therefore, be
described as a sacred animal of the Aino, nor yet as a totem; for
they do not call themselves bears, and they kill and eat the animal
freely. However, they have a legend of a woman who had a son by a
bear; and many of them who dwell in the mountains pride themselves
on being descended from a bear. Such people are called "Descendants
of the bear" (_Kimun Kamui sanikiri_), and in the pride of their
heart they will say, "As for me, I am a child of the god of the
mountains; I am descended from the divine one who rules in the
mountains," meaning by "the god of the mountains" no other than the
bear. It is therefore possible that, as our principal authority, the
Rev. J. Batchelor, believes, the bear may have been the totem of an
Aino clan; but even if that were so it would not explain the respect
shown for the animal by the whole Aino people.

But it is the bear-festival of the Aino which concerns us here.
Towards the end of winter a bear cub is caught and brought into the
village. If it is very small, it is suckled by an Aino woman, but
should there be no woman able to suckle it, the little animal is fed
from the hand or the mouth. During the day it plays about in the hut
with the children and is treated with great affection. But when the
cub grows big enough to pain people by hugging or scratching them,
he is shut up in a strong wooden cage, where he stays generally for
two or three years, fed on fish and millet porridge, till it is time
for him to be killed and eaten. But "it is a peculiarly striking
fact that the young bear is not kept merely to furnish a good meal;
rather he is regarded and honoured as a fetish, or even as a sort of
higher being." In Yezo the festival is generally celebrated in
September or October. Before it takes place the Aino apologise to
their gods, alleging that they have treated the bear kindly as long
as they could, now they can feed him no longer, and are obliged to
kill him. A man who gives a bear-feast invites his relations and
friends; in a small village nearly the whole community takes part in
the feast; indeed, guests from distant villages are invited and
generally come, allured by the prospect of getting drunk for
nothing. The form of invitation runs somewhat as follows: "I, so and
so, am about to sacrifice the dear little divine thing who resides
among the mountains. My friends and masters, come ye to the feast;
we will then unite in the great pleasure of sending the god away.
Come." When all the people are assembled in front of the cage, an
orator chosen for the purpose addresses the bear and tells it that
they are about to send it forth to its ancestors. He craves pardon
for what they are about to do to it, hopes it will not be angry, and
comforts it by assuring the animal that many of the sacred whittled
sticks (_inao_) and plenty of cakes and wine will be sent with it on
the long journey. One speech of this sort which Mr. Batchelor heard
ran as follows: "O thou divine one, thou wast sent into the world
for us to hunt. O thou precious little divinity, we worship thee;
pray hear our prayer. We have nourished thee and brought thee up
with a deal of pains and trouble, all because we love thee so. Now,
as thou hast grown big, we are about to send thee to thy father and
mother. When thou comest to them please speak well of us, and tell
them how kind we have been; please come to us again and we will
sacrifice thee." Having been secured with ropes, the bear is then
let out of the cage and assailed with a shower of blunt arrows in
order to arouse it to fury. When it has spent itself in vain
struggles, it is tied up to a stake, gagged and strangled, its neck
being placed between two poles, which are then violently compressed,
all the people eagerly helping to squeeze the animal to death. An
arrow is also discharged into the beast's heart by a good marksman,
but so as not to shed blood, for they think that it would be very
unlucky if any of the blood were to drip on the ground. However, the
men sometimes drink the warm blood of the bear "that the courage and
other virtues it possesses may pass into them"; and sometimes they
besmear themselves and their clothes with the blood in order to
ensure success in hunting. When the animal has been strangled to
death, it is skinned and its head is cut off and set in the east
window of the house, where a piece of its own flesh is placed under
its snout, together with a cup of its own meat boiled, some millet
dumplings, and dried fish. Prayers are then addressed to the dead
animal; amongst other things it is sometimes invited, after going
away to its father and mother, to return into the world in order
that it may again be reared for sacrifice. When the bear is supposed
to have finished eating its own flesh, the man who presides at the
feast takes the cup containing the boiled meat, salutes it, and
divides the contents between all the company present: every person,
young and old alike, must taste a little. The cup is called "the cup
of offering" because it has just been offered to the dead bear. When
the rest of the flesh has been cooked, it is shared out in like
manner among all the people, everybody partaking of at least a
morsel; not to partake of the feast would be equivalent to
excommunication, it would be to place the recreant outside the pale
of Aino fellowship. Formerly every particle of the bear, except the
bones, had to be eaten up at the banquet, but this rule is now
relaxed. The head, on being detached from the skin, is set up on a
long pole beside the sacred wands (_inao_) outside of the house,
where it remains till nothing but the bare white skull is left.
Skulls so set up are worshipped not only at the time of the
festival, but very often as long as they last. The Aino assured Mr.
Batchelor that they really do believe the spirits of the worshipful
animals to reside in the skulls; that is why they address them as
"divine preservers" and "precious divinities."

The ceremony of killing the bear was witnessed by Dr. B. Scheube on
the tenth of August at Kunnui, which is a village on Volcano Bay in
the island of Yezo or Yesso. As his description of the rite contains
some interesting particulars not mentioned in the foregoing account,
it may be worth while to summarize it.

On entering the hut he found about thirty Aino present, men, women,
and children, all dressed in their best. The master of the house
first offered a libation on the fireplace to the god of the fire,
and the guests followed his example. Then a libation was offered to
the house-god in his sacred corner of the hut. Meanwhile the
housewife, who had nursed the bear, sat by herself, silent and sad,
bursting now and then into tears. Her grief was obviously
unaffected, and it deepened as the festival went on. Next, the
master of the house and some of the guests went out of the hut and
offered libations before the bear's cage. A few drops were presented
to the bear in a saucer, which he at once upset. Then the women and
girls danced round the cage, their faces turned towards it, their
knees slightly bent, rising and hopping on their toes. As they
danced they clapped their hands and sang a monotonous song. The
housewife and a few old women, who might have nursed many bears,
danced tearfully, stretching out their arms to the bear, and
addressing it in terms of endearment. The young folks were less
affected; they laughed as well as sang. Disturbed by the noise, the
bear began to rush about his cage and howl lamentably. Next
libations were offered at the _inao_ (_inabos_) or sacred wands
which stand outside of an Aino hut. These wands are about a couple
of feet high, and are whittled at the top into spiral shavings. Five
new wands with bamboo leaves attached to them had been set up for
the festival. This is regularly done when a bear is killed; the
leaves mean that the animal may come to life again. Then the bear
was let out of his cage, a rope was thrown round his neck, and he
was led about in the neighbourhood of the hut. While this was being
done the men, headed by a chief, shot at the beast with arrows
tipped with wooden buttons. Dr. Scheube had to do so also. Then the
bear was taken before the sacred wands, a stick was put in his
mouth, nine men knelt on him and pressed his neck against a beam. In
five minutes the animal had expired without uttering a sound.
Meantime the women and girls had taken post behind the men, where
they danced, lamenting, and beating the men who were killing the
bear. The bear's carcase was next placed on the mat before the
sacred wands; and a sword and quiver, taken from the wands, were
hung round the beast's neck. Being a she-bear, it was also adorned
with a necklace and ear-rings. Then food and drink were offered to
it, in the shape of millet-broth, millet-cakes, and a pot of _sake._
The men now sat down on mats before the dead bear, offered libations
to it, and drank deep. Meanwhile the women and girls had laid aside
all marks of sorrow, and danced merrily, none more merrily than the
old women. When the mirth was at its height two young Aino, who had
let the bear out of his cage, mounted the roof of the hut and threw
cakes of millet among the company, who all scrambled for them
without distinction of age or sex. The bear was next skinned and
disembowelled, and the trunk severed from the head, to which the
skin was left hanging. The blood, caught in cups, was eagerly
swallowed by the men. None of the women or children appeared to
drink the blood, though custom did not forbid them to do so. The
liver was cut in small pieces and eaten raw, with salt, the women
and children getting their share. The flesh and the rest of the
vitals were taken into the house to be kept till the next day but
one, and then to be divided among the persons who had been present
at the feast. Blood and liver were offered to Dr. Scheube. While the
bear was being disembowelled, the women and girls danced the same
dance which they had danced at the beginning--not, however, round
the cage, but in front of the sacred wands. At this dance the old
women, who had been merry a moment before, again shed tears freely.
After the brain had been extracted from the bear's head and
swallowed with salt, the skull, detached from the skin, was hung on
a pole beside the sacred wands. The stick with which the bear had
been gagged was also fastened to the pole, and so were the sword and
quiver which had been hung on the carcase. The latter were removed
in about an hour, but the rest remained standing. The whole company,
men and women, danced noisily before the pole; and another
drinking-bout, in which the women joined, closed the festival.

Perhaps the first published account of the bear-feast of the Aino is
one which was given to the world by a Japanese writer in 1652. It
has been translated into French and runs thus: "When they find a
young bear, they bring it home, and the wife suckles it. When it is
grown they feed it with fish and fowl and kill it in winter for the
sake of the liver, which they esteem an antidote to poison, the
worms, colic, and disorders of the stomach. It is of a very bitter
taste, and is good for nothing if the bear has been killed in
summer. This butchery begins in the first Japanese month. For this
purpose they put the animal's head between two long poles, which are
squeezed together by fifty or sixty people, both men and women. When
the bear is dead they eat his flesh, keep the liver as a medicine,
and sell the skin, which is black and commonly six feet long, but
the longest measure twelve feet. As soon as he is skinned, the
persons who nourished the beast begin to bewail him; afterwards they
make little cakes to regale those who helped them."

The Aino of Saghalien rear bear cubs and kill them with similar
ceremonies. We are told that they do not look upon the bear as a god
but only as a messenger whom they despatch with various commissions
to the god of the forest. The animal is kept for about two years in
a cage, and then killed at a festival, which always takes place in
winter and at night. The day before the sacrifice is devoted to
lamentation, old women relieving each other in the duty of weeping
and groaning in front of the bear's cage. Then about the middle of
the night or very early in the morning an orator makes a long speech
to the beast, reminding him how they have taken care of him, and fed
him well, and bathed him in the river, and made him warm and
comfortable. "Now," he proceeds, "we are holding a great festival in
your honour. Be not afraid. We will not hurt you. We will only kill
you and send you to the god of the forest who loves you. We are
about to offer you a good dinner, the best you have ever eaten among
us, and we will all weep for you together. The Aino who will kill
you is the best shot among us. There he is, he weeps and asks your
forgiveness; you will feel almost nothing, it will be done so
quickly. We cannot feed you always, as you will understand. We have
done enough for you; it is now your turn to sacrifice yourself for
us. You will ask God to send us, for the winter, plenty of otters
and sables, and for the summer, seals and fish in abundance. Do not
forget our messages, we love you much, and our children will never
forget you." When the bear has partaken of his last meal amid the
general emotion of the spectators, the old women weeping afresh and
the men uttering stifled cries, he is strapped, not without
difficulty and danger, and being let out of the cage is led on leash
or dragged, according to the state of his temper, thrice round his
cage, then round his master's house, and lastly round the house of
the orator. Thereupon he is tied up to a tree, which is decked with
sacred whittled sticks (_inao_) of the usual sort; and the orator
again addresses him in a long harangue, which sometimes lasts till
the day is beginning to break. "Remember," he cries, "remember! I
remind you of your whole life and of the services we have rendered
you. It is now for you to do your duty. Do not forget what I have
asked of you. You will tell the gods to give us riches, that our
hunters may return from the forest laden with rare furs and animals
good to eat; that our fishers may find troops of seals on the shore
and in the sea, and that their nets may crack under the weight of
the fish. We have no hope but in you. The evil spirits laugh at us,
and too often they are unfavourable and malignant to us, but they
will bow before you. We have given you food and joy and health; now
we kill you in order that you may in return send riches to us and to
our children." To this discourse the bear, more and more surly and
agitated, listens without conviction; round and round the tree he
paces and howls lamentably, till, just as the first beams of the
rising sun light up the scene, an archer speeds an arrow to his
heart. No sooner has he done so, than the marksman throws away his
bow and flings himself on the ground, and the old men and women do
the same, weeping and sobbing. Then they offer the dead beast a
repast of rice and wild potatoes, and having spoken to him in terms
of pity and thanked him for what he has done and suffered, they cut
off his head and paws and keep them as sacred things. A banquet on
the flesh and blood of the bear follows. Women were formerly
excluded from it, but now they share with the men. The blood is
drunk warm by all present; the flesh is boiled, custom forbids it to
be roasted. And as the relics of the bear may not enter the house by
the door, and Aino houses in Saghalien have no windows, a man gets
up on the roof and lets the flesh, the head, and the skin down
through the smoke-hole. Rice and wild potatoes are then offered to
the head, and a pipe, tobacco, and matches are considerately placed
beside it. Custom requires that the guests should eat up the whole
animal before they depart; the use of salt and pepper at the meal is
forbidden; and no morsel of the flesh may be given to the dogs. When
the banquet is over, the head is carried away into the depth of the
forest and deposited on a heap of bears' skulls, the bleached and
mouldering relics of similar festivals in the past.

The Gilyaks, a Tunguzian people of Eastern Siberia, hold a
bear-festival of the same sort once a year in January. "The bear is
the object of the most refined solicitude of an entire village and
plays the chief part in their religious ceremonies." An old she-bear
is shot and her cub is reared, but not suckled, in the village. When
the bear is big enough he is taken from his cage and dragged through
the village. But first they lead him to the bank of the river, for
this is believed to ensure abundance of fish to each family. He is
then taken into every house in the village, where fish, brandy, and
so forth are offered to him. Some people prostrate themselves before
the beast. His entrance into a house is supposed to bring a
blessing; and if he snuffs at the food offered to him, this also is
a blessing. Nevertheless they tease and worry, poke and tickle the
animal continually, so that he is surly and snappish. After being
thus taken to every house, he is tied to a peg and shot dead with
arrows. His head is then cut off, decked with shavings, and placed
on the table where the feast is set out. Here they beg pardon of the
beast and worship him. Then his flesh is roasted and eaten in
special vessels of wood finely carved. They do not eat the flesh raw
nor drink the blood, as the Aino do. The brain and entrails are
eaten last; and the skull, still decked with shavings, is placed on
a tree near the house. Then the people sing and both sexes dance in
ranks, as bears.

One of these bear-festivals was witnessed by the Russian traveller
L. von Schrenck and his companions at the Gilyak village of Tebach
in January 1856. From his detailed report of the ceremony we may
gather some particulars which are not noticed in the briefer
accounts which I have just summarised. The bear, he tells us, plays
a great part in the life of all the peoples inhabiting the region of
the Amoor and Siberia as far as Kamtchatka, but among none of them
is his importance greater than among the Gilyaks. The immense size
which the animal attains in the valley of the Amoor, his ferocity
whetted by hunger, and the frequency of his appearance, all combine
to make him the most dreaded beast of prey in the country. No
wonder, therefore, that the fancy of the Gilyaks is busied with him
and surrounds him, both in life and in death, with a sort of halo of
superstitious fear. Thus, for example, it is thought that if a
Gilyak falls in combat with a bear, his soul transmigrates into the
body of the beast. Nevertheless his flesh has an irresistible
attraction for the Gilyak palate, especially when the animal has
been kept in captivity for some time and fattened on fish, which
gives the flesh, in the opinion of the Gilyaks, a peculiarly
delicious flavour. But in order to enjoy this dainty with impunity
they deem it needful to perform a long series of ceremonies, of
which the intention is to delude the living bear by a show of
respect, and to appease the anger of the dead animal by the homage
paid to his departed spirit. The marks of respect begin as soon as
the beast is captured. He is brought home in triumph and kept in a
cage, where all the villagers take it in turns to feed him. For
although he may have been captured or purchased by one man, he
belongs in a manner to the whole village. His flesh will furnish a
common feast, and hence all must contribute to support him in his
life. The length of time he is kept in captivity depends on his age.
Old bears are kept only a few months; cubs are kept till they are
full-grown. A thick layer of fat on the captive bear gives the
signal for the festival, which is always held in winter, generally
in December but sometimes in January or February. At the festival
witnessed by the Russian travellers, which lasted a good many days,
three bears were killed and eaten. More than once the animals were
led about in procession and compelled to enter every house in the
village, where they were fed as a mark of honour, and to show that
they were welcome guests. But before the beasts set out on this
round of visits, the Gilyaks played at skipping-rope in presence,
and perhaps, as L. von Schrenck inclined to believe, in honour of
the animals. The night before they were killed, the three bears were
led by moonlight a long way on the ice of the frozen river. That
night no one in the village might sleep. Next day, after the animals
had been again led down the steep bank to the river, and conducted
thrice round the hole in the ice from which the women of the village
drew their water, they were taken to an appointed place not far from
the village, and shot to death with arrows. The place of sacrifice
or execution was marked as holy by being surrounded with whittled
sticks, from the tops of which shavings hung in curls. Such sticks
are with the Gilyaks, as with the Aino, the regular symbols that
accompany all religious ceremonies.

When the house has been arranged and decorated for their reception,
the skins of the bears, with their heads attached to them, are
brought into it, not, however, by the door, but through a window,
and then hung on a sort of scaffold opposite the hearth on which the
flesh is to be cooked. The boiling of the bears' flesh among the
Gilyaks is done only by the oldest men, whose high privilege it is;
women and children, young men and boys have no part in it. The task
is performed slowly and deliberately, with a certain solemnity. On
the occasion described by the Russian travellers the kettle was
first of all surrounded with a thick wreath of shavings, and then
filled with snow, for the use of water to cook bear's flesh is
forbidden. Meanwhile a large wooden trough, richly adorned with
arabesques and carvings of all sorts, was hung immediately under the
snouts of the bears; on one side of the trough was carved in relief
a bear, on the other side a toad. When the carcases were being cut
up, each leg was laid on the ground in front of the bears, as if to
ask their leave, before being placed in the kettle; and the boiled
flesh was fished out of the kettle with an iron hook, and set in the
trough before the bears, in order that they might be the first to
taste of their own flesh. As fast, too, as the fat was cut in strips
it was hung up in front of the bears, and afterwards laid in a small
wooden trough on the ground before them. Last of all the inner
organs of the beasts were cut up and placed in small vessels. At the
same time the women made bandages out of parti-coloured rags, and
after sunset these bandages were tied round the bears' snouts just
below the eyes "in order to dry the tears that flowed from them."

As soon as the ceremony of wiping away poor bruin's tears had been
performed, the assembled Gilyaks set to work in earnest to devour
his flesh. The broth obtained by boiling the meat had already been
partaken of. The wooden bowls, platters, and spoons out of which the
Gilyaks eat the broth and flesh of the bears on these occasions are
always made specially for the purpose at the festival and only then;
they are elaborately ornamented with carved figures of bears and
other devices that refer to the animal or the festival, and the
people have a strong superstitious scruple against parting with
them. After the bones had been picked clean they were put back in
the kettle in which the flesh had been boiled. And when the festal
meal was over, an old man took his stand at the door of the house
with a branch of fir in his hand, with which, as the people passed
out, he gave a light blow to every one who had eaten of the bear's
flesh or fat, perhaps as a punishment for their treatment of the
worshipful animal. In the afternoon the women performed a strange
dance. Only one woman danced at a time, throwing the upper part of
her body into the oddest postures, while she held in her hands a
branch of fir or a kind of wooden castanets. The other women
meanwhile played an accompaniment by drumming on the beams of the
house with clubs. Von Schrenk believed that after the flesh of the
bear has been eaten the bones and the skull are solemnly carried out
by the oldest people to a place in the forest not far from the
village. There all the bones except the skull are buried. After that
a young tree is felled a few inches above the ground, its stump
cleft, and the skull wedged into the cleft. When the grass grows
over the spot, the skull disappears from view, and that is the end
of the bear.

Another description of the bear-festivals of the Gilyaks has been
given us by Mr. Leo Sternberg. It agrees substantially with the
foregoing accounts, but a few particulars in it may be noted.
According to Mr. Sternberg, the festival is usually held in honour
of a deceased relation: the next of kin either buys or catches a
bear cub and nurtures it for two or three years till it is ready for
the sacrifice. Only certain distinguished guests (_Narch-en_) are
privileged to partake of the bear's flesh, but the host and members
of his clan eat a broth made from the flesh; great quantities of
this broth are prepared and consumed on the occasion. The guests of
honour (_Narch-en_) must belong to the clan into which the host's
daughters and the other women of his clan are married: one of these
guests, usually the host's son-in-law, is entrusted with the duty of
shooting the bear dead with an arrow. The skin, head, and flesh of
the slain bear are brought into the house not through the door but
through the smoke-hole; a quiver full of arrows is laid under the
head and beside it are deposited tobacco, sugar, and other food. The
soul of the bear is supposed to carry off the souls of these things
with it on the far journey. A special vessel is used for cooking the
bear's flesh, and the fire must be kindled by a sacred apparatus of
flint and steel, which belongs to the clan and is handed down from
generation to generation, but which is never used to light fires
except on these solemn occasions. Of all the many viands cooked for
the consumption of the assembled people a portion is placed in a
special vessel and set before the bear's head: this is called
"feeding the head." After the bear has been killed, dogs are
sacrificed in couples of male and female. Before being throttled,
they are fed and invited to go to their lord on the highest
mountain, to change their skins, and to return next year in the form
of bears. The soul of the dead bear departs to the same lord, who is
also lord of the primaeval forest; it goes away laden with the
offerings that have been made to it, and attended by the souls of
the dogs and also by the souls of the sacred whittled sticks, which
figure prominently at the festival.

The Goldi, neighbours of the Gilyaks, treat the bear in much the
same way. They hunt and kill it; but sometimes they capture a live
bear and keep him in a cage, feeding him well and calling him their
son and brother. Then at a great festival he is taken from his cage,
paraded about with marked consideration, and afterwards killed and
eaten. "The skull, jaw-bones, and ears are then suspended on a tree,
as an antidote against evil spirits; but the flesh is eaten and much
relished, for they believe that all who partake of it acquire a zest
for the chase, and become courageous."

The Orotchis, another Tunguzian people of the region of the Amoor,
hold bear-festivals of the same general character. Any one who
catches a bear cub considers it his bounden duty to rear it in a
cage for about three years, in order at the end of that time to kill
it publicly and eat the flesh with his friends. The feasts being
public, though organised by individuals, the people try to have one
in each Orotchi village every year in turn. When the bear is taken
out of his cage, he is led about by means of ropes to all the huts,
accompanied by people armed with lances, bows, and arrows. At each
hut the bear and bear-leaders are treated to something good to eat
and drink. This goes on for several days until all the huts, not
only in that village but also in the next, have been visited. The
days are given up to sport and noisy jollity. Then the bear is tied
to a tree or wooden pillar and shot to death by the arrows of the
crowd, after which its flesh is roasted and eaten. Among the
Orotchis of the Tundja River women take part in the bear-feasts,
while among the Orotchis of the River Vi the women will not even
touch bear's flesh.

In the treatment of the captive bear by these tribes there are
features which can hardly be distinguished from worship. Such, for
example, are the prayers offered to it both alive and dead; the
offerings of food, including portions of its own flesh, laid before
the animal's skull; and the Gilyak custom of leading the living
beast to the river in order to ensure a supply of fish, and of
conducting him from house to house in order that every family may
receive his blessing, just as in Europe a May-tree or a personal
representative of the tree-spirit used to be taken from door to door
in spring for the sake of diffusing among all and sundry the fresh
energies of reviving nature. Again, the solemn participation in his
flesh and blood, and particularly the Aino custom of sharing the
contents of the cup which had been consecrated by being set before
the dead beast, are strongly suggestive of a sacrament, and the
suggestion is confirmed by the Gilyak practice of reserving special
vessels to hold the flesh and cooking it on a fire kindled by a
sacred apparatus which is never employed except on these religious
occasions. Indeed our principal authority on Aino religion, the Rev.
John Batchelor, frankly describes as worship the ceremonious respect
which the Aino pay to the bear, and he affirms that the animal is
undoubtedly one of their gods. Certainly the Aino appear to apply
their name for god (_kamui_) freely to the bear; but, as Mr.
Batchelor himself points out, that word is used with many different
shades of meaning and is applied to a great variety of objects, so
that from its application to the bear we cannot safely argue that
the animal is actually regarded as a deity. Indeed we are expressly
told that the Aino of Saghalien do not consider the bear to be a god
but only a messenger to the gods, and the message with which they
charge the animal at its death bears out the statement. Apparently
the Gilyaks also look on the bear in the light of an envoy
despatched with presents to the Lord of the Mountain, on whom the
welfare of the people depends. At the same time they treat the
animal as a being of a higher order than man, in fact as a minor
deity, whose presence in the village, so long as he is kept and fed,
diffuses blessings, especially by keeping at bay the swarms of evil
spirits who are constantly lying in wait for people, stealing their
goods and destroying their bodies by sickness and disease. Moreover,
by partaking of the flesh, blood, or broth of the bear, the Gilyaks,
the Aino, and the Goldi are all of opinion that they acquire some
portion of the animal's mighty powers, particularly his courage and
strength. No wonder, therefore, that they should treat so great a
benefactor with marks of the highest respect and affection.

Some light may be thrown on the ambiguous attitude of the Aino to
bears by comparing the similar treatment which they accord to other
creatures. For example, they regard the eagle-owl as a good deity
who by his hooting warns men of threatened evil and defends them
against it; hence he is loved, trusted, and devoutly worshipped as a
divine mediator between men and the Creator. The various names
applied to him are significant both of his divinity and of his
mediatorship. Whenever an opportunity offers, one of these divine
birds is captured and kept in a cage, where he is greeted with the
endearing titles of "Beloved god" and "Dear little divinity."
Nevertheless the time comes when the dear little divinity is
throttled and sent away in his capacity of mediator to take a
message to the superior gods or to the Creator himself. The
following is the form of prayer addressed to the eagle-owl when it
is about to be sacrificed: "Beloved deity, we have brought you up
because we loved you, and now we are about to send you to your
father. We herewith offer you food, _inao,_ wine, and cakes; take
them to your parent, and he will be very pleased. When you come to
him say, 'I have lived a long time among the Ainu, where an Ainu
father and an Ainu mother reared me. I now come to thee. I have
brought a variety of good things. I saw while living in Ainuland a
great deal of distress. I observed that some of the people were
possessed by demons, some were wounded by wild animals, some were
hurt by landslides, others suffered shipwreck, and many were
attacked by disease. The people are in great straits. My father,
hear me, and hasten to look upon the Ainu and help them.' If you do
this, your father will help us."

Again, the Aino keep eagles in cages, worship them as divinities,
and ask them to defend the people from evil. Yet they offer the bird
in sacrifice, and when they are about to do so they pray to him,
saying: "O precious divinity, O thou divine bird, pray listen to my
words. Thou dost not belong to this world, for thy home is with the
Creator and his golden eagles. This being so, I present thee with
these _inao_ and cakes and other precious things. Do thou ride upon
the _inao_ and ascend to thy home in the glorious heavens. When thou
arrivest, assemble the deities of thy own kind together and thank
them for us for having governed the world. Do thou come again, I
beseech thee, and rule over us. O my precious one, go thou quietly."
Once more, the Aino revere hawks, keep them in cages, and offer them
in sacrifice. At the time of killing one of them the following
prayer should be addressed to the bird: "O divine hawk, thou art an
expert hunter, please cause thy cleverness to descend on me." If a
hawk is well treated in captivity and prayed to after this fashion
when he is about to be killed, he will surely send help to the
hunter.

Thus the Aino hopes to profit in various ways by slaughtering the
creatures, which, nevertheless, he treats as divine. He expects them
to carry messages for him to their kindred or to the gods in the
upper world; he hopes to partake of their virtues by swallowing
parts of their bodies or in other ways; and apparently he looks
forward to their bodily resurrection in this world, which will
enable him again to catch and kill them, and again to reap all the
benefits which he has already derived from their slaughter. For in
the prayers addressed to the worshipful bear and the worshipful
eagle before they are knocked on the head the creatures are invited
to come again, which seems clearly to point to a faith in their
future resurrection. If any doubt could exist on this head, it would
be dispelled by the evidence of Mr. Batchelor, who tells us that the
Aino "are firmly convinced that the spirits of birds and animals
killed in hunting or offered in sacrifice come and live again upon
the earth clothed with a body; and they believe, further, that they
appear here for the special benefit of men, particularly Ainu
hunters." The Aino, Mr. Batchelor tells us, "confessedly slays and
eats the beast that another may come in its place and be treated in
like manner"; and at the time of sacrificing the creatures "prayers
are said to them which form a request that they will come again and
furnish viands for another feast, as if it were an honour to them to
be thus killed and eaten, and a pleasure as well. Indeed such is the
people's idea." These last observations, as the context shows, refer
especially to the sacrifice of bears.

Thus among the benefits which the Aino anticipates from the
slaughter of the worshipful animals not the least substantial is
that of gorging himself on their flesh and blood, both on the
present and on many a similar occasion hereafter; and that pleasing
prospect again is derived from his firm faith in the spiritual
immortality and bodily resurrection of the dead animals. A like
faith is shared by many savage hunters in many parts of the world
and has given rise to a variety of quaint customs, some of which
will be described presently. Meantime it is not unimportant to
observe that the solemn festivals at which the Aino, the Gilyaks,
and other tribes slaughter the tame caged bears with demonstrations
of respect and sorrow, are probably nothing but an extension or
glorification of similar rites which the hunter performs over any
wild bear which he chances to kill in the forest. Indeed with regard
to the Gilyaks we are expressly informed that this is the case. If
we would understand the meaning of the Gilyak ritual, says Mr.
Sternberg, "we must above all remember that the bear-festivals are
not, as is usually but falsely assumed, celebrated only at the
killing of a house-bear but are held on every occasion when a Gilyak
succeeds in slaughtering a bear in the chase. It is true that in
such cases the festival assumes less imposing dimensions, but in its
essence it remains the same. When the head and skin of a bear killed
in the forest are brought into the village, they are accorded a
triumphal reception with music and solemn ceremonial. The head is
laid on a consecrated scaffold, fed, and treated with offerings,
just as at the killing of a house-bear; and the guests of honour
(_Narch-en_) are also assembled. So, too, dogs are sacrificed, and
the bones of the bear are preserved in the same place and with the
same marks of respect as the bones of a house-bear. Hence the great
winter festival is only an extension of the rite which is observed
at the slaughter of every bear."

Thus the apparent contradiction in the practice of these tribes, who
venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt,
kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to
us: the people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for
acting as they do. For the savage is by no means so illogical and
unpractical as to superficial observers he is apt to seem; he has
thought deeply on the questions which immediately concern him, he
reasons about them, and though his conclusions often diverge very
widely from ours, we ought not to deny him the credit of patient and
prolonged meditation on some fundamental problems of human
existence. In the present case, if he treats bears in general as
creatures wholly subservient to human needs and yet singles out
certain individuals of the species for homage which almost amounts
to deification, we must not hastily set him down as irrational and
inconsistent, but must endeavour to place ourselves at his point of
view, to see things as he sees them, and to divest ourselves of the
prepossessions which tinge so deeply our own views of the world. If
we do so, we shall probably discover that, however absurd his
conduct may appear to us, the savage nevertheless generally acts on
a train of reasoning which seems to him in harmony with the facts of
his limited experience. This I propose to illustrate in the
following chapter, where I shall attempt to show that the solemn
ceremonial of the bear-festival among the Ainos and other tribes of
North-eastern Asia is only a particularly striking example of the
respect which on the principles of his rude philosophy the savage
habitually pays to the animals which he kills and eats.




LIII. The Propitiation of Wild Animals By Hunters

THE EXPLANATION of life by the theory of an indwelling and
practically immortal soul is one which the savage does not confine
to human beings but extends to the animate creation in general. In
so doing he is more liberal and perhaps more logical than the
civilised man, who commonly denies to animals that privilege of
immortality which he claims for himself. The savage is not so proud;
he commonly believes that animals are endowed with feelings and
intelligence like those of men, and that, like men, they possess
souls which survive the death of their bodies either to wander about
as disembodied spirits or to be born again in animal form.

Thus to the savage, who regards all living creatures as practically
on a footing of equality with man, the act of killing and eating an
animal must wear a very different aspect from that which the same
act presents to us, who regard the intelligence of animals as far
inferior to our own and deny them the possession of immortal souls.
Hence on the principles of his rude philosophy the primitive hunter
who slays an animal believes himself exposed to the vengeance either
of its disembodied spirit or of all the other animals of the same
species, whom he considers as knit together, like men, by the ties
of kin and the obligations of the blood feud, and therefore as bound
to resent the injury done to one of their number. Accordingly the
savage makes it a rule to spare the life of those animals which he
has no pressing motive for killing, at least such fierce and
dangerous animals as are likely to exact a bloody vengeance for the
slaughter of one of their kind. Crocodiles are animals of this sort.
They are only found in hot countries, where, as a rule, food is
abundant and primitive man has therefore little reason to kill them
for the sake of their tough and unpalatable flesh. Hence it is a
custom with some savages to spare crocodiles, or rather only to kill
them in obedience to the law of blood feud, that is, as a
retaliation for the slaughter of men by crocodiles. For example, the
Dyaks of Borneo will not kill a crocodile unless a crocodile has
first killed a man. "For why, say they, should they commit an act of
aggression, when he and his kindred can so easily repay them? But
should the alligator take a human life, revenge becomes a sacred
duty of the living relatives, who will trap the man-eater in the
spirit of an officer of justice pursuing a criminal. Others, even
then, hang back, reluctant to embroil themselves in a quarrel which
does not concern them. The man-eating alligator is supposed to be
pursued by a righteous Nemesis; and whenever one is caught they have
a profound conviction that it must be the guilty one, or his
accomplice."

Like the Dyaks, the natives of Madagascar never kill a crocodile
"except in retaliation for one of their friends who has been
destroyed by a crocodile. They believe that the wanton destruction
of one of these reptiles will be followed by the loss of human life,
in accordance with the principle of _lex talionis._" The people who
live near the lake Itasy in Madagascar make a yearly proclamation to
the crocodiles, announcing that they will revenge the death of some
of their friends by killing as many crocodiles in return, and
warning all well-disposed crocodiles to keep out of the way, as they
have no quarrel with them, but only with their evil-minded relations
who have taken human life. Various tribes of Madagascar believe
themselves to be descended from crocodiles, and accordingly they
view the scaly reptile as, to all intents and purposes, a man and a
brother. If one of the animals should so far forget himself as to
devour one of his human kinsfolk, the chief of the tribe, or in his
absence an old man familiar with the tribal customs, repairs at the
head of the people to the edge of the water, and summons the family
of the culprit to deliver him up to the arm of justice. A hook is
then baited and cast into the river or lake. Next day the guilty
brother, or one of his family, is dragged ashore, and after his
crime has been clearly brought home to him by a strict
interrogation, he is sentenced to death and executed. The claims of
justice being thus satisfied and the majesty of the law fully
vindicated, the deceased crocodile is lamented and buried like a
kinsman; a mound is raised over his relics and a stone marks the
place of his head.

Again, the tiger is another of those dangerous beasts whom the
savage prefers to leave alone, lest by killing one of the species he
should excite the hostility of the rest. No consideration will
induce a Sumatran to catch or wound a tiger except in self-defence
or immediately after a tiger has destroyed a friend or relation.
When a European has set traps for tigers, the people of the
neighbourhood have been known to go by night to the place and
explain to the animals that the traps are not set by them nor with
their consent. The inhabitants of the hills near Rajamahall, in
Bengal, are very averse to killing a tiger, unless one of their
kinsfolk has been carried off by one of the beasts. In that case
they go out for the purpose of hunting and slaying a tiger; and when
they have succeeded they lay their bows and arrows on the carcase
and invoke God, declaring that they slew the animal in retaliation
for the loss of a kinsman. Vengeance having been thus taken, they
swear not to attack another tiger except under similar provocation.

The Indians of Carolina would not molest snakes when they came upon
them, but would pass by on the other side of the path, believing
that if they were to kill a serpent, the reptile's kindred would
destroy some of their brethren, friends, or relations in return. So
the Seminole Indians spared the rattlesnake, because they feared
that the soul of the dead rattlesnake would incite its kinsfolk to
take vengeance. The Cherokee regard the rattlesnake as the chief of
the snake tribe and fear and respect him accordingly. Few Cherokee
will venture to kill a rattlesnake, unless they cannot help it, and
even then they must atone for the crime by craving pardon of the
snake's ghost either in their own person or through the mediation of
a priest, according to a set formula. If these precautions are
neglected, the kinsfolk of the dead snake will send one of their
number as an avenger of blood, who will track down the murderer and
sting him to death. No ordinary Cherokee dares to kill a wolf, if he
can possibly help it; for he believes that the kindred of the slain
beast would surely avenge its death, and that the weapon with which
the deed had been done would be quite useless for the future, unless
it were cleaned and exorcised by a medicine-man. However, certain
persons who know the proper rites of atonement for such a crime can
kill wolves with impunity, and they are sometimes hired to do so by
people who have suffered from the raids of the wolves on their
cattle or fish-traps. In Jebel-Nuba, a district of the Eastern
Sudan, it is forbidden to touch the nests or remove the young of a
species of black birds, resembling our blackbirds, because the
people believe that the parent birds would avenge the wrong by
causing a stormy wind to blow, which would destroy the harvest.

But the savage clearly cannot afford to spare all animals. He must
either eat some of them or starve, and when the question thus comes
to be whether he or the animal must perish, he is forced to overcome
his superstitious scruples and take the life of the beast. At the
same time he does all he can to appease his victims and their
kinsfolk. Even in the act of killing them he testifies his respect
for them, endeavours to excuse or even conceal his share in
procuring their death, and promises that their remains will be
honourably treated. By thus robbing death of its terrors, he hopes
to reconcile his victims to their fate and to induce their fellows
to come and be killed also. For example, it was a principle with the
Kamtchatkans never to kill a land or sea animal without first making
excuses to it and begging that the animal would not take it ill.
Also they offered it cedarnuts and so forth, to make it think that
it was not a victim but a guest at a feast. They believed that this
hindered other animals of the same species from growing shy. For
instance, after they had killed a bear and feasted on its flesh, the
host would bring the bear's head before the company, wrap it in
grass, and present it with a variety of trifles. Then he would lay
the blame of the bear's death on the Russians, and bid the beast
wreak his wrath upon them. Also he would ask the bear to inform the
other bears how well he had been treated, that they too might come
without fear. Seals, sea-lions, and other animals were treated by
the Kamtchatkans with the same ceremonious respect. Moreover, they
used to insert sprigs of a plant resembling bear's wort in the
mouths of the animals they killed; after which they would exhort the
grinning skulls to have no fear but to go and tell it to their
fellows, that they also might come and be caught and so partake of
this splendid hospitality. When the Ostiaks have hunted and killed a
bear, they cut off its head and hang it on a tree. Then they gather
round in a circle and pay it divine honours. Next they run towards
the carcase uttering lamentations and saying, "Who killed you? It
was the Russians. Who cut off your head? It was a Russian axe. Who
skinned you? It was a knife made by a Russian." They explain, too,
that the feathers which sped the arrow on its flight came from the
wing of a strange bird, and that they did nothing but let the arrow
go. They do all this because they believe that the wandering ghost
of the slain bear would attack them on the first opportunity, if
they did not thus appease it. Or they stuff the skin of the slain
bear with hay; and after celebrating their victory with songs of
mockery and insult, after spitting on and kicking it, they set it up
on its hind legs, "and then, for a considerable time, they bestow on
it all the veneration due to a guardian god." When a party of Koryak
have killed a bear or a wolf, they skin the beast and dress one of
themselves in the skin. Then they dance round the skin-clad man,
saying that it was not they who killed the animal, but some one
else, generally a Russian. When they kill a fox they skin it, wrap
the body in grass, and bid him go tell his companions how hospitably
he has been received, and how he has received a new cloak instead of
his old one. A fuller account of the Koryak ceremonies is given by a
more recent writer. He tells us that when a dead bear is brought to
the house, the women come out to meet it, dancing with firebrands.
The bear-skin is taken off along with the head; and one of the women
puts on the skin, dances in it, and entreats the bear not to be
angry, but to be kind to the people. At the same time they offer
meat on a wooden platter to the dead beast, saying, "Eat, friend."
Afterwards a ceremony is performed for the purpose of sending the
dead bear, or rather his spirit, away back to his home. He is
provided with provisions for the journey in the shape of puddings or
reindeer-flesh packed in a grass bag. His skin is stuffed with grass
and carried round the house, after which he is supposed to depart
towards the rising sun. The intention of the ceremonies is to
protect the people from the wrath of the slain bear and his
kinsfolk, and so to ensure success in future bear-hunts. The Finns
used to try to persuade a slain bear that he had not been killed by
them, but had fallen from a tree, or met his death in some other
way; moreover, they held a funeral festival in his honour, at the
close of which bards expatiated on the homage that had been paid to
him, urging him to report to the other bears the high consideration
with which he had been treated, in order that they also, following
his example, might come and be slain. When the Lapps had succeeded
in killing a bear with impunity, they thanked him for not hurting
them and for not breaking the clubs and spears which had given him
his death wounds; and they prayed that he would not visit his death
upon them by sending storms or in any other way. His flesh then
furnished a feast.

The reverence of hunters for the bear whom they regularly kill and
eat may thus be traced all along the northern region of the Old
World from Bering's Straits to Lappland. It reappears in similar
forms in North America. With the American Indians a bear hunt was an
important event for which they prepared by long fasts and
purgations. Before setting out they offered expiatory sacrifices to
the souls of bears slain in previous hunts, and besought them to be
favourable to the hunters. When a bear was killed the hunter lit his
pipe, and putting the mouth of it between the bear's lips, blew into
the bowl, filling the beast's mouth with smoke. Then he begged the
bear not to be angry at having been killed, and not to thwart him
afterwards in the chase. The carcase was roasted whole and eaten;
not a morsel of the flesh might be left over. The head, painted red
and blue, was hung on a post and addressed by orators, who heaped
praise on the dead beast. When men of the Bear clan in the Ottawa
tribe killed a bear, they made him a feast of his own flesh, and
addressed him thus: "Cherish us no grudge because we have killed
you. You have sense; you see that our children are hungry. They love
you and wish to take you into their bodies. Is it not glorious to be
eaten by the children of a chief?" Amongst the Nootka Indians of
British Columbia, when a bear had been killed, it was brought in and
seated before the head chief in an upright posture, with a chief's
bonnet, wrought in figures, on its head, and its fur powdered over
with white down. A tray of provisions was then set before it, and it
was invited by words and gestures to eat. After that the animal was
skinned, boiled, and eaten.

A like respect is testified for other dangerous creatures by the
hunters who regularly trap and kill them. When Caffre hunters are in
the act of showering spears on an elephant, they call out, "Don't
kill us, great captain; don't strike or tread upon us, mighty
chief." When he is dead they make their excuses to him, pretending
that his death was a pure accident. As a mark of respect they bury
his trunk with much solemn ceremony; for they say that "the elephant
is a great lord; his trunk is his hand." Before the Amaxosa Caffres
attack an elephant they shout to the animal and beg him to pardon
them for the slaughter they are about to perpetrate, professing
great submission to his person and explaining clearly the need they
have of his tusks to enable them to procure beads and supply their
wants. When they have killed him they bury in the ground, along with
the end of his trunk, a few of the articles they have obtained for
the ivory, thus hoping to avert some mishap that would otherwise
befall them. Amongst some tribes of Eastern Africa, when a lion is
killed, the carcase is brought before the king, who does homage to
it by prostrating himself on the ground and rubbing his face on the
muzzle of the beast. In some parts of Western Africa if a negro
kills a leopard he is bound fast and brought before the chiefs for
having killed one of their peers. The man defends himself on the
plea that the leopard is chief of the forest and therefore a
stranger. He is then set at liberty and rewarded. But the dead
leopard, adorned with a chief's bonnet, is set up in the village,
where nightly dances are held in its honour. The Baganda greatly
fear the ghosts of buffaloes which they have killed, and they always
appease these dangerous spirits. On no account will they bring the
head of a slain buffalo into a village or into a garden of
plantains: they always eat the flesh of the head in the open
country. Afterwards they place the skull in a small hut built for
the purpose, where they pour out beer as an offering and pray to the
ghost to stay where he is and not to harm them.

Another formidable beast whose life the savage hunter takes with
joy, yet with fear and trembling, is the whale. After the slaughter
of a whale the maritime Koryak of North-eastern Siberia hold a
communal festival, the essential part of which "is based on the
conception that the whale killed has come on a visit to the village;
that it is staying for some time, during which it is treated with
great respect; that it then returns to the sea to repeat its visit
the following year; that it will induce its relatives to come along,
telling them of the hospitable reception that has been accorded to
it. According to the Koryak ideas, the whales, like all other
animals, constitute one tribe, or rather family, of related
individuals, who live in villages like the Koryak. They avenge the
murder of one of their number, and are grateful for kindnesses that
they may have received." When the inhabitants of the Isle of St.
Mary, to the north of Madagascar, go a-whaling, they single out the
young whales for attack and "humbly beg the mother's pardon, stating
the necessity that drives them to kill her progeny, and requesting
that she will be pleased to go below while the deed is doing, that
her maternal feelings may not be outraged by witnessing what must
cause her so much uneasiness." An Ajumba hunter having killed a
female hippopotamus on Lake Azyingo in West Africa, the animal was
decapitated and its quarters and bowels removed. Then the hunter,
naked, stepped into the hollow of the ribs, and kneeling down in the
bloody pool washed his whole body with the blood and excretions of
the animal, while he prayed to the soul of the hippopotamus not to
bear him a grudge for having killed her and so blighted her hopes of
future maternity; and he further entreated the ghost not to stir up
other hippopotamuses to avenge her death by butting at and capsizing
his canoe.

The ounce, a leopard-like creature, is dreaded for its depredations
by the Indians of Brazil. When they have caught one of these animals
in a snare, they kill it and carry the body home to the village.
There the women deck the carcase with feathers of many colours, put
bracelets on its legs, and weep over it, saying, "I pray thee not to
take vengeance on our little ones for having been caught and killed
through thine own ignorance. For it was not we who deceived thee, it
was thyself. Our husbands only set the trap to catch animals that
are good to eat; they never thought to take thee in it. Therefore,
let not thy soul counsel thy fellows to avenge thy death on our
little ones!" When a Blackfoot Indian has caught eagles in a trap
and killed them, he takes them home to a special lodge, called the
eagles' lodge, which has been prepared for their reception outside
of the camp. Here he sets the birds in a row on the ground, and
propping up their heads on a stick, puts a piece of dried meat in
each of their mouths in order that the spirits of the dead eagles
may go and tell the other eagles how well they are being treated by
the Indians. So when Indian hunters of the Orinoco region have
killed an animal, they open its mouth and pour into it a few drops
of the liquor they generally carry with them, in order that the soul
of the dead beast may inform its fellows of the welcome it has met
with, and that they too, cheered by the prospect of the same kind
reception, may come with alacrity to be killed. When a Teton Indian
is on a journey, and he meets a grey spider or a spider with yellow
legs, he kills it, because some evil would befall him if he did not.
But he is very careful not to let the spider know that he kills it,
for if the spider knew, his soul would go and tell the other
spiders, and one of them would be sure to avenge the death of his
relation. So in crushing the insect, the Indian says, "O Grandfather
Spider, the Thunder-beings kill you." And the spider is crushed at
once and believes what is told him. His soul probably runs and tells
the other spiders that the Thunder-beings have killed him; but no
harm comes of that. For what can grey or yellow-legged spiders do to
the Thunder-beings?

But it is not merely dangerous creatures with whom the savage
desires to keep on good terms. It is true that the respect which he
pays to wild beasts is in some measure proportioned to their
strength and ferocity. Thus the savage Stiens of Cambodia, believing
that all animals have souls which roam about after their death, beg
an animal's pardon when they kill it, lest its soul should come and
torment them. Also they offer it sacrifices, but these sacrifices
are proportioned to the size and strength of the animal. The
ceremonies which they observe at the death of an elephant are
conducted with much pomp and last seven days. Similar distinctions
are drawn by North American Indians. "The bear, the buffalo, and the
beaver are manidos [divinities] which furnish food. The bear is
formidable, and good to eat. They render ceremonies to him, begging
him to allow himself to be eaten, although they know he has no fancy
for it. We kill you, but you are not annihilated. His head and paws
are objects of homage. . . . Other animals are treated similarly
from similar reasons. . . . Many of the animal manidos, not being
dangerous, are often treated with contempt--the terrapin, the
weasel, polecat, etc." The distinction is instructive. Animals which
are feared, or are good to eat, or both, are treated with
ceremonious respect; those which are neither formidable nor good to
eat are despised. We have had examples of reverence paid to animals
which are both feared and eaten. It remains to prove that similar
respect is shown to animals which, without being feared, are either
eaten or valued for their skins.

When Siberian sable-hunters have caught a sable, no one is allowed
to see it, and they think that if good or evil be spoken of the
captured sable no more sables will be caught. A hunter has been
known to express his belief that the sables could hear what was said
of them as far off as Moscow. He said that the chief reason why the
sable hunt was now so unproductive was that some live sables had
been sent to Moscow. There they had been viewed with astonishment as
strange animals, and the sables cannot abide that. Another, though
minor, cause of the diminished take of sables was, he alleged, that
the world is now much worse than it used to be, so that nowadays a
hunter will sometimes hide the sable which he has got instead of
putting it into the common stock. This also, said he, the sables
cannot abide. Alaskan hunters preserve the bones of sables and
beavers out of reach of the dogs for a year and then bury them
carefully, "lest the spirits who look after the beavers and sables
should consider that they are regarded with contempt, and hence no
more should be killed or trapped." The Canadian Indians were equally
particular not to let their dogs gnaw the bones, or at least certain
of the bones, of beavers. They took the greatest pains to collect
and preserve these bones, and, when the beaver had been caught in a
net, they threw them into the river. To a Jesuit who argued that the
beavers could not possibly know what became of their bones, the
Indians replied, "You know nothing about catching beavers and yet
you will be prating about it. Before the beaver is stone dead, his
soul takes a turn in the hut of the man who is killing him and makes
a careful note of what is done with his bones. If the bones are
given to the dogs, the other beavers would get word of it and would
not let themselves be caught. Whereas, if their bones are thrown
into the fire or a river, they are quite satisfied; and it is
particularly gratifying to the net which caught them." Before
hunting the beaver they offered a solemn prayer to the Great Beaver,
and presented him with tobacco; and when the chase was over, an
orator pronounced a funeral oration over the dead beavers. He
praised their spirit and wisdom. "You will hear no more," said he,
"the voice of the chieftains who commanded you and whom you chose
from among all the warrior beavers to give you laws. Your language,
which the medicine-men understand perfectly, will be heard no more
at the bottom of the lake. You will fight no more battles with the
otters, your cruel foes. No, beavers! But your skins shall serve to
buy arms; we will carry your smoked hams to our children; we will
keep the dogs from eating your bones, which are so hard."

The elan, deer, and elk were treated by the American Indians with
the same punctilious respect, and for the same reason. Their bones
might not be given to the dogs nor thrown into the fire, nor might
their fat be dropped upon the fire, because the souls of the dead
animals were believed to see what was done to their bodies and to
tell it to the other beasts, living and dead. Hence, if their bodies
were illused, the animals of that species would not allow themselves
to be taken, neither in this world nor in the world to come. Among
the Chiquites of Paraguay a sick man would be asked by the
medicine-man whether he had not thrown away some of the flesh of the
deer or turtle, and if he answered yes, the medicine-man would say,
"That is what is killing you. The soul of the deer or turtle has
entered into your body to avenge the wrong you did it." The Canadian
Indians would not eat the embryos of the elk, unless at the close of
the hunting season; otherwise the mother-elks would be shy and
refuse to be caught.

In the Timor-laut islands of the Indian Archipelago the skulls of
all the turtles which a fisherman has caught are hung up under his
house. Before he goes out to catch another, he addresses himself to
the skull of the last turtle that he killed, and having inserted
betel between its jaws, he prays the spirit of the dead animal to
entice its kinsfolk in the sea to come and be caught. In the Poso
district of Central Celebes hunters keep the jawbones of deer and
wild pigs which they have killed and hang them up in their houses
near the fire. Then they say to the jawbones, "Ye cry after your
comrades, that your grandfathers, or nephews, or children may not go
away." Their notion is that the souls of the dead deer and pigs
tarry near their jawbones and attract the souls of living deer and
pigs, which are thus drawn into the toils of the hunter. Thus the
wily savage employs dead animals as decoys to lure living animals to
their doom.

The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco love to hunt the ostrich, but
when they have killed one of these birds and are bringing home the
carcase to the village, they take steps to outwit the resentful
ghost of their victim. They think that when the first natural shock
of death is passed, the ghost of the ostrich pulls himself together
and makes after his body. Acting on this sage calculation, the
Indians pluck feathers from the breast of the bird and strew them at
intervals along the track. At every bunch of feathers the ghost
stops to consider, "Is this the whole of my body or only a part of
it?" The doubt gives him pause, and when at last he has made up his
mind fully at all the bunches, and has further wasted valuable time
by the zigzag course which he invariably pursues in going from one
to another, the hunters are safe at home, and the bilked ghost may
stalk in vain round about the village, which he is too timid to
enter.

The Esquimaux about Bering Strait believe that the souls of dead
sea-beasts, such as seals, walrus, and whales, remain attached to
their bladders, and that by returning the bladders to the sea they
can cause the souls to be reincarnated in fresh bodies and so
multiply the game which the hunters pursue and kill. Acting on this
belief every hunter carefully removes and preserves the bladders of
all the sea-beasts that he kills; and at a solemn festival held once
a year in winter these bladders, containing the souls of all the
sea-beasts that have been killed throughout the year, are honoured
with dances and offerings of food in the public assembly-room, after
which they are taken out on the ice and thrust through holes into
the water; for the simple Esquimaux imagine that the souls of the
animals, in high good humour at the kind treatment they have
experienced, will thereafter be born again as seals, walrus, and
whales, and in that form will flock willingly to be again speared,
harpooned, or otherwise done to death by the hunters.

For like reasons, a tribe which depends for its subsistence, chiefly
or in part, upon fishing is careful to treat the fish with every
mark of honour and respect. The Indians of Peru "adored the fish
that they caught in greatest abundance; for they said that the first
fish that was made in the world above (for so they named Heaven)
gave birth to all other fish of that species, and took care to send
them plenty of its children to sustain their tribe. For this reason
they worshipped sardines in one region, where they killed more of
them than of any other fish; in others, the skate; in others, the
dogfish; in others, the golden fish for its beauty; in others, the
crawfish; in others, for want of larger gods, the crabs, where they
had no other fish, or where they knew not how to catch and kill
them. In short, they had whatever fish was most serviceable to them
as their gods." The Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia think that
when a salmon is killed its soul returns to the salmon country.
Hence they take care to throw the bones and offal into the sea, in
order that the soul may reanimate them at the resurrection of the
salmon. Whereas if they burned the bones the soul would be lost, and
so it would be quite impossible for that salmon to rise from the
dead. In like manner the Ottawa Indians of Canada, believing that
the souls of dead fish passed into other bodies of fish, never
burned fish bones, for fear of displeasing the souls of the fish,
who would come no more to the nets. The Hurons also refrained from
throwing fish bones into the fire, lest the souls of the fish should
go and warn the other fish not to let themselves be caught, since
the Hurons would burn their bones. Moreover, they had men who
preached to the fish and persuaded them to come and be caught. A
good preacher was much sought after, for they thought that the
exhortations of a clever man had a great effect in drawing the fish
to the nets. In the Huron fishing village where the French
missionary Sagard stayed, the preacher to the fish prided himself
very much on his eloquence, which was of a florid order. Every
evening after supper, having seen that all the people were in their
places and that a strict silence was observed, he preached to the
fish. His text was that the Hurons did not burn fish bones. "Then
enlarging on this theme with extraordinary unction, he exhorted and
conjured and invited and implored the fish to come and be caught and
to be of good courage and to fear nothing, for it was all to serve
their friends who honoured them and did not burn their bones." The
natives of the Duke of York Island annually decorate a canoe with
flowers and ferns, lade it, or are supposed to lade it, with
shell-money, and set it adrift to compensate the fish for their
fellows who have been caught and eaten. It is especially necessary
to treat the first fish caught with consideration in order to
conciliate the rest of the fish, whose conduct may be supposed to be
influenced by the reception given to those of their kind which were
the first to be taken. Accordingly the Maoris always put back into
the sea the first fish caught, "with a prayer that it may tempt
other fish to come and be caught."

Still more stringent are the precautions taken when the fish are the
first of the season. On salmon rivers, when the fish begin to run up
the stream in spring, they are received with much deference by
tribes who, like the Indians of the Pacific Coast of North America,
subsist largely upon a fish diet. In British Columbia the Indians
used to go out to meet the first fish as they came up the river:
"They paid court to them, and would address them thus: 'You fish,
you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs.'" Amongst
the Tlingit of Alaska the first halibut of the season is carefully
handled and addressed as a chief, and a festival is given in his
honour, after which the fishing goes on. In spring, when the winds
blow soft from the south and the salmon begin to run up the Klamath
river, the Karoks of California dance for salmon, to ensure a good
catch. One of the Indians, called the Kareya or God-man, retires to
the mountains and fasts for ten days. On his return the people flee,
while he goes to the river, takes the first salmon of the catch,
eats some of it, and with the rest kindles the sacred fire in the
sweating house. "No Indian may take a salmon before this dance is
held, nor for ten days after it, even if his family are starving."
The Karoks also believe that a fisherman will take no salmon if the
poles of which his spearing-booth is made were gathered on the
river-side, where the salmon might have seen them. The poles must be
brought from the top of the highest mountain. The fisherman will
also labour in vain if he uses the same poles a second year in
booths or weirs, "because the old salmon will have told the young
ones about them." There is a favourite fish of the Aino which appears
in their rivers about May and June. They prepare for the fishing by
observing rules of ceremonial purity, and when they have gone out to
fish, the women at home must keep strict silence or the fish would
hear them and disappear. When the first fish is caught he is brought
home and passed through a small opening at the end of the hut, but
not through the door; for if he were passed through the door, "the
other fish would certainly see him and disappear." This may partly
explain the custom observed by other savages of bringing game in
certain cases into their huts, not by the door, but by the window,
the smoke-hole, or by a special opening at the back of the hut.

With some savages a special reason for respecting the bones of game,
and generally of the animals which they eat, is a belief that, if
the bones are preserved, they will in course of time be reclothed
with flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again. It is,
therefore, clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave the bones
intact since to destroy them would be to diminish the future supply
of game. Many of the Minnetaree Indians "believe that the bones of
those bisons which they have slain and divested of flesh rise again
clothed with renewed flesh, and quickened with life, and become fat,
and fit for slaughter the succeeding June." Hence on the western
prairies of America, the skulls of buffaloes may be seen arranged in
circles and symmetrical piles, awaiting the resurrection. After
feasting on a dog, the Dacotas carefully collect the bones, scrape,
wash, and bury them, "partly, as it is said, to testify to the
dog-species, that in feasting upon one of their number no disrespect
was meant to the species itself, and partly also from a belief that
the bones of the animal will rise and reproduce another." In
sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put aside the bones, eyes,
ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the animal was a male), and a
morsel of flesh from each limb. Then, after eating the remainder of
the flesh, they laid the bones and the rest in anatomical order in a
coffin and buried them with the usual rites, believing that the god
to whom the animal was sacrificed would reclothe the bones with
flesh and restore the animal to life in Jabme-Aimo, the subterranean
world of the dead. Sometimes, as after feasting on a bear, they seem
to have contented themselves with thus burying the bones. Thus the
Lapps expected the resurrection of the slain animal to take place in
another world, resembling in this respect the Kamtchatkans, who
believed that every creature, down to the smallest fly, would rise
from the dead and live underground. On the other hand, the North
American Indians looked for the resurrection of the animals in the
present world. The habit, observed especially by Mongolian peoples,
of stuffing the skin of a sacrificed animal, or stretching it on a
framework, points rather to a belief in a resurrection of the latter
sort. The objection commonly entertained by primitive peoples to
break the bones of the animals which they have eaten or sacrificed
may be based either on a belief in the resurrection of the animals,
or on a fear of intimidating other creatures of the same species and
offending the ghosts of the slain animals. The reluctance of North
American Indians and Esquimaux to let dogs gnaw the bones of animals
is perhaps only a precaution to prevent the bones from being broken.

But after all the resurrection of dead game may have its
inconveniences, and accordingly some hunters take steps to prevent
it by hamstringing the animal so as to prevent it or its ghost from
getting up and running away. This is the motive alleged for the
practice by Koui hunters in Laos; they think that the spells which
they utter in the chase may lose their magical virtue, and that the
slaughtered animal may consequently come to life again and escape.
To prevent that catastrophe they therefore hamstring the beast as
soon as they have butchered it. When an Esquimau of Alaska has
killed a fox, he carefully cuts the tendons of all the animal's legs
in order to prevent the ghost from reanimating the body and walking
about. But hamstringing the carcase is not the only measure which
the prudent savage adopts for the sake of disabling the ghost of his
victim. In old days, when the Aino went out hunting and killed a fox
first, they took care to tie its mouth up tightly in order to
prevent the ghost of the animal from sallying forth and warning its
fellows against the approach of the hunter. The Gilyaks of the Amoor
River put out the eyes of the seals they have killed, lest the
ghosts of the slain animals should know their slayers and avenge
their death by spoiling the seal-hunt.

Besides the animals which primitive man dreads for their strength
and ferocity, and those which he reveres on account of the benefits
which he expects from them, there is another class of creatures
which he sometimes deems it necessary to conciliate by worship and
sacrifice. These are the vermin that infest his crops and his
cattle. To rid himself of these deadly foes the farmer has recourse
to many superstitious devices, of which, though some are meant to
destroy or intimidate the vermin, others aim at propitiating them
and persuading them by fair means to spare the fruits of the earth
and the herds. Thus Esthonian peasants, in the island of Oesel,
stand in great awe of the weevil, an insect which is exceedingly
destructive to the grain. They give it a fine name, and if a child
is about to kill a weevil they say, "Don't do it; the more we hurt
him, the more he hurts us." If they find a weevil they bury it in
the earth instead of killing it. Some even put the weevil under a
stone in the field and offer corn to it. They think that thus it is
appeased and does less harm. Amongst the Saxons of Transylvania, in
order to keep sparrows from the corn, the sower begins by throwing
the first handful of seed backwards over his head, saying, "That is
for you, sparrows." To guard the corn against the attacks of
leaf-flies he shuts his eyes and scatters three handfuls of oats in
different directions. Having made this offering to the leaf-flies he
feels sure that they will spare the corn. A Transylvanian way of
securing the crops against all birds, beasts, and insects, is this:
after he has finished sowing, the sower goes once more from end to
end of the field imitating the gesture of sowing, but with an empty
hand. As he does so he says, "I sow this for the animals; I sow it
for every thing that flies and creeps, that walks and stands, that
sings and springs, in the name of God the Father, etc." The
following is a German way of freeing a garden from caterpillars.
After sunset or at midnight the mistress of the house, or another
female member of the family, walks all round the garden dragging a
broom after her. She may not look behind her, and must keep
murmuring, "Good evening, Mother Caterpillar, you shall come with
your husband to church." The garden gate is left open till the
following morning.

Sometimes in dealing with vermin the farmer aims at hitting a happy
mean between excessive rigour on the one hand and weak indulgence on
the other; kind but firm, he tempers severity with mercy. An ancient
Greek treatise on farming advises the husbandman who would rid his
lands of mice to act thus: "Take a sheet of paper and write on it as
follows: 'I adjure you, ye mice here present, that ye neither injure
me nor suffer another mouse to do so. I give you yonder field' (here
you specify the field); 'but if ever I catch you here again, by the
Mother of the Gods I will rend you in seven pieces.' Write this, and
stick the paper on an unhewn stone in the field before sunrise,
taking care to keep the written side up." In the Ardennes they say
that to get rid of rats you should repeat the following words:
"_Erat verbum, apud Deum vestrum._ Male rats and female rats, I
conjure you, by the great God, to go out of my house, out of all my
habitations, and to betake yourselves to such and such a place,
there to end your days. _Decretis, reversis et desembarassis virgo
potens, clemens, justitiae._" Then write the same words on pieces of
paper, fold them up, and place one of them under the door by which
the rats are to go forth, and the other on the road which they are
to take. This exorcism should be performed at sunrise. Some years
ago an American farmer was reported to have written a civil letter
to the rats, telling them that his crops were short, that he could
not afford to keep them through the winter, that he had been very
kind to them, and that for their own good he thought they had better
leave him and go to some of his neighbours who had more grain. This
document he pinned to a post in his barn for the rats to read.

Sometimes the desired object is supposed to be attained by treating
with high distinction one or two chosen individuals of the obnoxious
species, while the rest are pursued with relentless rigour. In the
East Indian island of Bali, the mice which ravage the rice-fields
are caught in great numbers, and burned in the same way that corpses
are burned. But two of the captured mice are allowed to live, and
receive a little packet of white linen. Then the people bow down
before them, as before gods, and let them go. When the farms of the
Sea Dyaks or Ibans of Sarawak are much pestered by birds and
insects, they catch a specimen of each kind of vermin (one sparrow,
one grasshopper, and so on), put them in a tiny boat of bark
well-stocked with provisions, and then allow the little vessel with
its obnoxious passengers to float down the river. If that does not
drive the pests away, the Dyaks resort to what they deem a more
effectual mode of accomplishing the same purpose. They make a clay
crocodile as large as life and set it up in the fields, where they
offer it food, rice-spirit, and cloth, and sacrifice a fowl and a
pig before it. Mollified by these attentions, the ferocious animal
very soon gobbles up all the creatures that devour the crops. In
Albania, if the fields or vineyards are ravaged by locusts or
beetles, some of the women will assemble with dishevelled hair,
catch a few of the insects, and march with them in a funeral
procession to a spring or stream, in which they drown the creatures.
Then one of the women sings, "O locusts and beetles who have left us
bereaved," and the dirge is taken up and repeated by all the women
in chorus. Thus by celebrating the obsequies of a few locusts and
beetles, they hope to bring about the death of them all. When
caterpillars invaded a vineyard or field in Syria, the virgins were
gathered, and one of the caterpillars was taken and a girl made its
mother. Then they bewailed and buried it. Thereafter they conducted
the "mother" to the place where the caterpillars were, consoling
her, in order that all the caterpillars might leave the garden.



LIV. Types of Animal Sacrament



1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament

WE are now perhaps in a position to understand the ambiguous
behaviour of the Aino and Gilyaks towards the bear. It has been
shown that the sharp line of demarcation which we draw between
mankind and the lower animals does not exist for the savage. To him
many of the other animals appear as his equals or even his
superiors, not merely in brute force but in intelligence; and if
choice or necessity leads him to take their lives, he feels bound,
out of regard to his own safety, to do it in a way which will be as
inoffensive as possible not merely to the living animal, but to its
departed spirit and to all the other animals of the same species,
which would resent an affront put upon one of their kind much as a
tribe of savages would revenge an injury or insult offered to a
tribesman. We have seen that among the many devices by which the
savage seeks to atone for the wrong done by him to his animal
victims one is to show marked deference to a few chosen individuals
of the species, for such behaviour is apparently regarded as
entitling him to exterminate with impunity all the rest of the
species upon which he can lay hands. This principle perhaps explains
the attitude, at first sight puzzling and contradictory, of the Aino
towards the bear. The flesh and skin of the bear regularly afford
them food and clothing; but since the bear is an intelligent and
powerful animal, it is necessary to offer some satisfaction or
atonement to the bear species for the loss which it sustains in the
death of so many of its members. This satisfaction or atonement is
made by rearing young bears, treating them, so long as they live,
with respect, and killing them with extraordinary marks of sorrow
and devotion. So the other bears are appeased, and do not resent the
slaughter of their kind by attacking the slayers or deserting the
country, which would deprive the Aino of one of their means of
subsistence.

Thus the primitive worship of animals conforms to two types, which
are in some respects the converse of each other. On the one hand,
animals are worshipped, and are therefore neither killed nor eaten.
On the other hand, animals are worshipped because they are
habitually killed and eaten. In both types of worship the animal is
revered on account of some benefit, positive or negative, which the
savage hopes to receive from it. In the former worship the benefit
comes either in the positive shape of protection, advice, and help
which the animal affords the man, or in the negative shape of
abstinence from injuries which it is in the power of the animal to
inflict. In the latter worship the benefit takes the material form
of the animal's flesh and skin. The two types of worship are in some
measure antithetical: in the one, the animal is not eaten because it
is revered; in the other, it is revered because it is eaten. But
both may be practised by the same people, as we see in the case of
the North American Indians, who, while they apparently revere and
spare their totem animals, also revere the animals and fish upon
which they subsist. The aborigines of Australia have totemism in the
most primitive form known to us; but there is no clear evidence that
they attempt, like the North American Indians, to conciliate the
animals which they kill and eat. The means which the Australians
adopt to secure a plentiful supply of game appear to be primarily
based, not on conciliation, but on sympathetic magic, a principle to
which the North American Indians also resort for the same purpose.
Hence, as the Australians undoubtedly represent a ruder and earlier
stage of human progress than the American Indians, it would seem
that before hunters think of worshipping the game as a means of
ensuring an abundant supply of it, they seek to attain the same end
by sympathetic magic. This, again, would show--what there is good
reason for believing--that sympathetic magic is one of the earliest
means by which man endeavours to adapt the agencies of nature to his
needs.

Corresponding to the two distinct types of animal worship, there are
two distinct types of the custom of killing the animal god. On the
one hand, when the revered animal is habitually spared, it is
nevertheless killed--and sometimes eaten--on rare and solemn
occasions. Examples of this custom have been already given and an
explanation of them offered. On the other hand, when the revered
animal is habitually killed, the slaughter of any one of the species
involves the killing of the god, and is atoned for on the spot by
apologies and sacrifices, especially when the animal is a powerful
and dangerous one; and, in addition to this ordinary and everyday
atonement, there is a special annual atonement, at which a select
individual of the species is slain with extraordinary marks of
respect and devotion. Clearly the two types of sacramental
killing--the Egyptian and the Aino types, as we may call them for
distinction--are liable to be confounded by an observer; and, before
we can say to which type any particular example belongs, it is
necessary to ascertain whether the animal sacramentally slain
belongs to a species which is habitually spared, or to one which is
habitually killed by the tribe. In the former case the example
belongs to the Egyptian type of sacrament, in the latter to the Aino
type.

The practice of pastoral tribes appears to furnish examples of both
types of sacrament. "Pastoral tribes," says Adolf Bastian, "being
sometimes obliged to sell their herds to strangers who may handle
the bones disrespectfully, seek to avert the danger which such a
sacrilege would entail by consecrating one of the herd as an object
of worship, eating it sacramentally in the family circle with closed
doors, and afterwards treating the bones with all the ceremonious
respect which, strictly speaking, should be accorded to every head
of cattle, but which, being punctually paid to the representative
animal, is deemed to be paid to all. Such family meals are found
among various peoples, especially those of the Caucasus. When
amongst the Abchases the shepherds in spring eat their common meal
with their loins girt and their staves in their hands, this may be
looked upon both as a sacrament and as an oath of mutual help and
support. For the strongest of all oaths is that which is accompanied
with the eating of a sacred substance, since the perjured person
cannot possibly escape the avenging god whom he has taken into his
body and assimilated." This kind of sacrament is of the Aino or
expiatory type, since it is meant to atone to the species for the
possible ill-usage of individuals. An expiation, similar in
principle but different in details, is offered by the Kalmucks to
the sheep, whose flesh is one of their staple foods. Rich Kalmucks
are in the habit of consecrating a white ram under the title of "the
ram of heaven" or "the ram of the spirit." The animal is never shorn
and never sold; but when it grows old and its owner wishes to
consecrate a new one, the old ram must be killed and eaten at a
feast to which the neighbours are invited. On a lucky day, generally
in autumn when the sheep are fat, a sorcerer kills the old ram,
after sprinkling it with milk. Its flesh is eaten; the skeleton,
with a portion of the fat, is burned on a turf altar; and the skin,
with the head and feet, is hung up.

An example of a sacrament of the Egyptian type is furnished by the
Todas, a pastoral people of Southern India, who subsist largely upon
the milk of their buffaloes. Amongst them "the buffalo is to a
certain degree held sacred" and "is treated with great kindness,
even with a degree of adoration, by the people." They never eat the
flesh of the cow buffalo, and as a rule abstain from the flesh of
the male. But to the latter rule there is a single exception. Once a
year all the adult males of the village join in the ceremony of
killing and eating a very young male calf--seemingly under a month
old. They take the animal into the dark recesses of the village
wood, where it is killed with a club made from the sacred tree of
the Todas (the _Millingtonia_). A sacred fire having been made by
the rubbing of sticks, the flesh of the calf is roasted on the
embers of certain trees, and is eaten by the men alone, women being
excluded from the assembly. This is the only occasion on which the
Todas eat buffalo flesh. The Madi or Moru tribe of Central Africa,
whose chief wealth is their cattle, though they also practise
agriculture, appear to kill a lamb sacramentally on certain solemn
occasions. The custom is thus described by Dr. Felkin: "A remarkable
custom is observed at stated times--once a year, I am led to
believe. I have not been able to ascertain what exact meaning is
attached to it. It appears, however, to relieve the people's minds,
for beforehand they evince much sadness, and seem very joyful when
the ceremony is duly accomplished. The following is what takes
place: A large concourse of people of all ages assemble, and sit
down round a circle of stones, which is erected by the side of a
road (really a narrow path). A very choice lamb is then fetched by a
boy, who leads it four times round the assembled people. As it
passes they pluck off little bits of its fleece and place them in
their hair, or on to some other part of their body. The lamb is then
led up to the stones, and there killed by a man belonging to a kind
of priestly order, who takes some of the blood and sprinkles it four
times over the people. He then applies it individually. On the
children he makes a small ring of blood over the lower end of the
breast bone, on women and girls he makes a mark above the breasts,
and the men he touches on each shoulder. He then proceeds to explain
the ceremony, and to exhort the people to show kindness. . . . When
this discourse, which is at times of great length, is over, the
people rise, each places a leaf on or by the circle of stones, and
then they depart with signs of great joy. The lamb's skull is hung
on a tree near the stones, and its flesh is eaten by the poor. This
ceremony is observed on a small scale at other times. If a family is
in any great trouble, through illness or bereavement, their friends
and neighbours come together and a lamb is killed; this is thought
to avert further evil. The same custom prevails at the grave of
departed friends, and also on joyful occasions, such as the return
of a son home after a very prolonged absence." The sorrow thus
manifested by the people at the annual slaughter of the lamb seems
to show that the lamb slain is a sacred or divine animal, whose
death is mourned by his worshippers, just as the death of the sacred
buzzard was mourned by the Californians and the death of the Theban
ram by the Egyptians. The smearing each of the worshippers with the
blood of the lamb is a form of communion with the divinity; the
vehicle of the divine life is applied externally instead of being
taken internally, as when the blood is drunk or the flesh eaten.



2. Processions with Sacred Animals

THE FORM of communion in which the sacred animal is taken from house
to house, that all may enjoy a share of its divine influence, has
been exemplified by the Gilyak custom of promenading the bear
through the village before it is slain. A similar form of communion
with the sacred snake is observed by a Snake tribe in the Punjaub.
Once a year in the month of September the snake is worshipped by all
castes and religions for nine days only. At the end of August the
Mirasans, especially those of the Snake tribe, make a snake of dough
which they paint black and red, and place on a winnowing basket.
This basket they carry round the village, and on entering any house
they say: "God be with you all! May every ill be far! May our
patron's (Gugga's) word thrive!" Then they present the basket with
the snake, saying: "A small cake of flour: a little bit of butter:
if you obey the snake, you and yours shall thrive!" Strictly
speaking, a cake and butter should be given, but it is seldom done.
Every one, however, gives something, generally a handful of dough or
some corn. In houses where there is a new bride or whence a bride
has gone, or where a son has been born, it is usual to give a rupee
and a quarter, or some cloth. Sometimes the bearers of the snake
also sing:


"Give the snake a piece of cloth, and he will send a lively bride!"


When every house has been thus visited, the dough snake is buried
and a small grave is erected over it. Thither during the nine days
of September the women come to worship. They bring a basin of curds,
a small portion of which they offer at the snake's grave, kneeling
on the ground and touching the earth with their foreheads. Then they
go home and divide the rest of the curds among the children. Here
the dough snake is clearly a substitute for a real snake. Indeed, in
districts where snakes abound the worship is offered, not at the
grave of the dough snake, but in the jungles where snakes are known
to be. Besides this yearly worship, performed by all the people, the
members of the Snake tribe worship in the same way every morning
after a new moon. The Snake tribe is not uncommon in the Punjaub.
Members of it will not kill a snake, and they say that its bite does
not hurt them. If they find a dead snake, they put clothes on it and
give it a regular funeral.

Ceremonies closely analogous to this Indian worship of the snake
have survived in Europe into recent times, and doubtless date from a
very primitive paganism. The best-known example is the "hunting of
the wren." By many European peoples--the ancient Greeks and Romans,
the modern Italians, Spaniards, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes,
Swedes, English, and Welsh--the wren has been designated the king,
the little king, the king of birds, the hedge king, and so forth,
and has been reckoned amongst those birds which it is extremely
unlucky to kill. In England it is supposed that if any one kills a
wren or harries its nest, he will infallibly break a bone or meet
with some dreadful misfortune within the year; sometimes it is
thought that the cows will give bloody milk. In Scotland the wren is
called "the Lady of Heaven's hen," and boys say:


    "Malisons, malisons, mair than ten,
     That harry the Ladye of Heaven's hen!"


At Saint Donan, in Brittany, people believe that if children touch
the young wrens in the nest, they will suffer from the fire of St.
Lawrence, that is, from pimples on the face, legs, and so on. In
other parts of France it is thought that if a person kills a wren or
harries its nest, his house will be struck by lightning, or that the
fingers with which he did the deed will shrivel up and drop off, or
at least be maimed, or that his cattle will suffer in their feet.

Notwithstanding such beliefs, the custom of annually killing the
wren has prevailed widely both in this country and in France. In the
Isle of Man down to the eighteenth century the custom was observed
on Christmas Eve, or rather Christmas morning. On the twenty-fourth
of December, towards evening, all the servants got a holiday; they
did not go to bed all night, but rambled about till the bells rang
in all the churches at midnight. When prayers were over, they went
to hunt the wren, and having found one of these birds they killed it
and fastened it to the top of a long pole with its wings extended.
Thus they carried it in procession to every house chanting the
following rhyme:


   "We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
    We hunted the wren for Jack of the Can,
    We hunted the wren for Robin the Bobbin,
    We hunted the wren for every one."


When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money
they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in
procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and
buried it "with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the
Manks language, which they call her knell; after which Christmas
begins." The burial over, the company outside the churchyard formed
a circle and danced to music.

A writer of the eighteenth century says that in Ireland the wren "is
still hunted and killed by the peasants on Christmas Day, and on the
following (St. Stephen's Day) he is carried about, hung by the leg,
in the centre of two hoops, crossing each other at right angles, and
a procession made in every village, of men, women, and children,
singing an Irish catch, importing him to be the king of all birds."
Down to the present time the "hunting of the wren" still takes place
in parts of Leinster and Connaught. On Christmas Day or St.
Stephen's Day the boys hunt and kill the wren, fasten it in the
middle of a mass of holly and ivy on the top of a broomstick, and on
St. Stephen's Day go about with it from house to house, singing:


   "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
    St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze;
    Although he is little, his family's great,
    I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat."


Money or food (bread, butter, eggs, etc.) were given them, upon
which they feasted in the evening.

In the first half of the nineteenth century similar customs were
still observed in various parts of the south of France. Thus at
Carcassone, every year on the first Sunday of December the young
people of the street Saint Jean used to go out of the town armed
with sticks, with which they beat the bushes, looking for wrens. The
first to strike down one of these birds was proclaimed King. Then
they returned to the town in procession, headed by the King, who
carried the wren on a pole. On the evening of the last day of the
year the King and all who had hunted the wren marched through the
streets of the town to the light of torches, with drums beating and
fifes playing in front of them. At the door of every house they
stopped, and one of them wrote with chalk on the door _vive le roi!_
with the number of the year which was about to begin. On the morning
of Twelfth Day the King again marched in procession with great pomp,
wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a sceptre. In front
of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of a pole, which was
adorned with a verdant wreath of olive, of oak, and sometimes of
mistletoe grown on an oak. After hearing high mass in the parish
church of St. Vincent, surrounded by his officers and guards, the
King visited the bishop, the mayor, the magistrates, and the chief
inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses of the royal
banquet which took place in the evening and wound up with a dance.

The parallelism between this custom of "hunting the wren" and some
of those which we have considered, especially the Gilyak procession
with the bear, and the Indian one with the snake, seems too close to
allow us to doubt that they all belong to the same circle of ideas.
The worshipful animal is killed with special solemnity once a year;
and before or immediately after death he is promenaded from door to
door, that each of his worshippers may receive a portion of the
divine virtues that are supposed to emanate from the dead or dying
god. Religious processions of this sort must have had a great place
in the ritual of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may
judge from the numerous traces of them which have survived in
folk-custom. For example, on the last day of the year, or Hogmanay
as it was called, it used to be customary in the Highlands of
Scotland for a man to dress himself up in a cow's hide and thus
attired to go from house to house, attended by young fellows, each
of them armed with a staff, to which a bit of raw hide was tied.
Round every house the hide-clad man used to run thrice _deiseal,_
that is, according to the course of the sun, so as to keep the house
on his right hand; while the others pursued him, beating the hide
with their staves and thereby making a loud noise like the beating
of a drum. In this disorderly procession they also struck the walls
of the house. On being admitted, one of the party, standing within
the threshold, pronounced a blessing on the family in these words:
"May God bless the house and all that belongs to it, cattle, stones,
and timber! In plenty of meat, of bed and body clothes, and health
of men may it ever abound!" Then each of the party singed in the
fire a little bit of the hide which was tied to his staff; and
having done so he applied the singed hide to the nose of every
person and of every domestic animal belonging to the house. This was
imagined to secure them from diseases and other misfortunes,
particularly from witchcraft, throughout the ensuing year. The whole
ceremony was called _calluinn_ because of the great noise made in
beating the hide. It was observed in the Hebrides, including St.
Kilda, down to the second half of the eighteenth century at least,
and it seems to have survived well into the nineteenth century.




LV. The Transference of Evil



1. The Transference to Inanimate Objects

WE have now traced the practice of killing a god among peoples in
the hunting, pastoral, and agricultural stages of society; and I
have attempted to explain the motives which led men to adopt so
curious a custom. One aspect of the custom still remains to be
noticed. The accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people
are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear them
away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy. The notion
that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being
who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises
from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental,
between the material and the immaterial. Because it is possible to
shift a load of wood, stones, or what not, from our own back to the
back of another, the savage fancies that it is equally possible to
shift the burden of his pains and sorrows to another, who will
suffer them in his stead. Upon this idea he acts, and the result is
an endless number of very unamiable devices for palming off upon
some one else the trouble which a man shrinks from bearing himself.
In short, the principle of vicarious suffering is commonly
understood and practised by races who stand on a low level of social
and intellectual culture. In the following pages I shall illustrate
the theory and the practice as they are found among savages in all
their naked simplicity, undisguised by the refinements of
metaphysics and the subtleties of theology.

The devices to which the cunning and selfish savage resorts for the
sake of easing himself at the expense of his neighbour are manifold;
only a few typical examples out of a multitude can be cited. At the
outset it is to be observed that the evil of which a man seeks to
rid himself need not be transferred to a person; it may equally well
be transferred to an animal or a thing, though in the last case the
thing is often only a vehicle to convey the trouble to the first
person who touches it. In some of the East Indian islands they think
that epilepsy can be cured by striking the patient on the face with
the leaves of certain trees and then throwing them away. The disease
is believed to have passed into the leaves, and to have been thrown
away with them. To cure toothache some of the Australian blacks
apply a heated spear-thrower to the cheek. The spear-thrower is then
cast away, and the toothache goes with it in the shape of a black
stone called _karriitch._ Stones of this kind are found in old
mounds and sandhills. They are carefully collected and thrown in the
direction of enemies in order to give them toothache. The Bahima, a
pastoral people of Uganda, often suffer from deep-seated abscesses:
"their cure for this is to transfer the disease to some other person
by obtaining herbs from the medicine-man, rubbing them over the
place where the swelling is, and burying them in the road where
people continually pass; the first person who steps over these
buried herbs contracts the disease, and the original patient
recovers."

Sometimes in case of sickness the malady is transferred to an effigy
as a preliminary to passing it on to a human being. Thus among the
Baganda the medicine-man would sometimes make a model of his patient
in clay; then a relative of the sick man would rub the image over
the sufferer's body and either bury it in the road \??\ it in the
grass by the wayside. The first person who stepped over the image or
passed by it would catch the disease. Sometimes the effigy was made
out of a plantain-flower tied up so as to look like a person; it was
used in the same way as the clay figure. But the use of images for
this maleficent purpose was a capital crime; any person caught in
the act of burying one of them in the public road would surely have
been put to death.

In the western district of the island of Timor, when men or women
are making long and tiring journeys, they fan themselves with leafy
branches, which they afterwards throw away on particular spots where
their forefathers did the same before them. The fatigue which they
felt is thus supposed to have passed into the leaves and to be left
behind. Others use stones instead of leaves. Similarly in the Babar
Archipelago tired people will strike themselves with stones,
believing that they thus transfer to the stones the weariness which
they felt in their own bodies. They then throw away the stones in
places which are specially set apart for the purpose. A like belief
and practice in many distant parts of the world have given rise to
those cairns or heaps of sticks and leaves which travellers often
observe beside the path, and to which every passing native adds his
contribution in the shape of a stone, or stick, or leaf. Thus in the
Solomon and Banks' Islands the natives are wont to throw sticks,
stones, or leaves upon a heap at a place of steep descent, or where
a difficult path begins, saying, "There goes my fatigue." The act is
not a religious rite, for the thing thrown on the heap is not an
offering to spiritual powers, and the words which accompany the act
are not a prayer. It is nothing but a magical ceremony for getting
rid of fatigue, which the simple savage fancies he can embody in a
stick, leaf, or stone, and so cast it from him.



2. The Transference to Animals

ANIMALS are often employed as a vehicle for carrying away or
transferring the evil. When a Moor has a headache he will sometimes
take a lamb or a goat and beat it till it falls down, believing that
the headache will thus be transferred to the animal. In Morocco most
wealthy Moors keep a wild boar in their stables, in order that the
jinn and evil spirits may be diverted from the horses and enter into
the boar. Amongst the Caffres of South Africa, when other remedies
have failed, "natives sometimes adopt the custom of taking a goat
into the presence of a sick man, and confess the sins of the kraal
over the animal. Sometimes a few drops of blood from the sick man
are allowed to fall on the head of the goat, which is turned out
into an uninhabited part of the veldt. The sickness is supposed to
be transferred to the animal, and to become lost in the desert." In
Arabia, when the plague is raging, the people will sometimes lead a
camel through all the quarters of the town in order that the animal
may take the pestilence on itself. Then they strangle it in a sacred
place and imagine that they have rid themselves of the camel and of
the plague at one blow. It is said that when smallpox is raging the
savages of Formosa will drive the demon of disease into a sow, then
cut off the animal's ears and burn them or it, believing that in
this way they rid themselves of the plague.

Amongst the Malagasy the vehicle for carrying away evils is called a
_faditra._ "The faditra is anything selected by the sikidy [divining
board] for the purpose of taking away any hurtful evils or diseases
that might prove injurious to an individual's happiness, peace, or
prosperity. The faditra may be either ashes, cut money, a sheep, a
pumpkin, or anything else the sikidy may choose to direct. After the
particular article is appointed, the priest counts upon it all the
evils that may prove injurious to the person for whom it is made,
and which he then charges the faditra to take away for ever. If the
faditra be ashes, it is blown, to be carried away by the wind. If it
be cut money, it is thrown to the bottom of deep water, or where it
can never be found. If it be a sheep, it is carried away to a
distance on the shoulders of a man, who runs with all his might,
mumbling as he goes, as if in the greatest rage against the faditra,
for the evils it is bearing away. If it be a pumpkin, it is carried
on the shoulders to a little distance, and there dashed upon the
ground with every appearance of fury and indignation." A Malagasy
was informed by a diviner that he was doomed to a bloody death, but
that possibly he might avert his fate by performing a certain rite.
Carrying a small vessel full of blood upon his head, he was to mount
upon the back of a bullock; while thus mounted, he was to spill the
blood upon the bullock's head, and then send the animal away into
the wilderness, whence it might never return.

The Bataks of Sumatra have a ceremony which they call "making the
curse to fly away." When a woman is childless, a sacrifice is
offered to the gods of three grasshoppers, representing a head of
cattle, a buffalo, and a horse. Then a swallow is set free, with a
prayer that the curse may fall upon the bird and fly away with it.
"The entrance into a house of an animal which does not generally
seek to share the abode of man is regarded by the Malays as ominous
of misfortune. If a wild bird flies into a house, it must be
carefully caught and smeared with oil, and must then be released in
the open air, a formula being recited in which it is bidden to fly
away with all the ill-luck and misfortunes of the occupier." In
antiquity Greek women seem to have done the same with swallows which
they caught in the house: they poured oil on them and let them fly
away, apparently for the purpose of removing ill-luck from the
household. The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that they can
transfer freckles to the first swallow they see in spring by washing
their face in flowing water and saying, "Swallow, swallow, take my
freckles, and give me rosy cheeks."

Among the Badagas of the Neilgherry Hills in Southern India, when a
death has taken place, the sins of the deceased are laid upon a
buffalo calf. For this purpose the people gather round the corpse
and carry it outside of the village. There an elder of the tribe,
standing at the head of the corpse, recites or chants a long list of
sins such as any Badaga may commit, and the people repeat the last
word of each line after him. The confession of sins is thrice
repeated. "By a conventional mode of expression, the sum total of
sins a man may do is said to be thirteen hundred. Admitting that the
deceased has committed them all, the performer cries aloud, 'Stay
not their flight to God's pure feet.' As he closes, the whole
assembly chants aloud 'Stay not their flight.' Again the performer
enters into details, and cries, 'He killed the crawling snake. It is
a sin.' In a moment the last word is caught up, and all the people
cry 'It is a sin.' As they shout, the performer lays his hand upon
the calf. The sin is transferred to the calf. Thus the whole
catalogue is gone through in this impressive way. But this is not
enough. As the last shout 'Let all be well' dies away, the performer
gives place to another, and again confession is made, and all the
people shout 'It is a sin.' A third time it is done. Then, still in
solemn silence, the calf is let loose. Like the Jewish scapegoat, it
may never be used for secular work." At a Badaga funeral witnessed
by the Rev. A. C. Clayton the buffalo calf was led thrice round the
bier, and the dead man's hand was laid on its head. "By this act,
the calf was supposed to receive all the sins of the deceased. It
was then driven away to a great distance, that it might contaminate
no one, and it was said that it would never be sold, but looked on
as a dedicated sacred animal." The idea of this ceremony is, that
the sins of the deceased enter the calf, or that the task of his
absolution is laid on it. They say that the calf very soon
disappears, and that it is never heard of."



3. The Transference to Men

AGAIN, men sometimes play the part of scapegoat by diverting to
themselves the evils that threaten others. When a Cingalese is
dangerously ill, and the physicians can do nothing, a devil-dancer
is called in, who by making offerings to the devils, and dancing in
the masks appropriate to them, conjures these demons of disease, one
after the other, out of the sick man's body and into his own. Having
thus successfully extracted the cause of the malady, the artful
dancer lies down on a bier, and shamming death is carried to an open
place outside the village. Here, being left to himself, he soon
comes to life again, and hastens back to claim his reward. In 1590 a
Scotch which of the name of Agnes Sampson was convicted of curing a
certain Robert Kers of a disease "laid upon him by a westland
warlock when he was at Dumfries, whilk sickness she took upon
herself, and kept the same with great groaning and torment till the
morn, at whilk time there was a great din heard in the house." The
noise was made by the witch in her efforts to shift the disease, by
means of clothes, from herself to a cat or dog. Unfortunately the
attempt partly miscarried. The disease missed the animal and hit
Alexander Douglas of Dalkeith, who dwined and died of it, while the
original patient, Robert Kers, was made whole.

"In one part of New Zealand an expiation for sin was felt to be
necessary; a service was performed over an individual, by which all
the sins of the tribe were supposed to be transferred to him, a fern
stalk was previously tied to his person, with which he jumped into
the river, and there unbinding, allowed it to float away to the sea,
bearing their sins with it." In great emergencies the sins of the
Rajah of Manipur used to be transferred to somebody else, usually to
a criminal, who earned his pardon by his vicarious sufferings. To
effect the transference the Rajah and his wife, clad in fine robes,
bathed on a scaffold erected in the bazaar, while the criminal
crouched beneath it. With the water which dripped from them on him
their sins also were washed away and fell on the human scapegoat. To
complete the transference the Rajah and his wife made over their
fine robes to their substitute, while they themselves, clad in new
raiment, mixed with the people till evening. In Travancore, when a
Rajah is near his end, they seek out a holy Brahman, who consents to
take upon himself the sins of the dying man in consideration of the
sum of ten thousand rupees. Thus prepared to immolate himself on the
altar of duty, the saint is introduced into the chamber of death,
and closely embraces the dying Rajah, saying to him, "O King, I
undertake to bear all your sins and diseases. May your Highness live
long and reign happily." Having thus taken to himself the sins of
the sufferer, he is sent away from the country and never more
allowed to return. At Utch Kurgan in Turkestan Mr. Schuyler saw an
old man who was said to get his living by taking on himself the sins
of the dead, and thenceforth devoting his life to prayer for their
souls.

In Uganda, when an army had returned from war, and the gods warned
the king by their oracles that some evil had attached itself to the
soldiers, it was customary to pick out a woman slave from the
captives, together with a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog from the
booty, and to send them back under a strong guard to the borders of
the country from which they had come. There their limbs were broken
and they were left to die; for they were too crippled to crawl back
to Uganda. In order to ensure the transference of the evil to these
substitutes, bunches of grass were rubbed over the people and cattle
and then tied to the victims. After that the army was pronounced
clean and was allowed to return to the capital. So on his accession
a new king of Uganda used to wound a man and send him away as a
scapegoat to Bunyoro to carry away any uncleanliness that might
attach to the king or queen.



4. The Transference of Evil in Europe

THE EXAMPLES of the transference of evil hitherto adduced have been
mostly drawn from the customs of savage or barbarous peoples. But
similar attempts to shift the burden of disease, misfortune, and sin
from one's self to another person, or to an animal or thing, have
been common also among the civilised nations of Europe, both in
ancient and modern times. A Roman cure for fever was to pare the
patient's nails, and stick the parings with wax on a neighbour's
door before sunrise; the fever then passed from the sick man to his
neighbour. Similar devices must have been resorted to by the Greeks;
for in laying down laws for his ideal state, Plato thinks it too
much to expect that men should not be alarmed at finding certain wax
figures adhering to their doors or to the tombstones of their
parents, or lying at cross-roads. In the fourth century of our era
Marcellus of Bordeaux prescribed a cure for warts, which has still a
great vogue among the superstitious in various parts of Europe. You
are to touch your warts with as many little stones as you have
warts; then wrap the stones in an ivy leaf, and throw them away in a
thoroughfare. Whoever picks them up will get the warts, and you will
be rid of them. People in the Orkney Islands will sometimes wash a
sick man, and then throw the water down at a gateway, in the belief
that the sickness will leave the patient and be transferred to the
first person who passes through the gate. A Bavarian cure for fever
is to write upon a piece of paper, "Fever, stay away, I am not at
home," and to put the paper in somebody's pocket. The latter then
catches the fever, and the patient is rid of it. A Bohemian
prescription for the same malady is this. Take an empty pot, go with
it to a cross-road, throw it down, and run away. The first person
who kicks against the pot will catch your fever, and you will be
cured.

Often in Europe, as among savages, an attempt is made to transfer a
pain or malady from a man to an animal. Grave writers of antiquity
recommended that, if a man be stung by a scorpion, he should sit
upon an ass with his face to the tail, or whisper in the animal's
ear, "A scorpion has stung me"; in either case, they thought, the
pain would be transferred from the man to the ass. Many cures of
this sort are recorded by Marcellus. For example, he tells us that
the following is a remedy for toothache. Standing booted under the
open sky on the ground, you catch a frog by the head, spit into its
mouth, ask it to carry away the ache, and then let it go. But the
ceremony must be performed on a lucky day and at a lucky hour. In
Cheshire the ailment known as aphtha or thrush, which affects the
mouth or throat of infants, is not uncommonly treated in much the
same manner. A young frog is held for a few moments with its head
inside the mouth of the sufferer, whom it is supposed to relieve by
taking the malady to itself. "I assure you," said an old woman who
had often superintended such a cure, "we used to hear the poor frog
whooping and coughing, mortal bad, for days after; it would have
made your heart ache to hear the poor creature coughing as it did
about the garden." A Northamptonshire, Devonshire, and Welsh cure
for a cough is to put a hair of the patient's head between two
slices of buttered bread and give the sandwich to a dog. The animal
will thereupon catch the cough and the patient will lose it.
Sometimes an ailment is transferred to an animal by sharing food
with it. Thus in Oldenburg, if you are sick of a fever you set a
bowl of sweet milk before a dog and say, "Good luck, you hound! may
you be sick and I be sound!" Then when the dog has lapped some of
the milk, you take a swig at the bowl; and then the dog must lap
again, and then you must swig again; and when you and the dog have
done it the third time, he will have the fever and you will be quit
of it.

A Bohemian cure for fever is to go out into the forest before the
sun is up and look for a snipe's nest. When you have found it, take
out one of the young birds and keep it beside you for three days.
Then go back into the wood and set the snipe free. The fever will
leave you at once. The snipe has taken it away. So in Vedic times
the Hindoos of old sent consumption away with a blue jay. They said,
"O consumption, fly away, fly away with the blue jay! With the wild
rush of the storm and the whirlwind, oh, vanish away!" In the
village of Llandegla in Wales there is a church dedicated to the
virgin martyr St. Tecla, where the falling sickness is, or used to
be, cured by being transferred to a fowl. The patient first washed
his limbs in a sacred well hard by, dropped fourpence into it as an
offering, walked thrice round the well, and thrice repeated the
Lord's prayer. Then the fowl, which was a cock or a hen according as
the patient was a man or a woman, was put into a basket and carried
round first the well and afterwards the church. Next the sufferer
entered the church and lay down under the communion table till break
of day. After that he offered sixpence and departed, leaving the
fowl in the church. If the bird died, the sickness was supposed to
have been transferred to it from the man or woman, who was now rid
of the disorder. As late as 1855 the old parish clerk of the village
remembered quite well to have seen the birds staggering about from
the effects of the fits which had been transferred to them.

Often the sufferer seeks to shift his burden of sickness or ill-luck
to some inanimate object. In Athens there is a little chapel of St.
John the Baptist built against an ancient column. Fever patients
resort thither, and by attaching a waxed thread to the inner side of
the column believe that they transfer the fever from themselves to
the pillar. In the Mark of Brandenburg they say that if you suffer
from giddiness you should strip yourself naked and run thrice round
a flax-field after sunset; in that way the flax will get the
giddiness and you will be rid of it.

But perhaps the thing most commonly employed in Europe as a
receptacle for sickness and trouble of all sorts is a tree or bush.
A Bulgarian cure for fever is to run thrice around a willow-tree at
sunrise, crying, "The fever shall shake thee, and the sun shall warm
me." In the Greek island of Karpathos the priest ties a red thread
round the neck of a sick person. Next morning the friends of the
patient remove the thread and go out to the hillside, where they tie
the thread to a tree, thinking that they thus transfer the sickness
to the tree. Italians attempt to cure fever in like manner by
tethering it to a tree The sufferer ties a thread round his left
wrist at night, and hangs the thread on a tree next morning. The
fever is thus believed to be tied up to the tree, and the patient to
be rid of it; but he must be careful not to pass by that tree again,
otherwise the fever would break loose from its bonds and attack him
afresh. A Flemish cure for the ague is to go early in the morning to
an old willow, tie three knots in one of its branches, say,
"Good-morrow, Old One, I give thee the cold; good-morrow, Old One,"
then turn and run away without looking round. In Sonnenberg, if you
would rid yourself of gout you should go to a young fir-tree and tie
a knot in one of its twigs, saying, "God greet thee, noble fir. I
bring thee my gout. Here will I tie a knot and bind my gout into it.
In the name," etc.

Another way of transferring gout from a man to a tree is this. Pare
the nails of the sufferer's fingers and clip some hairs from his
legs. Bore a hole in an oak, stuff the nails and hair in the hole,
stop up the hole again, and smear it with cow's dung. If, for three
months thereafter, the patient is free of gout, you may be sure the
oak has it in his stead. In Cheshire if you would be rid of warts,
you have only to rub them with a piece of bacon, cut a slit in the
bark of an ash-tree, and slip the bacon under the bark. Soon the
warts will disappear from your hand, only however to reappear in the
shape of rough excrescences or knobs on the bark of the tree. At
Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, there used to be certain oak-trees
which were long celebrated for the cure of ague. The transference of
the malady to the tree was simple but painful. A lock of the
sufferer's hair was pegged into an oak; then by a sudden wrench he
left his hair and his ague behind him in the tree.




LVI. The Public Expulsion of Evils



1. The Omnipresence of Demons

IN THE FOREGOING chapter the primitive principle of the transference
of ills to another person, animal, or thing was explained and
illustrated. But similar means have been adopted to free a whole
community from diverse evils that afflict it. Such attempts to
dismiss at once the accumulated sorrows of a people are by no means
rare or exceptional; on the contrary they have been made in many
lands, and from being occasional they tend to become periodic and
annual.

It needs some effort on our part to realise the frame of mind which
prompts these attempts. Bred in a philosophy which strips nature of
personality and reduces it to the unknown cause of an orderly series
of impressions on our senses, we find it hard to put ourselves in
the place of the savage, to whom the same impressions appear in the
guise of spirits or the handiwork of spirits. For ages the army of
spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from
us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from
ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere,
from the riven murky cloud that belches forth the lightning, and
from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with
flakes of burning red the golden eve. The spirits are gone even from
their last stronghold in the sky, whose blue arch no longer passes,
except with children, for the screen that hides from mortal eyes the
glories of the celestial world. Only in poets' dreams or impassioned
flights of oratory is it given to catch a glimpse of the last
flutter of the standards of the retreating host, to hear the beat of
their invisible wings, the sound of their mocking laughter, or the
swell of angel music dying away in the distance. Far otherwise is it
with the savage. To his imagination the world still teems with those
motley beings whom a more sober philosophy has discarded. Fairies
and goblins, ghosts and demons, still hover about him both waking
and sleeping. They dog his footsteps, dazzle his senses, enter into
him, harass and deceive and torment him in a thousand freakish and
mischievous ways. The mishaps that befall him, the losses he
sustains, the pains he has to endure, he commonly sets down, if not
to the magic of his enemies, to the spite or anger or caprice of the
spirits. Their constant presence wearies him, their sleepless
malignity exasperates him; he longs with an unspeakable longing to
be rid of them altogether, and from time to time, driven to bay, his
patience utterly exhausted, he turns fiercely on his persecutors and
makes a desperate effort to chase the whole pack of them from the
land, to clear the air of their swarming multitudes, that he may
breathe more freely and go on his way unmolested, at least for a
time. Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to
make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of
a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils or ghosts. They think
that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors,
they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales
of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.



2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils

WE can therefore understand why those general clearances of evil, to
which from time to time the savage resorts, should commonly take the
form of a forcible expulsion of devils. In these evil spirits
primitive man sees the cause of many if not of most of his troubles,
and he fancies that if he can only deliver himself from them, things
will go better with him. The public attempts to expel the
accumulated ills of a whole community may be divided into two
classes, according as the expelled evils are immaterial and
invisible or are embodied in a material vehicle or scape-goat. The
former may be called the direct or immediate expulsion of evils; the
latter the indirect or mediate expulsion, or the expulsion by
scapegoat. We begin with examples of the former.

In the island of Rook, between New Guinea and New Britain, when any
misfortune has happened, all the people run together, scream, curse,
howl, and beat the air with sticks to drive away the devil, who is
supposed to be the author of the mishap. From the spot where the
mishap took place they drive him step by step to the sea, and on
reaching the shore they redouble their shouts and blows in order to
expel him from the island. He generally retires to the sea or to the
island of Lottin. The natives of New Britain ascribe sickness,
drought, the failure of crops, and in short all misfortunes, to the
influence of wicked spirits. So at times when many people sicken and
die, as at the beginning of the rainy season, all the inhabitants of
a district, armed with branches and clubs, go out by moonlight to
the fields, where they beat and stamp on the ground with wild howls
till morning, believing that this drives away the devils; and for
the same purpose they rush through the village with burning torches.
The natives of New Caledonia are said to believe that all evils are
caused by a powerful and malignant spirit; hence in order to rid
themselves of him they will from time to time dig a great pit, round
which the whole tribe gathers. After cursing the demon, they fill up
the pit with earth, and trample on the top with loud shouts. This
they call burying the evil spirit. Among the Dieri tribe of Central
Australia, when a serious illness occurs, the medicine-men expel
Cootchie or the devil by beating the ground in and outside of the
camp with the stuffed tail of a kangaroo, until they have chased the
demon away to some distance from the camp.

When a village has been visited by a series of disasters or a severe
epidemic, the inhabitants of Minahassa in Celebes lay the blame upon
the devils who are infesting the village and who must be expelled
from it. Accordingly, early one morning all the people, men, women,
and children, quit their homes, carrying their household goods with
them, and take up their quarters in temporary huts which have been
erected outside the village. Here they spend several days, offering
sacrifices and preparing for the final ceremony. At last the men,
some wearing masks, others with their faces blackened, and so on,
but all armed with swords, guns, pikes, or brooms, steal cautiously
and silently back to the deserted village. Then, at a signal from
the priest, they rush furiously up and down the streets and into and
under the houses (which are raised on piles above the ground),
yelling and striking on walls, doors, and windows, to drive away the
devils. Next, the priests and the rest of the people come with the
holy fire and march nine times round each house and thrice round the
ladder that leads up to it, carrying the fire with them. Then they
take the fire into the kitchen, where it must burn for three days
continuously. The devils are now driven away, and great and general
is the joy.

The Alfoors of Halmahera attribute epidemics to the devil who comes
from other villages to carry them off. So, in order to rid the
village of the disease, the sorcerer drives away the devil. From all
the villagers he receives a costly garment and places it on four
vessels, which he takes to the forest and leaves at the spot where
the devil is supposed to be. Then with mocking words he bids the
demon abandon the place. In the Kei Islands to the south-west of New
Guinea, the evil spirits, who are quite distinct from the souls of
the dead, form a mighty host. Almost every tree and every cave is
the lodging-place of one of these fiends, who are moreover extremely
irascible and apt to fly out on the smallest provocation. They
manifest their displeasure by sending sickness and other calamities.
Hence in times of public misfortune, as when an epidemic is raging,
and all other remedies have failed, the whole population go forth
with the priest at their head to a place at some distance from the
village. Here at sunset they erect a couple of poles with a
cross-bar between them, to which they attach bags of rice, wooden
models of pivot-guns, gongs, bracelets, and so on. Then, when
everybody has taken his place at the poles and a death-like silence
reigns, the priest lifts up his voice and addresses the spirits in
their own language as follows: "Ho! ho! ho! ye evil spirits who
dwell in the trees, ye evil spirits who live in the grottoes, ye
evil spirits who lodge in the earth, we give you these pivot-guns,
these gongs, etc. Let the sickness cease and not so many people die
of it." Then everybody runs home as fast as their legs can carry
them.

In the island of Nias, when a man is seriously ill and other
remedies have been tried in vain, the sorcerer proceeds to exorcise
the devil who is causing the illness. A pole is set up in front of
the house, and from the top of the pole a rope of palm-leaves is
stretched to the roof of the house. Then the sorcerer mounts the
roof with a pig, which he kills and allows to roll from the roof to
the ground. The devil, anxious to get the pig, lets himself down
hastily from the roof by the rope of palm-leaves, and a good spirit,
invoked by the sorcerer, prevents him from climbing up again. If
this remedy fails, it is believed that other devils must still be
lurking in the house. So a general hunt is made after them. All the
doors and windows in the house are closed, except a single
dormer-window in the roof. The men, shut up in the house, hew and
slash with their swords right and left to the clash of gongs and the
rub-a-dub of drums. Terrified at this onslaught, the devils escape
by the dormer-window, and sliding down the rope of palm-leaves take
themselves off. As all the doors and windows, except the one in the
roof, are shut, the devils cannot get into the house again. In the
case of an epidemic, the proceedings are similar. All the gates of
the village, except one, are closed; every voice is raised, every
gong and drum beaten, every sword brandished. Thus the devils are
driven out and the last gate is shut behind them. For eight days
thereafter the village is in a state of siege, no one being allowed
to enter it.

When cholera has broken out in a Burmese village the able-bodied men
scramble on the roofs and lay about them with bamboos and billets of
wood, while all the rest of the population, old and young, stand
below and thump drums, blow trumpets, yell, scream, beat floors,
walls, tin pans, everything to make a din. This uproar, repeated on
three successive nights, is thought to be very effective in driving
away the cholera demons. When smallpox first appeared amongst the
Kumis of South-Eastern India, they thought it was a devil come from
Aracan. The villages were placed in a state of siege, no one being
allowed to leave or enter them. A monkey was killed by being dashed
on the ground, and its body was hung at the village gate. Its blood,
mixed with small river pebbles, was sprinkled on the houses, the
threshold of every house was swept with the monkey's tail, and the
fiend was adjured to depart.

When an epidemic is raging on the Gold Coast of West Africa, the
people will sometimes turn out, armed with clubs and torches, to
drive the evil spirits away. At a given signal the whole population
begin with frightful yells to beat in every corner of the houses,
then rush like mad into the streets waving torches and striking
frantically in the empty air. The uproar goes on till somebody
reports that the cowed and daunted demons have made good their
escape by a gate of the town or village; the people stream out after
them, pursue them for some distance into the forest, and warn them
never to return. The expulsion of the devils is followed by a
general massacre of all the cocks in the village or town, lest by
their unseasonable crowing they should betray to the banished demons
the direction they must take to return to their old homes. When
sickness was prevalent in a Huron village, and all other remedies
had been tried in vain, the Indians had recourse to the ceremony
called _Lonouyroya,_ "which is the principal invention and most
proper means, so they say, to expel from the town or village the
devils and evil spirits which cause, induce, and import all the
maladies and infirmities which they suffer in body and mind."
Accordingly, one evening the men would begin to rush like madmen
about the village, breaking and upsetting whatever they came across
in the wigwams. They threw fire and burning brands about the
streets, and all night long they ran howling and singing without
cessation. Then they all dreamed of something, a knife, dog, skin,
or whatever it might be, and when morning came they went from wigwam
to wigwam asking for presents. These they received silently, till
the particular thing was given them which they had dreamed about. On
receiving it they uttered a cry of joy and rushed from the hut, amid
the congratulations of all present. The health of those who received
what they had dreamed of was believed to be assured; whereas those
who did not get what they had set their hearts upon regarded their
fate as sealed.

Sometimes, instead of chasing the demon of disease from their homes,
savages prefer to leave him in peaceable possession, while they
themselves take to flight and attempt to prevent him from following
in their tracks. Thus when the Patagonians were attacked by
small-pox, which they attributed to the machinations of an evil
spirit, they used to abandon their sick and flee, slashing the air
with their weapons and throwing water about in order to keep off the
dreadful pursuer; and when after several days' march they reached a
place where they hoped to be beyond his reach, they used by way of
precaution to plant all their cutting weapons with the sharp edges
turned towards the quarter from which they had come, as if they were
repelling a charge of cavalry. Similarly, when the Lules or
Tonocotes Indians of the Gran Chaco were attacked by an epidemic,
they regularly sought to evade it by flight, but in so doing they
always followed a sinuous, not a straight, course; because they said
that when the disease made after them he would be so exhausted by
the turnings and windings of the route that he would never be able
to come up with them. When the Indians of New Mexico were decimated
by smallpox or other infectious disease, they used to shift their
quarters every day, retreating into the most sequestered parts of
the mountains and choosing the thorniest thickets they could find,
in the hope that the smallpox would be too afraid of scratching
himself on the thorns to follow them. When some Chins on a visit to
Rangoon were attacked by cholera, they went about with drawn swords
to scare away the demon, and they spent the day hiding under bushes
so that he might not be able to find them.



3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils

THE EXPULSION of evils, from being occasional, tends to become
periodic. It comes to be thought desirable to have a general
riddance of evil spirits at fixed times, usually once a year, in
order that the people may make a fresh start in life, freed from all
the malignant influences which have been long accumulating about
them. Some of the Australian blacks annually expelled the ghosts of
the dead from their territory. The ceremony was witnessed by the
Rev. W. Ridley on the banks of the River Barwan. "A chorus of
twenty, old and young, were singing and beating time with
boomerangs. . . . Suddenly, from under a sheet of bark darted a man
with his body whitened by pipeclay, his head and face coloured with
lines of red and yellow, and a tuft of feathers fixed by means of a
stick two feet above the crown of his head. He stood twenty minutes
perfectly still, gazing upwards. An aboriginal who stood by told me
he was looking for the ghosts of dead men. At last he began to move
very slowly, and soon rushed to and fro at full speed, flourishing a
branch as if to drive away some foes invisible to us. When I thought
this pantomime must be almost over, ten more, similarly adorned,
suddenly appeared from behind the trees, and the whole party joined
in a brisk conflict with their mysterious assailants. . . . At last,
after some rapid evolutions in which they put forth all their
strength, they rested from the exciting toil which they had kept up
all night and for some hours after sunrise; they seemed satisfied
that the ghosts were driven away for twelve months. They were
performing the same ceremony at every station along the river, and I
am told it is an annual custom."

Certain seasons of the year mark themselves naturally out as
appropriate moments for a general expulsion of devils. Such a moment
occurs towards the close of an Arctic winter, when the sun reappears
on the horizon after an absence of weeks or months. Accordingly, at
Point Barrow, the most northerly extremity of Alaska, and nearly of
America, the Esquimaux choose the moment of the sun's reappearance
to hunt the mischievous spirit Tuña from every house. The ceremony
was witnessed by the members of the United States Polar Expedition,
who wintered at Point Barrow. A fire was built in front of the
council-house, and an old woman was posted at the entrance to every
house. The men gathered round the council-house while the young
women and girls drove the spirit out of every house with their
knives, stabbing viciously under the bunk and deer-skins, and
calling upon Tuña to be gone. When they thought he had been driven
out of every hole and corner, they thrust him down through the hole
in the floor and chased him into the open air with loud cries and
frantic gestures. Meanwhile the old woman at the entrance of the
house made passes with a long knife in the air to keep him from
returning. Each party drove the spirit towards the fire and invited
him to go into it. All were by this time drawn up in a semicircle
round the fire, when several of the leading men made specific
charges against the spirit; and each after his speech brushed his
clothes violently, calling on the spirit to leave him and go into
the fire. Two men now stepped forward with rifles loaded with blank
cartridges, while a third brought a vessel of urine and flung it on
the flames. At the same time one of the men fired a shot into the
fire; and as the cloud of steam rose it received the other shot,
which was supposed to finish Tunña for the time being.

In late autumn, when storms rage over the land and break the icy
fetters by which the frozen sea is as yet but slightly bound, when
the loosened floes are driven against each other and break with loud
crashes, and when the cakes of ice are piled in wild disorder one
upon another, the Esquimaux of Baffin Land fancy they hear the
voices of the spirits who people the mischief-laden air. Then the
ghosts of the dead knock wildly at the huts, which they cannot
enter, and woe to the hapless wight whom they catch; he soon sickens
and dies. Then the phantom of a huge hairless dog pursues the real
dogs, which expire in convulsions and cramps at sight of him. All
the countless spirits of evil are abroad striving to bring sickness
and death, foul weather and failure in hunting on the Esquimaux.
Most dreaded of all these spectral visitants are Sedna, mistress of
the nether world, and her father, to whose share dead Esquimaux
fall. While the other spirits fill the air and the water, she rises
from under ground. It is then a busy season for the wizards. In
every house you may hear them singing and praying, while they
conjure the spirits, seated in a mystic gloom at the back of the
hut, which is dimly lit by a lamp burning low. The hardest task of
all is to drive away Sedna, and this is reserved for the most
powerful enchanter. A rope is coiled on the floor of a large hut in
such a way as to leave a small opening at the top, which represents
the breathing hole of a seal. Two enchanters stand beside it, one of
them grasping a spear as if he were watching a seal-hole in winter,
the other holding the harpoon-line. A third sorcerer sits at the
back of the hut chanting a magic song to lure Sedna to the spot. Now
she is heard approaching under the floor of the hut, breathing
heavily; now she emerges at the hole; now she is harpooned and sinks
away in angry haste, dragging the harpoon with her, while the two
men hold on to the line with all their might. The struggle is
severe, but at last by a desperate wrench she tears herself away and
returns to her dwelling in Adlivun. When the harpoon is drawn up out
of the hole it is found to be splashed with blood, which the
enchanters proudly exhibit as a proof of their prowess. Thus Sedna
and the other evil spirits are at last driven away, and next day a
great festival is celebrated by old and young in honour of the
event. But they must still be cautious, for the wounded Sedna is
furious and will seize any one she may find outside of his hut; so
they all wear amulets on the top of their hoods to protect
themselves against her. These amulets consist of pieces of the first
garments that they wore after birth.

The Iroquois inaugurated the new year in January, February, or March
(the time varied) with a "festival of dreams" like that which the
Hurons observed on special occasions. The whole ceremonies lasted
several days, or even weeks, and formed a kind of saturnalia. Men
and women, variously disguised, went from wigwam to wigwam smashing
and throwing down whatever they came across. It was a time of
general license; the people were supposed to be out of their senses,
and therefore not to be responsible for what they did. Accordingly,
many seized the opportunity of paying off old scores by belabouring
obnoxious persons, drenching them with ice-cold water, and covering
them with filth or hot ashes. Others seized burning brands or coals
and flung them at the heads of the first persons they met. The only
way of escaping from these persecutors was to guess what they had
dreamed of. On one day of the festival the ceremony of driving away
evil spirits from the village took place. Men clothed in the skins
of wild beasts, their faces covered with hideous masks, and their
hands with the shell of the tortoise, went from hut to hut making
frightful noises; in every hut they took the fuel from the fire and
scattered the embers and ashes about the floor with their hands. The
general confession of sins which preceded the festival was probably
a preparation for the public expulsion of evil influences; it was a
way of stripping the people of their moral burdens, that these might
be collected and cast out.

In September the Incas of Peru celebrated a festival called Situa,
the object of which was to banish from the capital and its vicinity
all disease and trouble. The festival fell in September because the
rains begin about this time, and with the first rains there was
generally much sickness. As a preparation for the festival the
people fasted on the first day of the moon after the autumnal
equinox. Having fasted during the day, and the night being come,
they baked a coarse paste of maize. This paste was made of two
sorts. One was kneaded with the blood of children aged from five to
ten years, the blood being obtained by bleeding the children between
the eyebrows. These two kinds of paste were baked separately,
because they were for different uses. Each family assembled at the
house of the eldest brother to celebrate the feast; and those who
had no elder brother went to the house of their next relation of
greater age. On the same night all who had fasted during the day
washed their bodies, and taking a little of the blood-kneaded paste,
rubbed it over their head, face, breast, shoulders, arms and legs.
They did this in order that the paste might take away all their
infirmities. After this the head of the family anointed the
threshold with the same paste, and left it there as a token that the
inmates of the house had performed their ablutions and cleansed
their bodies. Meantime the High Priest performed the same ceremonies
in the temple of the Sun. As soon as the Sun rose, all the people
worshipped and besought him to drive all evils out of the city, and
then they broke their fast with the paste that had been kneaded
without blood. When they had paid their worship and broken their
fast, which they did at a stated hour, in order that all might adore
the Sun as one man, an Inca of the blood royal came forth from the
fortress, as a messenger of the Sun, richly dressed, with his mantle
girded round his body, and a lance in his hand. The lance was decked
with feathers of many hues, extending from the blade to the socket,
and fastened with rings of gold. He ran down the hill from the
fortress brandishing his lance, till he reached the centre of the
great square, where stood the golden urn, like a fountain, that was
used for the sacrifice of the fermented juice of the maize. Here
four other Incas of the blood royal awaited him, each with a lance
in his hand, and his mantle girded up to run. The messenger touched
their four lances with his lance, and told them that the Sun bade
them, as his messengers, drive the evils out of the city. The four
Incas then separated and ran down the four royal roads which led out
of the city to the four quarters of the world. While they ran, all
the people, great and small, came to the doors of their houses, and
with great shouts of joy and gladness shook their clothes, as if
they were shaking off dust, while they cried, "Let the evils be
gone. How greatly desired has this festival been by us. O Creator of
all things, permit us to reach another year, that we may see another
feast like this." After they had shaken their clothes, they passed
their hands over their heads, faces, arms, and legs, as if in the
act of washing. All this was done to drive the evils out of their
houses, that the messengers of the Sun might banish them from the
city; and it was done not only in the streets through which the
Incas ran, but generally in all quarters of the city. Moreover, they
all danced, the Inca himself amongst them, and bathed in the rivers
and fountains, saying that their maladies would come out of them.
Then they took great torches of straw, bound round with cords. These
they lighted, and passed from one to the other, striking each other
with them, and saying, "Let all harm go away." Meanwhile the runners
ran with their lances for a quarter of a league outside the city,
where they found four other Incas ready, who received the lances
from their hands and ran with them. Thus the lances were carried by
relays of runners for a distance of five or six leagues, at the end
of which the runners washed themselves and their weapons in rivers,
and set up the lances, in sign of a boundary within which the
banished evils might not return.

The negroes of Guinea annually banish the devil from all their towns
with much ceremony at a time set apart for the purpose. At Axim, on
the Gold Coast, this annual expulsion is preceded by a feast of
eight days, during which mirth and jollity, skipping, dancing, and
singing prevail, and "a perfect lampooning liberty is allowed, and
scandal so highly exalted, that they may freely sing of all the
faults, villanies, and frauds of their superiors as well as
inferiors, without punishment, or so much as the least
interruption." On the eighth day they hunt out the devil with a
dismal cry, running after him and pelting him with sticks, stones,
and whatever comes to hand. When they have driven him far enough out
of the town, they all return. In this way he is expelled from more
than a hundred towns at the same time. To make sure that he does not
return to their houses, the women wash and scour all their wooden
and earthen vessels, "to free them from all uncleanness and the
devil."

At Cape Coast Castle, on the Gold Coast, the ceremony was witnessed
on the ninth of October, 1844, by an Englishman, who has described
it as follows: "To-night the annual custom of driving the evil
spirit, Abonsam, out of the town has taken place. As soon as the
eight o'clock gun fired in the fort the people began firing muskets
in their houses, turning all their furniture out of doors, beating
about in every corner of the rooms with sticks, etc., and screaming
as loudly as possible, in order to frighten the devil. Being driven
out of the houses, as they imagine, they sallied forth into the
streets, throwing lighted torches about, shouting, screaming,
beating sticks together, rattling old pans, making the most horrid
noise, in order to drive him out of the town into the sea. The
custom is preceded by four weeks' dead silence; no gun is allowed to
be fired, no drum to be beaten, no palaver to be made between man
and man. If, during these weeks, two natives should disagree and
make a noise in the town, they are immediately taken before the king
and fined heavily. If a dog or pig, sheep or goat be found at large
in the street, it may be killed, or taken by anyone, the former
owner not being allowed to demand any compensation. This silence is
designed to deceive Abonsam, that, being off his guard, he may be
taken by surprise, and frightened out of the place. If anyone die
during the silence, his relatives are not allowed to weep until the
four weeks have been completed."

Sometimes the date of the annual expulsion of devils is fixed with
reference to the agricultural seasons. Thus among the Hos of
Togoland, in West Africa, the expulsion is performed annually before
the people partake of the new yams. The chiefs summon the priests
and magicians and tell them that the people are now to eat the new
yams and be merry, therefore they must cleanse the town and remove
the evils. Accordingly the evil spirits, witches, and all the ills
that infest the people are conjured into bundles of leaves and
creepers, fastened to poles, which are carried away and set up in
the earth on various roads outside the town. During the following
night no fire may be lit and no food eaten. Next morning the women
sweep out their hearths and houses, and deposit the sweepings on
broken wooden plates. Then the people pray, saying, "All ye
sicknesses that are in our body and plague us, we are come to-day to
throw you out." Thereupon they run as fast as they can in the
direction of Mount Adaklu, smiting their mouths and screaming, "Out
to-day! Out to-day! That which kills anybody, out to-day! Ye evil
spirits, out to-day! and all that causes our heads to ache, out
to-day! Anlo and Adaklu are the places whither all ill shall betake
itself!" When they have come to a certain tree on Mount Adaklu, they
throw everything away and return home.

At Kiriwina, in South-Eastern New Guinea, when the new yams had been
harvested, the people feasted and danced for many days, and a great
deal of property, such as armlets, native money, and so forth, was
displayed conspicuously on a platform erected for the purpose. When
the festivities were over, all the people gathered together and
expelled the spirits from the village by shouting, beating the posts
of the houses, and overturning everything under which a wily spirit
might be supposed to lurk. The explanation which the people gave to
a missionary was that they had entertained and feasted the spirits
and provided them with riches, and it was now time for them to take
their departure. Had they not seen the dances, and heard the songs,
and gorged themselves on the souls of the yams, and appropriated the
souls of the money and all the other fine things set out on the
platform? What more could the spirits want? So out they must go.

Among the Hos of North-Eastern India the great festival of the year
is the harvest home, held in January, when the granaries are full of
grain, and the people, to use their own expression, are full of
devilry. "They have a strange notion that at this period, men and
women are so overcharged with vicious propensities, that it is
absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let off steam
by allowing for a time full vent to the passions." The ceremonies
open with a sacrifice to the village god of three fowls, a cock and
two hens, one of which must be black. Along with them are offered
flowers of the palas tree (_Butea frondosa_), bread made from
rice-flour, and sesamum seeds. These offerings are presented by the
village priest, who prays that during the year about to begin they
and their children may be preserved from all misfortune and
sickness, and that they may have seasonable rain and good crops.
Prayer is also made in some places for the souls of the dead. At
this time an evil spirit is supposed to infest the place, and to get
rid of it men, women, and children go in procession round and
through every part of the village with sticks in their hands, as if
beating for game, singing a wild chant, and shouting vociferously,
till they feel assured that the evil spirit must have fled. Then
they give themselves up to feasting and drinking rice-beer, till
they are in a fit state for the wild debauch which follows. The
festival now "becomes a saturnale, during which servants forget
their duty to their masters, children their reverence for parents,
men their respect for women, and women all notions of modesty,
delicacy, and gentleness; they become raging bacchantes." Usually
the Hos are quiet and reserved in manner, decorous and gentle to
women. But during this festival "their natures appear to undergo a
temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross
language, and parents their children; men and women become almost
like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities." The
Mundaris, kinsmen and neighbours of the Hos, keep the festival in
much the same manner. "The resemblance to a Saturnale is very
complete, as at this festival the farm labourers are feasted by
their masters, and allowed the utmost freedom of speech in
addressing them. It is the festival of the harvest home; the
termination of one year's toil, and a slight respite from it before
they commence again."

Amongst some of the Hindoo Koosh tribes, as among the Hos and
Mundaris, the expulsion of devils takes place after harvest. When
the last crop of autumn has been got in, it is thought necessary to
drive away evil spirits from the granaries. A kind of porridge is
eaten, and the head of the family takes his matchlock and fires it
into the floor. Then, going outside, he sets to work loading and
firing till his powder-horn is exhausted, while all his neighbours
are similarly employed. The next day is spent in rejoicings. In
Chitral this festival is called "devil-driving." On the other hand
the Khonds of India expel the devils at seed-time instead of at
harvest. At this time they worship Pitteri Pennu, the god of
increase and of gain in every shape. On the first day of the
festival a rude car is made of a basket set upon a few sticks, tied
upon the bamboo rollers for wheels. The priest takes this car first
to the house of the lineal head of the tribe, to whom precedence is
given in all ceremonies connected with agriculture. Here he receives
a little of each kind of seed and some feathers. He then takes the
car to all the other houses in the village, each of which
contributes the same things. Lastly, the car is conducted to a field
without the village, attended by all the young men, who beat each
other and strike the air violently with long sticks. The seed thus
carried out is called the share of the "evil spirits, spoilers of
the seed." "These are considered to be driven out with the car; and
when it and its contents are abandoned to them, they are held to
have no excuse for interfering with the rest of the seed-corn."

The people of Bali, an island to the east of Java, have periodical
expulsions of devils upon a great scale. Generally the time chosen
for the expulsion is the day of the "dark moon" in the ninth month.
When the demons have been long unmolested the country is said to be
"warm," and the priest issues orders to expel them by force, lest
the whole of Bali should be rendered uninhabitable. On the day
appointed the people of the village or district assemble at the
principal temple. Here at a cross-road offerings are set out for the
devils. After prayers have been recited by the priests, the blast of
a horn summons the devils to partake of the meal which has been
prepared for them. At the same time a number of men step forward and
light their torches at the holy lamp which burns before the chief
priest. Immediately afterwards, followed by the bystanders, they
spread in all directions and march through the streets and lanes
crying, "Depart! go away!" Wherever they pass, the people who have
stayed at home hasten, by a deafening clatter on doors, beams,
rice-blocks, and so forth, to take their share in the expulsion of
devils. Thus chased from the houses, the fiends flee to the banquet
which has been set out for them; but here the priest receives them
with curses which finally drive them from the district. When the
last devil has taken his departure, the uproar is succeeded by a
dead silence, which lasts during the next day also. The devils, it
is thought, are anxious to return to their old homes, and in order
to make them think that Bali is not Bali but some desert island, no
one may stir from his own abode for twenty-four hours. Even ordinary
household work, including cooking, is discontinued. Only the
watchmen may show themselves in the streets. Wreaths of thorns and
leaves are hung at all the entrances to warn strangers from
entering. Not till the third day is this state of siege raised, and
even then it is forbidden to work at the rice-fields or to buy and
sell in the market. Most people still stay at home, whiling away the
time with cards and dice.

In Tonquin a _theckydaw_ or general expulsion of maleyolent spirits
commonly took place once a year, especially if there was a great
mortality amongst men, the elephants or horses of the general's
stable, or the cattle of the country, "the cause of which they
attribute to the malicious spirits of such men as have been put to
death for treason, rebellion, and conspiring the death of the king,
general, or princes, and that in revenge of the punishment they have
suffered, they are bent to destroy everything and commit horrible
violence. To prevent which their superstition has suggested to them
the institution of this _theckydaw,_ as a proper means to drive the
devil away, and purge the country of evil spirits." The day
appointed for the ceremony was generally the twenty-fifth of
February, one month after the beginning of the new year, which fell
on the twenty-fifth of January. The intermediate month was a season
of feasting, merry-making of all kinds, and general licence. During
the whole month the great seal was kept shut up in a box, face
downwards, and the law was, as it were, laid asleep. All courts of
justice were closed; debtors could not be seized; small crimes, such
as petty larceny, fighting, and assault, escaped with impunity; only
treason and murder were taken account of and the malefactors
detained till the great seal should come into operation again. At
the close of the saturnalia the wicked spirits were driven away.
Great masses of troops and artillery having been drawn up with
flying colours and all the pomp of war, "the general beginneth then
to offer meat offerings to the criminal devils and malevolent
spirits (for it is usual and customary likewise amongst them to
feast the condemned before their execution), inviting them to eat
and drink, when presently he accuses them in a strange language, by
characters and figures, etc., of many offences and crimes committed
by them, as to their having disquieted the land, killed his
elephants and horses, etc., for all which they justly deserve to be
chastised and banished the country. Whereupon three great guns are
fired as the last signal; upon which all the artillery and musquets
are discharged, that, by their most terrible noise the devils may be
driven away; and they are so blind as to believe for certain, that
they really and effectually put them to flight."

In Cambodia the expulsion of evil spirits took place in March. Bits
of broken statues and stones, considered as the abode of the demons,
were collected and brought to the capital. Here as many elephants
were collected as could be got together. On the evening of the full
moon volleys of musketry were fired and the elephants charged
furiously to put the devils to flight. The ceremony was performed on
three successive days. In Siam the banishment of demons is annually
carried into effect on the last day of the old year. A signal gun is
fired from the palace; it is answered from the next station, and so
on from station to station, till the firing has reached the outer
gate of the city. Thus the demons are driven out step by step. As
soon as this is done a consecrated rope is fastened round the
circuit of the city walls to prevent the banished demons from
returning. The rope is made of tough couch-grass and is painted in
alternate stripes of red, yellow, and blue.

Annual expulsions of demons, witches, or evil influences appear to
have been common among the heathen of Europe, if we may judge from
the relics of such customs among their descendants at the present
day. Thus among the heathen Wotyaks, a Finnish people of Eastern
Russia, all the young girls of the village assemble on the last day
of the year or on New Year's Day, armed with sticks, the ends of
which are split in nine places. With these they beat every corner of
the house and yard, saying, "We are driving Satan out of the
village." Afterwards the sticks are thrown into the river below the
village, and as they float down stream Satan goes with them to the
next village, from which he must be driven out in turn. In some
villages the expulsion is managed otherwise. The unmarried men
receive from every house in the village groats, flesh, and brandy.
These they take to the fields, light a fire under a fir-tree, boil
the groats, and eat of the food they have brought with them, after
pronouncing the words, "Go away into the wilderness, come not into
the house." Then they return to the village and enter every house
where there are young women. They take hold of the young women and
throw them into the snow, saying, "May the spirits of disease leave
you." The remains of the groats and the other food are then
distributed among all the houses in proportion to the amount that
each contributed, and each family consumes its share. According to a
Wotyak of the Malmyz district the young men throw into the snow
whomever they find in the houses, and this is called "driving out
Satan"; moreover, some of the boiled groats are cast into the fire
with the words, "O god, afflict us not with sickness and pestilence,
give us not up as a prey to the spirits of the wood." But the most
antique form of the ceremony is that observed by the Wotyaks of the
Kasan Government. First of all a sacrifice is offered to the Devil
at noon. Then all the men assemble on horseback in the centre of the
village, and decide with which house they shall begin. When this
question, which often gives rise to hot disputes, is settled, they
tether their horses to the paling, and arm themselves with whips,
clubs of lime-wood and bundles of lighted twigs. The lighted twigs
are believed to have the greatest terrors for Satan. Thus armed,
they proceed with frightful cries to beat every corner of the house
and yard, then shut the door, and spit at the ejected fiend. So they
go from house to house, till the Devil has been driven from every
one. Then they mount their horses and ride out of the village,
yelling wildly and brandishing their clubs in every direction.
Outside of the village they fling away the clubs and spit once more
at the Devil. The Cheremiss, another Finnish people of Eastern
Russia, chase Satan from their dwellings by beating the walls with
cudgels of lime-wood. For the same purpose they fire guns, stab the
ground with knives, and insert burning chips of wood in the
crevices. Also they leap over bonfires, shaking out their garments
as they do so; and in some districts they blow on long trumpets of
lime-tree bark to frighten him away. When he has fled to the wood,
they pelt the trees with some of the cheese-cakes and eggs which
furnished the feast.

In Christian Europe the old heathen custom of expelling the powers
of evil at certain times of the year has survived to modern times.
Thus in some villages of Calabria the month of March is inaugurated
with the expulsion of the witches. It takes place at night to the
sound of the church bells, the people running about the streets and
crying, "March is come." They say that the witches roam about in
March, and the ceremony is repeated every Friday evening during the
month. Often, as might have been anticipated, the ancient pagan rite
has attached itself to church festivals. In Albania on Easter Eve
the young people light torches of resinous wood and march in
procession, swinging them, through the village. At last they throw
the torches into the river, crying, "Ha, Kore! we throw you into the
river, like these torches, that you may never return." Silesian
peasants believe that on Good Friday the witches go their rounds and
have great power for mischief. Hence about Oels, near Strehlitz, the
people on that day arm themselves with old brooms and drive the
witches from house and home, from farmyard and cattle-stall, making
a great uproar and clatter as they do so.

In Central Europe the favourite time for expelling the witches is,
or was, Walpurgis Night, the Eve of May Day, when the baleful powers
of these mischievous beings were supposed to be at their height. In
the Tyrol, for example, as in other places, the expulsion of the
powers of evil at this season goes by the name of "Burning out the
Witches." It takes place on May Day, but people have been busy with
their preparations for days before. On a Thursday at midnight
bundles are made up of resinous splinters, black and red spotted
hemlock, caperspurge, rosemary, and twigs of the sloe. These are
kept and burned on May Day by men who must first have received
plenary absolution from the Church. On the last three days of April
all the houses are cleansed and fumigated with juniper berries and
rue. On May Day, when the evening bell has rung and the twilight is
falling, the ceremony of "Burning out the Witches" begins. Men and
boys make a racket with whips, bells, pots, and pans; the women
carry censers; the dogs are unchained and run barking and yelping
about. As soon as the church bells begin to ring, the bundles of
twigs, fastened on poles, are set on fire and the incense is
ignited. Then all the house-bells and dinner-bells are rung, pots
and pans are clashed, dogs bark, every one must make a noise. And
amid this hubbub all scream at the pitch of their voices:


"_Witch flee, flee from here, or it will go ill with thee._"


Then they run seven times round the houses, the yards, and the
village. So the witches are smoked out of their lurking-places and
driven away. The custom of expelling the witches on Walpurgis Night
is still, or was down to recent years, observed in many parts of
Bavaria and among the Germans of Bohemia. Thus in the Böhmer-wald
Mountains all the young fellows of the village assemble after sunset
on some height, especially at a cross-road, and crack whips for a
while in unison with all their strength. This drives away the
witches; for so far as the sound of the whips is heard, these
maleficent beings can do no harm. In some places, while the young
men are cracking their whips, the herdsmen wind their horns, and the
long-drawn notes, heard far off in the silence of night, are very
effectual for banning the witches.

Another witching time is the period of twelve days between Christmas
and Epiphany. Hence in some parts of Silesia the people burn
pine-resin all night long between Christmas and the New Year in
order that the pungent smoke may drive witches and evil spirits far
away from house and homestead; and on Christmas Eve and New Year's
Eve they fire shots over fields and meadows, into shrubs and trees,
and wrap straw round the fruit-trees, to prevent the spirits from
doing them harm. On New Year's Eve, which is Saint Sylvester's Day,
Bohemian lads, armed with guns, form themselves into circles and
fire thrice into the air. This is called "Shooting the Witches" and
is supposed to frighten the witches away. The last of the mystic
twelve days is Epiphany or Twelfth Night, and it has been selected
as a proper season for the expulsion of the powers of evil in
various parts of Europe. Thus at Brunnen, on the Lake of Lucerne,
boys go about in procession on Twelfth Night carrying torches and
making a great noise with horns, bells, whips, and so forth to
frighten away two female spirits of the wood, Strudeli and
Strätteli. The people think that if they do not make enough noise,
there will be little fruit that year. Again, in Labruguière, a
canton of Southern France, on the eve of Twelfth Day the people run
through the streets, jangling bells, clattering kettles, and doing
everything to make a discordant noise. Then by the light of torches
and blazing faggots they set up a prodigious hue and cry, an
ear-splitting uproar, hoping thereby to chase all the wandering
ghosts and devils from the town.




LVII. Public Scapegoats



1. The Expulsion of Embodied Evils

THUS far we have dealt with that class of the general expulsion of
evils which I have called direct or immediate. In this class the
evils are invisible, at least to common eyes, and the mode of
deliverance consists for the most part in beating the empty air and
raising such a hubbub as may scare the mischievous spirits and put
them to flight. It remains to illustrate the second class of
expulsions, in which the evil influences are embodied in a visible
form or are at least supposed to be loaded upon a material medium,
which acts as a vehicle to draw them off from the people, village,
or town.

The Pomos of California celebrate an expulsion of devils every seven
years, at which the devils are represented by disguised men. "Twenty
or thirty men array themselves in harlequin rig and barbaric paint,
and put vessels of pitch on their heads; then they secretly go out
into the surrounding mountains. These are to personify the devils. A
herald goes up to the top of the assembly-house, and makes a speech
to the multitude. At a signal agreed upon in the evening the
masqueraders come in from the mountains, with the vessels of pitch
flaming on their heads, and with all the frightful accessories of
noise, motion, and costume which the savage mind can devise in
representation of demons. The terrified women and children flee for
life, the men huddle them inside a circle, and, on the principle of
fighting the devil with fire, they swing blazing firebrands in the
air, yell, whoop, and make frantic dashes at the marauding and
bloodthirsty devils, so creating a terrific spectacle, and striking
great fear into the hearts of the assembled hundreds of women, who
are screaming and fainting and clinging to their valorous
protectors. Finally the devils succeed in getting into the
assembly-house, and the bravest of the men enter and hold a parley
with them. As a conclusion of the whole farce, the men summon
courage, the devils are expelled from the assembly-house, and with a
prodigious row and racket of sham fighting are chased away into the
mountains." In spring, as soon as the willow-leaves were full grown
on the banks of the river, the Mandan Indians celebrated their great
annual festival, one of the features of which was the expulsion of
the devil. A man, painted black to represent the devil, entered the
village from the prairie, chased and frightened the women, and acted
the part of a buffalo bull in the buffalo dance, the object of which
was to ensure a plentiful supply of buffaloes during the ensuing
year. Finally he was chased from the village, the women pursuing him
with hisses and gibes, beating him with sticks, and pelting him with
dirt.

Some of the native tribes of Central Queensland believe in a noxious
being called Molonga, who prowls unseen and would kill men and
violate women if certain ceremonies were not performed. These
ceremonies last for five nights and consist of dances, in which only
men, fantastically painted and adorned, take part. On the fifth
night Molonga himself, personified by a man tricked out with red
ochre and feathers and carrying a long feather-tipped spear, rushes
forth from the darkness at the spectators and makes as if he would
run them through. Great is the excitement, loud are the shrieks and
shouts, but after another feigned attack the demon vanishes in the
gloom. On the last night of the year the palace of the Kings of
Cambodia is purged of devils. Men painted as fiends are chased by
elephants about the palace courts. When they have been expelled, a
consecrated thread of cotton is stretched round the palace to keep
them out. In Munzerabad, a district of Mysore in Southern India,
when cholera or smallpox has broken out in a parish, the inhabitants
assemble and conjure the demon of the disease into a wooden image,
which they carry, generally at midnight, into the next parish. The
inhabitants of that parish in like manner pass the image on to their
neighbours, and thus the demon is expelled from one village after
another, until he comes to the bank of a river into which he is
finally thrown.

Oftener, however, the expelled demons are not represented at all,
but are understood to be present invisibly in the material and
visible vehicle which conveys them away. Here, again, it will be
convenient to distinguish between occasional and periodical
expulsions. We begin with the former.



2. The Occasional Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle

THE VEHICLE which conveys away the demons may be of various kinds. A
common one is a little ship or boat. Thus, in the southern district
of the island of Ceram, when a whole village suffers from sickness,
a small ship is made and filled with rice, tobacco, eggs, and so
forth, which have been contributed by all the people. A little sail
is hoisted on the ship. When all is ready, a man calls out in a very
loud voice, "O all ye sicknesses, ye smallpoxes, agues, measles,
etc., who have visited us so long and wasted us so sorely, but who
now cease to plague us, we have made ready this ship for you, and we
have furnished you with provender sufficient for the voyage. Ye
shall have no lack of food nor of betel-leaves nor of areca nuts nor
of tobacco. Depart, and sail away from us directly; never come near
us again; but go to a land which is far from here. Let all the tides
and winds waft you speedily thither, and so convey you thither that
for the time to come we may live sound and well, and that we may
never see the sun rise on you again." Then ten or twelve men carry
the vessel to the shore, and let it drift away with the land-breeze,
feeling convinced that they are free from sickness for ever, or at
least till the next time. If sickness attacks them again, they are
sure it is not the same sickness, but a different one, which in due
time they dismiss in the same manner. When the demon-laden bark is
lost to sight, the bearers return to the village, whereupon a man
cries out, "The sicknesses are now gone, vanished, expelled, and
sailed away." At this all the people come running out of their
houses, passing the word from one to the other with great joy,
beating on gongs and on tinkling instruments.

Similar ceremonies are commonly resorted to in other East Indian
islands. Thus in Timor-laut, to mislead the demons who are causing
sickness, a small proa, containing the image of a man and
provisioned for a long voyage, is allowed to drift away with wind
and tide. As it is being launched, the people cry, "O sickness, go
from here; turn back; what do you here in this poor land?" Three
days after this ceremony a pig is killed, and part of the flesh is
offered to Dudilaa, who lives in the sun. One of the oldest men
says, "Old sir, I beseech you make well the grand-children,
children, women, and men, that we may be able to eat pork and rice
and to drink palmwine. I will keep my promise. Eat your share, and
make all the people in the village well." If the proa is stranded at
any inhabited spot, the sickness will break out there. Hence a
stranded proa excites much alarm amongst the coast population, and
they immediately burn it, because demons fly from fire. In the
island of Buru the proa which carries away the demons of disease is
about twenty feet long, rigged out with sails, oars, anchor, and so
on, and well stocked with provisions. For a day and a night the
people beat gongs and drums, and rush about to frighten the demons.
Next morning ten stalwart young men strike the people with branches,
which have been previously dipped in an earthen pot of water. As
soon as they have done so, they run down to the beach, put the
branches on board the proa, launch another boat in great haste, and
tow the disease-burdened bark far out to sea. There they cast it
off, and one of them calls out, "Grandfather Smallpox, go away--go
willingly away--go visit another land; we have made you food ready
for the voyage, we have now nothing more to give." When they have
landed, all the people bathe together in the sea. In this ceremony
the reason for striking the people with the branches is clearly to
rid them of the disease-demons, which are then supposed to be
transferred to the branches. Hence the haste with which the branches
are deposited in the proa and towed away to sea. So in the inland
districts of Ceram, when smallpox or other sickness is raging, the
priest strikes all the houses with consecrated branches, which are
then thrown into the river, to be carried down to the sea; exactly
as amongst the Wotyaks of Russia the sticks which have been used for
expelling the devils from the village are thrown into the river,
that the current may sweep the baleful burden away. The plan of
putting puppets in the boat to represent sick persons, in order to
lure the demons after them, is not uncommon. For example, most of
the pagan tribes on the coast of Borneo seek to drive away epidemic
disease as follows. They carve one or more rough human images from
the pith of the sago palm and place them on a small raft or boat or
full-rigged Malay ship together with rice and other food. The boat
is decked with blossoms of the areca palm and with ribbons made from
its leaves, and thus adorned the little craft is allowed to float
out to sea with the ebb-tide, bearing, as the people fondly think or
hope, the sickness away with it.

Often the vehicle which carries away the collected demons or ills of
a whole community is an animal or scapegoat. In the Central
Provinces of India, when cholera breaks out in a village, every one
retires after sunset to his house. The priests then parade the
streets, taking from the roof of each house a straw, which is burnt
with an offering of rice, ghee, and turmeric, at some shrine to the
east of the village. Chickens daubed with vermilion are driven away
in the direction of the smoke, and are believed to carry the disease
with them. If they fail, goats are tried, and last of all pigs. When
cholera rages among the Bhars, Mallans, and Kurmis of India, they
take a goat or a buffalo--in either case the animal must be a
female, and as black as possible--then having tied some grain,
cloves, and red lead in a yellow cloth on its back they turn it out
of the village. The animal is conducted beyond the boundary and not
allowed to return. Sometimes the buffalo is marked with a red
pigment and driven to the next village, where he carries the plague
with him.

Amongst the Dinkas, a pastoral people of the White Nile, each family
possesses a sacred cow. When the country is threatened with war,
famine, or any other public calamity, the chiefs of the village
require a particular family to surrender their sacred cow to serve
as a scapegoat. The animal is driven by the women to the brink of
the river and across it to the other bank, there to wander in the
wilderness and fall a prey to ravening beasts. Then the women return
in silence and without looking behind them; were they to cast a
backward glance, they imagine that the ceremony would have no
effect. In 1857, when the Aymara Indians of Bolivia and Peru were
suffering from a plague, they loaded a black llama with the clothes
of the plague-stricken people, sprinkled brandy on the clothes, and
then turned the animal loose on the mountains, hoping that it would
carry the pest away with it.

Occasionally the scapegoat is a man. For example, from time to time
the gods used to warn the King of Uganda that his foes the Banyoro
were working magic against him and his people to make them die of
disease. To avert such a catastrophe the king would send a scapegoat
to the frontier of Bunyoro, the land of the enemy. The scapegoat
consisted of either a man and a boy or a woman and her child, chosen
because of some mark or bodily defect, which the gods had noted and
by which the victims were to be recognised. With the human victims
were sent a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog; and a strong guard
escorted them to the land which the god had indicated. There the
limbs of the victims were broken and they were left to die a
lingering death in the enemy's country, being too crippled to crawl
back to Uganda. The disease or plague was thought to have been thus
transferred to the victims and to have been conveyed back in their
persons to the land from which it came.

Some of the aboriginal tribes of China, as a protection against
pestilence, select a man of great muscular strength to act the part
of scapegoat. Having besmeared his face with paint, he performs many
antics with the view of enticing all pestilential and noxious
influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a
priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women
beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the
town or village. In the Punjaub a cure for the murrain is to hire a
man of the Chamar caste, turn his face away from the village, brand
him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle taking
the murrain with him. He must not look back.



3. The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle

THE MEDIATE expulsion of evils by means of a scapegoat or other
material vehicle, like the immediate expulsion of them in invisible
form, tends to become periodic, and for a like reason. Thus every
year, generally in March, the people of Leti, Moa, and Lakor,
islands of the Indian Archipelago, send away all their diseases to
sea. They make a proa about six feet long, rig it with sails, oars,
rudder, and other gear, and every family deposits in its some rice,
fruit, a fowl, two eggs, insects that ravage the fields, and so on.
Then they let it drift away to sea, saying, "Take away from here all
kinds of sickness, take them to other islands, to other lands,
distribute them in places that lie eastward, where the sun rises."
The Biajas of Borneo annually send to sea a little bark laden with
the sins and misfortunes of the people. The crew of any ship that
falls in with the ill-omened bark at sea will suffer all the sorrows
with which it is laden. A like custom is annually observed by the
Dusuns of the Tuaran district in British North Borneo. The ceremony
is the most important of the whole year. Its aim is to bring good
luck to the village during the ensuing year by solemnly expelling
all the evil spirits that may have collected in or about the houses
throughout the last twelve months. The task of routing out the
demons and banishing them devolves chiefly on women. Dressed in
their finest array, they go in procession through the village. One
of them carries a small sucking pig in a basket on her back; and all
of them bear wands, with which they belabour the little pig at the
appropriate moment; its squeals help to attract the vagrant spirits.
At every house the women dance and sing, clashing castanets or
cymbals of brass and jingling bunches of little brass bells in both
hands. When the performance has been repeated at every house in the
village, the procession defiles down to the river, and all the evil
spirits, which the performers have chased from the houses, follow
them to the edge of the water. There a raft has been made ready and
moored to the bank. It contains offerings of food, cloth,
cooking-pots, and swords; and the deck is crowded with figures of
men, women, animals, and birds, all made out of the leaves of the
sago palm. The evil spirits now embark on the raft, and when they
are all aboard, it is pushed off and allowed to float down with the
current, carrying the demons with it. Should the raft run aground
near the village, it is shoved off with all speed, lest the
invisible passengers should seize the opportunity of landing and
returning to the village. Finally, the sufferings of the little pig,
whose squeals served to decoy the demons from their lurking-places,
are terminated by death, for it is killed and its carcase thrown
away.

Every year, at the beginning of the dry season, the Nicobar
Islanders carry the model of a ship through their villages. The
devils are chased out of the huts, and driven on board the little
ship, which is then launched and suffered to sail away with the
wind. The ceremony has been described by a catechist, who witnessed
it at Car Nicobar in July 1897. For three days the people were busy
preparing two very large floating cars, shaped like canoes, fitted
with sails, and loaded with certain leaves, which possessed the
valuable property of expelling devils. While the young people were
thus engaged, the exorcists and the elders sat in a house singing
songs by turns; but often they would come forth, pace the beach
armed with rods, and forbid the devil to enter the village. The
fourth day of the solemnity bore a name which means "Expelling the
Devil by Sails." In the evening all the villagers assembled, the
women bringing baskets of ashes and bunches of devil-expelling
leaves. These leaves were then distributed to everybody, old and
young. When all was ready, a band of robust men, attended by a guard
of exorcists, carried one of the cars down to the sea on the right
side of the village graveyard, and set it floating in the water. As
soon as they had returned, another band of men carried the other car
to the beach and floated it similarly in the sea to the left of the
graveyard. The demon-laden barks being now launched, the women threw
ashes from the shore, and the whole crowd shouted, saying, "Fly
away, devil, fly away, never come again!" The wind and the tide
being favourable, the canoes sailed quickly away; and that night all
the people feasted together with great joy, because the devil had
departed in the direction of Chowra. A similar expulsion of devils
takes place once a year in other Nicobar villages; but the
ceremonies are held at different times in different places.

Amongst many of the aboriginal tribes of China, a great festival is
celebrated in the third month of every year. It is held by way of a
general rejoicing over what the people believe to be a total
annihilation of the ills of the past twelve months. The destruction
is supposed to be effected in the following way. A large earthenware
jar filled with gunpowder, stones, and bits of iron is buried in the
earth. A train of gunpowder, communicating with the jar, is then
laid; and a match being applied, the jar and its contents are blown
up. The stones and bits of iron represent the ills and disasters of
the past year, and the dispersion of them by the explosion is
believed to remove the ills and disasters themselves. The festival
is attended with much revelling and drunkenness.

At Old Calabar on the coast of Guinea, the devils and ghosts are, or
used to be, publicly expelled once in two years. Among the spirits
thus driven from their haunts are the souls of all the people who
died since the last lustration of the town. About three weeks or a
month before the expulsion, which according to one account takes
place in the month of November, rude effigies representing men and
animals, such as crocodiles, leopards, elephants, bullocks, and
birds, are made of wicker-work or wood, and being hung with strips
of cloth and bedizened with gew-gaws, are set before the door of
every house. About three o'clock in the morning of the day appointed
for the ceremony the whole population turns out into the streets,
and proceeds with a deafening uproar and in a state of the wildest
excitement to drive all lurking devils and ghosts into the effigies,
in order that they may be banished with them from the abodes of men.
For this purpose bands of people roam through the streets knocking
on doors, firing guns, beating drums, blowing on horns, ringing
bells, clattering pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might
and main, in short making all the noise it is possible for them to
raise. The hubbub goes on till the approach of dawn, when it
gradually subsides and ceases altogether at sunrise. By this time
the houses have been thoroughly swept, and all the frightened
spirits are supposed to have huddled into the effigies or their
fluttering drapery. In these wicker figures are also deposited the
sweepings of the houses and the ashes of yesterday's fires. Then the
demon-laden images are hastily snatched up, carried in tumultuous
procession down to the brink of the river, and thrown into the water
to the tuck of drums. The ebb-tide bears them away seaward, and thus
the town is swept clean of ghosts and devils for another two years.

Similar annual expulsions of embodied evils are not unknown in
Europe. On the evening of Easter Sunday the gypsies of Southern
Europe take a wooden vessel like a band-box, which rests cradle-wise
on two cross pieces of wood. In this they place herbs and simples,
together with the dried carcase of a snake, or lizard, which every
person present must first have touched with his fingers. The vessel
is then wrapt in white and red wool, carried by the oldest man from
tent to tent, and finally thrown into running water, not, however,
before every member of the band has spat into it once, and the
sorceress has uttered some spells over it. They believe that by
performing this ceremony they dispel all the illnesses that would
otherwise have afflicted them in the course of the year; and that if
any one finds the vessel and opens it out of curiosity, he and his
will be visited by all the maladies which the others have escaped.

The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year
are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the
Garos of Assam, "besides the sacrifices for individual cases of
illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year
by a whole community or village, and are intended to safeguard its
members from dangers of the forest, and from sickness and mishap
during the coming twelve months. The principal of these is the
Asongtata ceremony. Close to the outskirts of every big village a
number of stones may be noticed stuck into the ground, apparently
without order or method. These are known by the name of _asong,_ and
on them is offered the sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The
sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later, that of a
_langur_ (_Entellus_ monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered
necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and
is led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the
village. It is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled
villagers, meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to
frighten and drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up
their residence within. The round of the village having been made in
this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the
village, killed by a blow of a _dao,_ which disembowels it, and then
crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified
animal long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form _chevaux de
frise_ round about it. These commemorate the days when such defences
surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and
they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from
the wild animals of the forest. The _langur_ required for the
purpose is hunted down some days before, but should it be found
impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take its place; a hulock
may not be used." Here the crucified ape or rat is the public
scapegoat, which by its vicarious sufferings and death relieves the
people from all sickness and mishap in the coming year.

Again, on one day of the year the Bhotiyas of Juhar, in the Western
Himalayas, take a dog, intoxicate him with spirits and bhang or
hemp, and having fed him with sweetmeats, lead him round the village
and let him loose. They then chase and kill him with sticks and
stones, and believe that, when they have done so, no disease or
misfortune will visit the village during the year. In some parts of
Breadalbane it was formerly the custom on New Year's Day to take a
dog to the door, give him a bit of bread, and drive him out, saying,
"Get away, you dog! Whatever death of men or loss of cattle would
happen in this house to the end of the present year, may it all
light on your head!" On the Day of Atonement, which was the tenth
day of the seventh month, the Jewish high-priest laid both his hands
on the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of
the Children of Israel, and, having thereby transferred the sins of
the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically
laid, may also be a human being. At Onitsha, on the Niger, two human
beings used to be annually sacrificed to take away the sins of the
land. The victims were purchased by public subscription. All persons
who, during the past year, had fallen into gross sins, such as
incendiarism, theft, adultery, witchcraft, and so forth, were
expected to contribute 28 _ngugas,_ or a little over £2. The money
thus collected was taken into the interior of the country and
expended in the purchase of two sickly persons "to be offered as a
sacrifice for all these abominable crimes--one for the land and one
for the river." A man from a neighbouring town was hired to put them
to death. On the twenty-seventh of February 1858 the Rev. J. C.
Taylor witnessed the sacrifice of one of these victims. The sufferer
was a woman, about nineteen or twenty years of age. They dragged her
alive along the ground, face downwards, from the king's house to the
river, a distance of two miles, the crowds who accompanied her
crying, "Wickedness! wickedness!" The intention was "to take away
the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a
merciless manner, as if the weight of all their wickedness was thus
carried away." Similar customs are said to be still secretly
practised every year by many tribes in the delta of the Niger in
spite of the vigilance of the British Government. Among the Yoruba
negroes of West Africa "the human victim chosen for sacrifice, and
who may be either a freeborn or a slave, a person of noble or
wealthy parentage, or one of humble birth, is, after he has been
chosen and marked out for the purpose, called an _Oluwo._ He is
always well fed and nourished and supplied with whatever he should
desire during the period of his confinement. When the occasion
arrives for him to be sacrificed and offered up, he is commonly led
about and paraded through the streets of the town or city of the
Sovereign who would sacrifice him for the well-being of his
government and of every family and individual under it, in order
that he might carry off the sin, guilt, misfortune and death of all
without exception. Ashes and chalk would be employed to hide his
identity by the one being freely thrown over his head, and his face
painted with the latter, whilst individuals would often rush out of
their houses to lay their hands upon him that they might thus
transfer to him their sin, guilt, trouble, and death." This parade
over, he is taken to an inner sanctuary and beheaded. His last words
or dying groans are the signal for an outburst of joy among the
people assembled outside, who believe that the sacrifice has been
accepted and the divine wrath appeased.

In Siam it used to be the custom on one day of the year to single
out a woman broken down by debauchery, and carry her on a litter
through all the streets to the music of drums and hautboys. The mob
insulted her and pelted her with dirt; and after having carried her
through the whole city, they threw her on a dunghill or a hedge of
thorns outside the ramparts, forbidding her ever to enter the walls
again. They believed that the woman thus drew upon herself all the
malign influences of the air and of evil spirits. The Bataks of
Sumatra offer either a red horse or a buffalo as a public sacrifice
to purify the land and obtain the favour of the gods. Formerly, it
is said, a man was bound to the same stake as the buffalo, and when
they killed the animal, the man was driven away; no one might
receive him, converse with him, or give him food. Doubtless he was
supposed to carry away the sins and misfortunes of the people.

Sometimes the scapegoat is a divine animal. The people of Malabar
share the Hindoo reverence for the cow, to kill and eat which "they
esteem to be a crime as heinous as homicide or wilful murder."
Nevertheless the "Bramans transfer the sins of the people into one
or more Cows, which are then carry'd away, both the Cows and the
Sins wherewith these Beasts are charged, to what place the Braman
shall appoint." When the ancient Egyptians sacrificed a bull, they
invoked upon its head all the evils that might otherwise befall
themselves and the land of Egypt, and thereupon they either sold the
bull's head to the Greeks or cast it into the river. Now, it cannot
be said that in the times known to us the Egyptians worshipped bulls
in general, for they seem to have commonly killed and eaten them.
But a good many circumstances point to the conclusion that
originally all cattle, bulls as well as cows, were held sacred by
the Egyptians. For not only were all cows esteemed holy by them and
never sacrificed, but even bulls might not be sacrificed unless they
had certain natural marks; a priest examined every bull before it
was sacrificed; if it had the proper marks, he put his seal on the
animal in token that it might be sacrificed; and if a man sacrificed
a bull which had not been sealed, he was put to death. Moreover, the
worship of the black bulls Apis and Mnevis, especially the former,
played an important part in Egyptian religion; all bulls that died a
natural death were carefully buried in the suburbs of the cities,
and their bones were afterwards collected from all parts of Egypt
and interred in a single spot; and at the sacrifice of a bull in the
great rites of Isis all the worshippers beat their breasts and
mourned. On the whole, then, we are perhaps entitled to infer that
bulls were originally, as cows were always, esteemed sacred by the
Egyptians, and that the slain bull upon whose head they laid the
misfortunes of the people was once a divine scapegoat. It seems not
improbable that the lamb annually slain by the Madis of Central
Africa is a divine scapegoat, and the same supposition may partly
explain the Zuni sacrifice of the turtle.

Lastly, the scapegoat may be a divine man. Thus, in November the
Gonds of India worship Ghansyam Deo, the protector of the crops, and
at the festival the god himself is said to descend on the head of
one of the worshippers, who is suddenly seized with a kind of fit
and, after staggering about, rushes off into the jungle, where it is
believed that, if left to himself, he would die mad. However, they
bring him back, but he does not recover his senses for one or two
days. The people think that one man is thus singled out as a
scapegoat for the sins of the rest of the village. In the temple of
the Moon the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of
sacred slaves, of whom many were inspired and prophesied. When one
of these men exhibited more than usual symptoms of inspiration or
insanity, and wandered solitary up and down the woods, like the Gond
in the jungle, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and
maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was
anointed with unguents and led forth to be sacrificed. A man whose
business it was to slay these human victims and to whom practice had
given dexterity, advanced from the crowd and thrust a sacred spear
into the victim's side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which
the slain man fell, omens were drawn as to the welfare of the
commonwealth. Then the body was carried to a certain spot where all
the people stood upon it as a purificatory ceremony. This last
circumstance clearly indicates that the sins of the people were
transferred to the victim, just as the Jewish priest transferred the
sins of the people to the scapegoat by laying his hands on the
animal's head; and since the man was believed to be possessed by the
divine spirit, we have here an undoubted example of a man-god slain
to take away the sins and misfortunes of the people.

In Tibet the ceremony of the scapegoat presents some remarkable
features. The Tibetan new year begins with the new moon which
appears about the fifteenth of February. For twenty-three days
afterwards the government of Lhasa, the capital, is taken out of the
hands of the ordinary rulers and entrusted to the monk of the Debang
monastery who offers to pay the highest sum for the privilege. The
successful bidder is called the Jalno, and he announces his
accession to power in person, going through the streets of Lhasa
with a silver stick in his hand. Monks from all the neighbouring
monasteries and temples assemble to pay him homage. The Jalno
exercises his authority in the most arbitrary manner for his own
benefit, as all the fines which he exacts are his by purchase. The
profit he makes is about ten times the amount of the purchase money.
His men go about the streets in order to discover any conduct on the
part of the inhabitants that can be found fault with. Every house in
Lhasa is taxed at this time, and the slightest offence is punished
with unsparing rigour by fines. This severity of the Jalno drives
all working classes out of the city till the twenty-three days are
over. But if the laity go out, the clergy come in. All the Buddhist
monasteries of the country for miles round about open their gates
and disgorge their inmates. All the roads that lead down into Lhasa
from the neighbouring mountains are full of monks hurrying to the
capital, some on foot, some on horseback, some riding asses or
lowing oxen, all carrying their prayer-books and culinary utensils.
In such multitudes do they come that the streets and squares of the
city are encumbered with their swarms, and incarnadined with their
red cloaks. The disorder and confusion are indescribable. Bands of
the holy men traverse the streets chanting prayers, or uttering wild
cries. They meet, they jostle, they quarrel, they fight; bloody
noses, black eyes, and broken heads are freely given and received.
All day long, too, from before the peep of dawn till after darkness
has fallen, these red-cloaked monks hold services in the dim
incense-laden air of the great Machindranath temple, the cathedral
of Lhasa; and thither they crowd thrice a day to receive their doles
of tea and soup and money. The cathedral is a vast building,
standing in the centre of the city, and surrounded by bazaars and
shops. The idols in it are richly inlaid with gold and precious
stones.

Twenty-four days after the Jalno has ceased to have authority, he
assumes it again, and for ten days acts in the same arbitrary manner
as before. On the first of the ten days the priests again assemble
at the cathedral, pray to the gods to prevent sickness and other
evils among the people, "and, as a peace-offering, sacrifice one
man. The man is not killed purposely, but the ceremony he undergoes
often proves fatal. Grain is thrown against his head, and his face
is painted half white, half black." Thus grotesquely disguised, and
carrying a coat of skin on his arm, he is called the King of the
Years, and sits daily in the market-place, where he helps himself to
whatever he likes and goes about shaking a black yak's tail over the
people, who thus transfer their bad luck to him. On the tenth day,
all the troops in Lhasa march to the great temple and form in line
before it. The King of the Years is brought forth from the temple
and receives small donations from the assembled multitude. He then
ridicules the Jalno, saying to him, "What we perceive through the
five senses is no illusion. All you teach is untrue," and the like.
The Jalno, who represents the Grand Lama for the time being,
contests these heretical opinions; the dispute waxes warm, and at
last both agree to decide the questions at issue by a cast of the
dice, the Jalno offering to change places with the scapegoat should
the throw be against him. If the King of the Years wins, much evil
is prognosticated; but if the Jalno wins, there is great rejoicing,
for it proves that his adversary has been accepted by the gods as a
victim to bear all the sins of the people of Lhasa. Fortune,
however, always favours the Jalno, who throws sixes with unvarying
success, while his opponent turns up only ones. Nor is this so
extraordinary as at first sight it might appear; for the Jalno's
dice are marked with nothing but sixes and his adversary's with
nothing but ones. When he sees the finger of Providence thus plainly
pointed against him, the King of the Years is terrified and flees
away upon a white horse, with a white dog, a white bird, salt, and
so forth, which have all been provided for him by the government.
His face is still painted half white and half black, and he still
wears his leathern coat. The whole populace pursues him, hooting,
yelling, and firing blank shots in volleys after him. Thus driven
out of the city, he is detained for seven days in the great chamber
of horrors at the Samyas monastery, surrounded by monstrous and
terrific images of devils and skins of huge serpents and wild
beasts. Thence he goes away into the mountains of Chetang, where he
has to remain an outcast for several months or a year in a narrow
den. If he dies before the time is out, the people say it is an
auspicious omen; but if he survives, he may return to Lhasa and play
the part of scapegoat over again the following year.

This quaint ceremonial, still annually observed in the secluded
capital of Buddhism--the Rome of Asia--is interesting because it
exhibits, in a clearly marked religious stratification, a series of
divine redeemers themselves redeemed, of vicarious sacrifices
vicariously atoned for, of gods undergoing a process of
fossilisation, who, while they retain the privileges, have
disburdened themselves of the pains and penalties of divinity. In
the Jalno we may without undue straining discern a successor of
those temporary kings, those mortal gods, who purchase a short lease
of power and glory at the price of their lives. That he is the
temporary substitute of the Grand Lama is certain; that he is, or
was once, liable to act as scapegoat for the people is made nearly
certain by his offer to change places with the real scapegoat--the
King of the Years--if the arbitrament of the dice should go against
him. It is true that the conditions under which the question is now
put to the hazard have reduced the offer to an idle form. But such
forms are no mere mushroom growths, springing up of themselves in a
night. If they are now lifeless formalities, empty husks devoid of
significance, we may be sure that they once had a life and a
meaning; if at the present day they are blind alleys leading
nowhere, we may be certain that in former days they were paths that
led somewhere, if only to death. That death was the goal to which of
old the Tibetan scapegoat passed after his brief period of licence
in the market-place, is a conjecture that has much to commend it.
Analogy suggests it; the blank shots fired after him, the statement
that the ceremony often proves fatal, the belief that his death is a
happy omen, all confirm it. We need not wonder then that the Jalno,
after paying so dear to act as deputy-deity for a few weeks, should
have preferred to die by deputy rather than in his own person when
his time was up. The painful but necessary duty was accordingly laid
on some poor devil, some social outcast, some wretch with whom the
world had gone hard, who readily agreed to throw away his life at
the end of a few days if only he might have his fling in the
meantime. For observe that while the time allowed to the original
deputy--the Jalno--was measured by weeks, the time allowed to the
deputy's deputy was cut down to days, ten days according to one
authority, seven days according to another. So short a rope was
doubtless thought a long enough tether for so black or sickly a
sheep; so few sands in the hour-glass, slipping so fast away,
sufficed for one who had wasted so many precious years. Hence in the
jack-pudding who now masquerades with motley countenance in the
market-place of Lhasa, sweeping up misfortune with a black yak's
tail, we may fairly see the substitute of a substitute, the vicar of
a vicar, the proxy on whose back the heavy burden was laid when it
had been lifted from nobler shoulders. But the clue, if we have
followed it aright, does not stop at the Jalno; it leads straight
back to the pope of Lhasa himself, the Grand Lama, of whom the Jalno
is merely the temporary vicar. The analogy of many customs in many
lands points to the conclusion that, if this human divinity stoops
to resign his ghostly power for a time into the hands of a
substitute, it is, or rather was once, for no other reason than that
the substitute might die in his stead. Thus through the mist of ages
unillumined by the lamp of history, the tragic figure of the pope of
Buddhism--God's vicar on earth for Asia--looms dim and sad as the
man-god who bore his people's sorrows, the Good Shepherd who laid
down his life for the sheep.



4. On Scapegoats in General

THE FOREGOING survey of the custom of publicly expelling the
accumulated evils of a village or town or country suggests a few
general observations.

In the first place, it will not be disputed that what I have called
the immediate and the mediate expulsions of evil are identical in
intention; in other words, that whether the evils are conceived of
as invisible or as embodied in a material form, is a circumstance
entirely subordinate to the main object of the ceremony, which is
simply to effect a total clearance of all the ills that have been
infesting a people. If any link were wanting to connect the two
kinds of expulsion, it would be furnished by such a practice as that
of sending the evils away in a litter or a boat. For here, on the
one hand, the evils are invisible and intangible; and, on the other
hand, there is a visible and tangible vehicle to convey them away.
And a scapegoat is nothing more than such a vehicle.

In the second place, when a general clearance of evils is resorted
to periodically, the interval between the celebrations of the
ceremony is commonly a year, and the time of year when the ceremony
takes place usually coincides with some well-marked change of
season, such as the beginning or end of winter in the arctic and
temperate zones, and the beginning or end of the rainy season in the
tropics. The increased mortality which such climatic changes are apt
to produce, especially amongst ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed
savages, is set down by primitive man to the agency of demons, who
must accordingly be expelled. Hence, in the tropical regions of New
Britain and Peru, the devils are or were driven out at the beginning
of the rainy season; hence, on the dreary coasts of Baffin Land,
they are banished at the approach of the bitter Arctic winter. When
a tribe has taken to husbandry, the time for the general expulsion
of devils is naturally made to agree with one of the great epochs of
the agricultural year, as sowing, or harvest; but, as these epochs
themselves naturally coincide with changes of season, it does not
follow that the transition from the hunting or pastoral to the
agricultural life involves any alteration in the time of celebrating
this great annual rite. Some of the agricultural communities of
India and the Hindoo Koosh, as we have seen, hold their general
clearance of demons at harvest, others at sowing-time. But, at
whatever season of the year it is held, the general expulsion of
devils commonly marks the beginning of the new year. For, before
entering on a new year, people are anxious to rid themselves of the
troubles that have harassed them in the past; hence it comes about
that in so many communities the beginning of the new year is
inaugurated with a solemn and public banishment of evil spirits.

In the third place, it is to be observed that this public and
periodic expulsion of devils is commonly preceded or followed by a
period of general license, during which the ordinary restraints of
society are thrown aside, and all offences, short of the gravest,
are allowed to pass unpunished. In Guinea and Tonquin the period of
license precedes the public expulsion of demons; and the suspension
of the ordinary government in Lhasa previous to the expulsion of the
scapegoat is perhaps a relic of a similar period of universal
license. Amongst the Hos of India the period of license follows the
expulsion of the devil. Amongst the Iroquois it hardly appears
whether it preceded or followed the banishment of evils. In any
case, the extraordinary relaxation of all ordinary rules of conduct
on such occasions is doubtless to be explained by the general
clearance of evils which precedes or follows it. On the one hand,
when a general riddance of evil and absolution from all sin is in
immediate prospect, men are encouraged to give the rein to their
passions, trusting that the coming ceremony will wipe out the score
which they are running up so fast. On the other hand, when the
ceremony has just taken place, men's minds are freed from the
oppressive sense, under which they generally labour, of an
atmosphere surcharged with devils; and in the first revulsion of joy
they overleap the limits commonly imposed by custom and morality.
When the ceremony takes place at harvest-time, the elation of
feeling which it excites is further stimulated by the state of
physical wellbeing produced by an abundant supply of food.

Fourthly, the employment of a divine man or animal as a scapegoat is
especially to be noted; indeed, we are here directly concerned with
the custom of banishing evils only in so far as these evils are
believed to be transferred to a god who is afterwards slain. It may
be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as
a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from
the examples cited. For, as has already been pointed out, the custom
of killing a god dates from so early a period of human history that
in later ages, even when the custom continues to be practised, it is
liable to be misinterpreted. The divine character of the animal or
man is forgotten, and he comes to be regarded merely as an ordinary
victim. This is especially likely to be the case when it is a divine
man who is killed. For when a nation becomes civilised, if it does
not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims
only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the
killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the
execution of a criminal.

If we ask why a dying god should be chosen to take upon himself and
carry away the sins and sorrows of the people, it may be suggested
that in the practice of using the divinity as a scapegoat we have a
combination of two customs which were at one time distinct and
independent. On the one hand we have seen that it has been customary
to kill the human or animal god in order to save his divine life
from being weakened by the inroads of age. On the other hand we have
seen that it has been customary to have a general expulsion of evils
and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to people to combine these
two customs, the result would be the employment of the dying god as
a scapegoat. He was killed, not originally to take away sin, but to
save the divine life from the degeneracy of old age; but, since he
had to be killed at any rate, people may have thought that they
might as well seize the opportunity to lay upon him the burden of
their sufferings and sins, in order that he might bear it away with
him to the unknown world beyond the grave.

The use of the divinity as a scapegoat clears up the ambiguity
which, as we saw, appears to hang about the European folk-custom of
"carrying out Death." Grounds have been shown for believing that in
this ceremony the so-called Death was originally the spirit of
vegetation, who was annually slain in spring, in order that he might
come to life again with all the vigour of youth. But, as I pointed
out, there are certain features in the ceremony which are not
explicable on this hypothesis alone. Such are the marks of joy with
which the effigy of Death is carried out to be buried or burnt, and
the fear and abhorrence of it manifested by the bearers. But these
features become at once intelligible if we suppose that the Death
was not merely the dying god of vegetation, but also a public
scapegoat, upon whom were laid all the evils that had afflicted the
people during the past year. Joy on such an occasion is natural and
appropriate; and if the dying god appears to be the object of that
fear and abhorrence which are properly due not to himself, but to
the sins and misfortunes with which he is laden, this arises merely
from the difficulty of distinguishing, or at least of marking the
distinction, between the bearer and the burden. When the burden is
of a baleful character, the bearer of it will be feared and shunned
just as much as if he were himself instinct with those dangerous
properties of which, as it happens, he is only the vehicle.
Similarly we have seen that disease-laden and sin-laden boats are
dreaded and shunned by East Indian peoples. Again, the view that in
these popular customs the Death is a scapegoat as well as a
representative of the divine spirit of vegetation derives some
support from the circumstance that its expulsion is always
celebrated in spring and chiefly by Slavonic peoples. For the
Slavonic year began in spring; and thus, in one of its aspects, the
ceremony of "carrying out Death" would be an example of the
widespread custom of expelling the accumulated evils of the old year
before entering on a new one.




LVIII. Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity



1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Rome

WE are now prepared to notice the use of the human scapegoat in
classical antiquity. Every year on the fourteenth of March a man
clad in skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome,
beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. He was
called Mamurius Veturius, that is, "the old Mars," and as the
ceremony took place on the day preceding the first full moon of the
old Roman year (which began on the first of March), the skin-clad
man must have represented the Mars of the past year, who was driven
out at the beginning of a new one. Now Mars was originally not a god
of war but of vegetation. For it was to Mars that the Roman
husbandman prayed for the prosperity of his corn and his vines, his
fruit-trees and his copses; it was to Mars that the priestly college
of the Arval Brothers, whose business it was to sacrifice for the
growth of the crops, addressed their petitions almost exclusively;
and it was to Mars, as we saw, that a horse was sacrificed in
October to secure an abundant harvest. Moreover, it was to Mars,
under his title of "Mars of the woods" (_Mars Silvanus_), that
farmers offered sacrifice for the welfare of their cattle. We have
already seen that cattle are commonly supposed to be under the
special patronage of tree-gods. Once more, the consecration of the
vernal month of March to Mars seems to point him out as the deity of
the sprouting vegetation. Thus the Roman custom of expelling the old
Mars at the beginning of the new year in spring is identical with
the Slavonic custom of "carrying out Death," if the view here taken
of the latter custom is correct. The similarity of the Roman and
Slavonic customs has been already remarked by scholars, who appear,
however, to have taken Mamurius Veturius and the corresponding
figures in the Slavonic ceremonies to be representatives of the old
year rather than of the old god of vegetation. It is possible that
ceremonies of this kind may have come to be thus interpreted in
later times even by the people who practised them. But the
personification of a period of time is too abstract an idea to be
primitive. However, in the Roman, as in the Slavonic, ceremony, the
representative of the god appears to have been treated not only as a
deity of vegetation but also as a scapegoat. His expulsion implies
this; for there is no reason why the god of vegetation, as such,
should be expelled the city. But it is otherwise if he is also a
scapegoat; it then becomes necessary to drive him beyond the
boundaries, that he may carry his sorrowful burden away to other
lands. And, in fact, Mamurius Veturius appears to have been driven
away to the land of the Oscans, the enemies of Rome.



2. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient Greece

THE ANCIENT Greeks were also familiar with the use of a human
scapegoat. In Plutarch's native town of Chaeronea a ceremony of this
kind was performed by the chief magistrate at the Town Hall, and by
each householder at his own home. It was called the "expulsion of
hunger." A slave was beaten with rods of the _agnus castus,_ and
turned out of doors with the words, "Out with hunger, and in with
wealth and health." When Plutarch held the office of chief
magistrate of his native town he performed this ceremony at the Town
Hall, and he has recorded the discussion to which the custom
afterwards gave rise.

But in civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker
forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious
Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most
brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the
poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole
year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice
and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred
garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city,
while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might
fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to
death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly
maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public
expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine,
befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
One of the victims was sacrificed for the men and the other for the
women. The former wore round his neck a string of black, the latter
a string of white figs. Sometimes, it seems, the victim slain on
behalf of the women was a woman. They were led about the city and
then sacrificed, apparently by being stoned to death outside the
city. But such sacrifices were not confined to extraordinary
occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the
festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and
one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death. The
city of Abdera in Thrace was publicly purified once a year, and one
of the burghers, set apart for the purpose, was stoned to death as a
scapegoat or vicarious sacrifice for the life of all the others; six
days before his execution he was excommunicated, "in order that he
alone might bear the sins of all the people."

From the Lover's Leap, a white bluff at the southern end of their
island, the Leucadians used annually to hurl a criminal into the sea
as a scapegoat. But to lighten his fall they fastened live birds and
feathers to him, and a flotilla of small boats waited below to catch
him and convey him beyond the boundary. Probably these humane
precautions were a mitigation of an earlier custom of flinging the
scapegoat into the sea to drown. The Leucadian ceremony took place
at the time of a sacrifice to Apollo, who had a temple or sanctuary
on the spot. Elsewhere it was customary to cast a young man every
year into the sea, with the prayer, "Be thou our offscouring." This
ceremony was supposed to rid the people of the evils by which they
were beset, or according to a somewhat different interpretation it
redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to the sea-god. As
practised by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century before
our era, the custom of the scapegoat was as follows. When a city
suffered from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or
deformed person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which
afflicted the community. He was brought to a suitable place, where
dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese were put into his hand. These
he ate. Then he was beaten seven times upon his genital organs with
squills and branches of the wild fig and other wild trees, while the
flutes played a particular tune. Afterwards he was burned on a pyre
built of the wood of forest trees; and his ashes were cast into the
sea. A similar custom appears to have been annually celebrated by
the Asiatic Greeks at the harvest festival of the Thargelia.

In the ritual just described the scourging of the victim with
squills, branches of the wild fig, and so forth, cannot have been
intended to aggravate his sufferings, otherwise any stick would have
been good enough to beat him with. The true meaning of this part of
the ceremony has been explained by W. Mannhardt. He points out that
the ancients attributed to squills a magical power of averting evil
influences, and that accordingly they hung them up at the doors of
their houses and made use of them in purificatory rites. Hence the
Arcadian custom of whipping the image of Pan with squills at a
festival, or whenever the hunters returned empty-handed, must have
been meant, not to punish the god, but to purify him from the
harmful influences which were impeding him in the exercise of his
divine functions as a god who should supply the hunter with game.
Similarly the object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital
organs with squills and so on, must have been to release his
reproductive energies from any restraint or spell under which they
might be laid by demoniacal or other malignant agency; and as the
Thargelia at which he was annually sacrificed was an early harvest
festival celebrated in May, we must recognise in him a
representative of the creative and fertilising god of vegetation.
The representative of the god was annually slain for the purpose I
have indicated, that of maintaining the divine life in perpetual
vigour, untainted by the weakness of age; and before he was put to
death it was not unnatural to stimulate his reproductive powers in
order that these might be transmitted in full activity to his
successor, the new god or new embodiment of the old god, who was
doubtless supposed immediately to take the place of the one slain.
Similar reasoning would lead to a similar treatment of the scapegoat
on special occasions, such as drought or famine. If the crops did
not answer to the expectation of the husbandman, this would be
attributed to some failure in the generative powers of the god whose
function it was to produce the fruits of the earth. It might be
thought that he was under a spell or was growing old and feeble.
Accordingly he was slain in the person of his representative, with
all the ceremonies already described, in order that, born young
again, he might infuse his own youthful vigour into the stagnant
energies of nature. On the same principle we can understand why
Mamurius Veturius was beaten with rods, why the slave at the
Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the _agnus castus_ (a tree to
which magical properties were ascribed), why the effigy of Death in
some parts of Europe is assailed with sticks and stones, and why at
Babylon the criminal who played the god scourged before he was
crucified. The purpose of the scourging was not to intensify the
agony of the divine sufferer, but on the contrary to dispel any
malignant influences by which at the supreme moment he might
conceivably be beset.

Thus far I have assumed that the human victims at the Thargelia
represented the spirits of vegetation in general, but it has been
well remarked by Mr. W. R. Paton that these poor wretches seem to
have masqueraded as the spirits of fig-trees in particular. He
points out that the process of caprification, as it is called, that
is, the artificial fertilisation of the cultivated fig-trees by
hanging strings of wild figs among the boughs, takes place in Greece
and Asia Minor in June about a month after the date of the
Thargelia, and he suggests that the hanging of the black and white
figs round the necks of the two human victims, one of whom
represented the men and the other the women, may have been a direct
imitation of the process of caprification designed, on the principle
of imitative magic, to assist the fertilisation of the fig-trees.
And since caprification is in fact a marriage of the male fig-tree
with the female fig-tree, Mr. Paton further supposes that the loves
of the trees may, on the same principle of imitative magic, have
been simulated by a mock or even a real marriage between the two
human victims, one of whom appears sometimes to have been a woman.
On this view the practice of beating the human victims on their
genitals with branches of wild fig-trees and with squills was a
charm intended to stimulate the generative powers of the man and
woman who for the time being personated the male and the female
fig-trees respectively, and who by their union in marriage, whether
real or pretended, were believed to help the trees to bear fruit.

The interpretation which I have adopted of the custom of beating the
human scapegoat with certain plants is supported by many analogies.
Thus among the Kai of German New Guinea, when a man wishes to make
his banana shoots bear fruit quickly, he beats them with a stick cut
from a banana-tree which has already borne fruit. Here it is obvious
that fruitfulness is believed to inhere in a stick cut from a
fruitful tree and to be imparted by contact to the young banana
plants. Similarly in New Caledonia a man will beat his taro plants
lightly with a branch, saying as he does so, "I beat this taro that
it may grow," after which he plants the branch in the ground at the
end of the field. Among the Indians of Brazil at the mouth of the
Amazon, when a man wishes to increase the size of his generative
organ, he strikes it with the fruit of a white aquatic plant called
_aninga,_ which grows luxuriantly on the banks of the river. The
fruit, which is inedible, resembles a banana, and is clearly chosen
for this purpose on account of its shape. The ceremony should be
performed three days before or after the new moon. In the county of
Bekes, in Hungary, barren women are fertilised by being struck with
a stick which has first been used to separate pairing dogs. Here a
fertilising virtue is clearly supposed to be inherent in the stick
and to be conveyed by contact to the women. The Toradjas of Central
Celebes think that the plant _Dracaena terminalis_ has a strong
soul, because when it is lopped, it soon grows up again. Hence when
a man is ill, his friends will sometimes beat him on the crown of
the head with _Dracaena_ leaves in order to strengthen his weak soul
with the strong soul of the plant.

These analogies, accordingly, support the interpretation which,
following my predecessors W. Mannhardt and Mr. W. R. Paton, I have
given of the beating inflicted on the human victims at the Greek
harvest festival of the Thargelia. That beating, being administered
to the generative organs of the victims by fresh green plants and
branches, is most naturally explained as a charm to increase the
reproductive energies of the men or women either by communicating to
them the fruitfulness of the plants and branches, or by ridding them
of the maleficent influences; and this interpretation is confirmed
by the observation that the two victims represented the two sexes,
one of them standing for the men in general and the other for the
women. The season of the year when the ceremony was performed,
namely the time of the corn harvest, tallies well with the theory
that the rite had an agricultural significance. Further, that it was
above all intended to fertilise the fig-trees is strongly suggested
by the strings of black and white figs which were hung round the
necks of the victims, as well as by the blows which were given their
genital organs with the branches of a wild fig-tree; since this
procedure closely resembles the procedure which ancient and modern
husbandmen in Greek lands have regularly resorted to for the purpose
of actually fertilising their fig-trees. When we remember what an
important part the artificial fertilisation of the date palm-tree
appears to have played of old not only in the husbandry but in the
religion of Mesopotamia, there seems no reason to doubt that the
artificial fertilisation of the fig-tree may in like manner have
vindicated for itself a place in the solemn ritual of Greek
religion.

If these considerations are just, we must apparently conclude that
while the human victims at the Thargelia certainly appear in later
classical times to have figured chiefly as public scapegoats, who
carried away with them the sins, misfortunes, and sorrows of the
whole people, at an earlier time they may have been looked on as
embodiments of vegetation, perhaps of the corn but particularly of
the fig-trees; and that the beating which they received and the
death which they died were intended primarily to brace and refresh
the powers of vegetation then beginning to droop and languish under
the torrid heat of the Greek summer.

The view here taken of the Greek scapegoat, if it is correct,
obviates an objection which might otherwise be brought against the
main argument of this book. To the theory that the priest of Aricia
was slain as a representative of the spirit of the grove, it might
have been objected that such a custom has no analogy in classical
antiquity. But reasons have now been given for believing that the
human being periodically and occasionally slain by the Asiatic
Greeks was regularly treated as an embodiment of a divinity of
vegetation. Probably the persons whom the Athenians kept to be
sacrificed were similarly treated as divine. That they were social
outcasts did not matter. On the primitive view a man is not chosen
to be the mouth-piece or embodiment of a god on account of his high
moral qualities or social rank. The divine afflatus descends equally
on the good and the bad, the lofty and the lowly. If then the
civilised Greeks of Asia and Athens habitually sacrificed men whom
they regarded as incarnate gods, there can be no inherent
improbability in the supposition that at the dawn of history a
similar custom was observed by the semibarbarous Latins in the
Arician Grove.

But to clinch the argument, it is clearly desirable to prove that
the custom of putting to death a human representative of a god was
known and practised in ancient Italy elsewhere than in the Arician
Grove. This proof I now propose to adduce.



3. The Roman Saturnalia

WE have seen 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 language 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.
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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. In the year A.D. 303 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. 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.

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 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 showed his coronal of snow. When we compare this comic
monarch of the gay, the civilised 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 civilisation 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.

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. 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. Whether that was so or not, we
may conclude with a fair degree of probability that if the King of
the Wood at Aricia lived and died as an incarnation of a sylvan
deity, he had of old a parallel at Rome in the men who, year by
year, were slain in the character of King Saturn, the god of the
sown and sprouting seed.




LIX. Killing the God in Mexico

BY NO PEOPLE does the custom of sacrificing the human representative
of a god appear to have been observed so commonly and with so much
solemnity as by the Aztecs of ancient Mexico. With the ritual of
these remarkable sacrifices we are well acquainted, for it has been
fully described by the Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the
sixteenth century, and whose curiosity was naturally excited by the
discovery in this distant region of a barbarous and cruel religion
which presented many curious points of analogy to the doctrine and
ritual of their own church. "They took a captive," says the Jesuit
Acosta, "such as they thought good; and afore they did sacrifice him
unto their idols, they gave him the name of the idol, to whom he
should be sacrificed, and apparelled him with the same ornaments
like their idol, saying, that he did represent the same idol. And
during the time that this representation lasted, which was for a
year in some feasts, in others six months, and in others less, they
reverenced and worshipped him in the same manner as the proper idol;
and in the meantime he did eat, drink, and was merry. When he went
through the streets, the people came forth to worship him, and every
one brought him an alms, with children and sick folks, that he might
cure them, and bless them, suffering him to do all things at his
pleasure, only he was accompanied with ten or twelve men lest he
should fly. And he (to the end he might be reverenced as he passed)
sometimes sounded upon a small flute, that the people might prepare
to worship him. The feast being come, and he grown fat, they killed
him, opened him, and ate him, making a solemn sacrifice of him."

This general description of the custom may now be illustrated by
particular examples. Thus at the festival called Toxcatl, the
greatest festival of the Mexican year, a young man was annually
sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca, "the god of gods,"
after having been maintained and worshipped as that great deity in
person for a whole year. According to the old Franciscan monk
Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion, the sacrifice of
the human god fell at Easter or a few days later, so that, if he is
right, it would correspond in date as well as in character to the
Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer.
More exactly he tells us that the sacrifice took place on the first
day of the fifth Aztec month, which according to him began on the
twenty-third or twenty-seventh day of April.

At this festival the great god died in the person of one human
representative and came to life again in the person of another, who
was destined to enjoy the fatal honour of divinity for a year and to
perish, like all his predecessors, at the end of it. The young man
singled out for this high dignity was carefully chosen from among
the captives on the ground of his personal beauty. He had to be of
unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar, neither
too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too fat, he
was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water. And in order
that he might behave in his lofty station with becoming grace and
dignity he was carefully trained to comport himself like a gentleman
of the first quality, to speak correctly and elegantly, to play the
flute, to smoke cigars and to snuff at flowers with a dandified air.
He was honourably lodged in the temple, where the nobles waited on
him and paid him homage, bringing him meat and serving him like a
prince. The king himself saw to it that he was apparelled in
gorgeous attire, "for already he esteemed him as a god." Eagle down
was gummed to his head and white cock's feathers were stuck in his
hair, which drooped to his girdle. A wreath of flowers like roasted
maize crowned his brows, and a garland of the same flowers passed
over his shoulders and under his armpits. Golden ornaments hung from
his nose, golden armlets adorned his arms, golden bells jingled on
his legs at every step he took; earrings of turquoise dangled from
his ears, bracelets of turquoise bedecked his wrists; necklaces of
shells encircled his neck and depended on his breast; he wore a
mantle of network, and round his middle a rich waistcloth. When this
bejewelled exquisite lounged through the streets playing on his
flute, puffing at a cigar, and smelling at a nosegay, the people
whom he met threw themselves on the earth before him and prayed to
him with sighs and tears, taking up the dust in their hands and
putting it in their mouths in token of the deepest humiliation and
subjection. Women came forth with children in their arms and
presented them to him, saluting him as a god. For "he passed for our
Lord God; the people acknowledged him as the Lord." All who thus
worshipped him on his passage he saluted gravely and courteously.
Lest he should flee, he was everywhere attended by a guard of eight
pages in the royal livery, four of them with shaven crowns like the
palace-slaves, and four of them with the flowing locks of warriors;
and if he contrived to escape, the captain of the guard had to take
his place as the representative of the god and to die in his stead.
Twenty days before he was to die, his costume was changed, and four
damsels delicately nurtured and bearing the names of four
goddesses--the Goddess of Flowers, the Goddess of the Young Maize,
the Goddess "Our Mother among the Water," and the Goddess of
Salt--were given him to be his brides, and with them he consorted.
During the last five days divine honours were showered on the
destined victim. The king remained in his palace while the whole
court went after the human god. Solemn banquets and dances followed
each other in regular succession and at appointed places. On the
last day the young man, attended by his wives and pages, embarked in
a canoe covered with a royal canopy and was ferried across the lake
to a spot where a little hill rose from the edge of the water. It
was called the Mountain of Parting, because there his wives bade him
a last farewell. Then, accompanied only by his pages, he repaired to
a small and lonely temple by the wayside. Like the Mexican temples
in general, it was built in the form of a pyramid; and as the young
man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on
which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the summit
he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block
of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand
into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in sacrifice
to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the bodies of
common victims, sent rolling down the steps of the temple, but was
carried down to the foot, where the head was cut off and spitted on
a pike. Such was the regular end of the man who personated the
greatest god of the Mexican pantheon.

The honour of living for a short time in the character of a god and
dying a violent death in the same capacity was not restricted to men
in Mexico; women were allowed, or rather compelled, to enjoy the
glory and to share the doom as representatives of goddesses. Thus at
a great festival in September, which was preceded by a strict fast
of seven days, they sanctified a young slave girl of twelve or
thirteen years, the prettiest they could find, to represent the
Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. They invested her with the ornaments
of the goddess, putting a mitre on her head and maize-cobs round her
neck and in her hands, and fastening a green feather upright on the
crown of her head to imitate an ear of maize. This they did, we are
told, in order to signify that the maize was almost ripe at the time
of the festival, but because it was still tender they chose a girl
of tender years to play the part of the Maize Goddess. The whole
long day they led the poor child in all her finery, with the green
plume nodding on her head, from house to house dancing merrily to
cheer people after the dulness and privations of the fast.

In the evening all the people assembled at the temple, the courts of
which they lit up by a multitude of lanterns and candles. There they
passed the night without sleeping, and at midnight, while the
trumpets, flutes, and horns discoursed solemn music, a portable
framework or palanquin was brought forth, bedecked with festoons of
maize-cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all sorts. This the
bearers set down at the door of the chamber in which the wooden
image of the goddess stood. Now the chamber was adorned and
wreathed, both outside and inside, with wreaths of maize-cobs,
peppers, pumpkins, roses, and seeds of every kind, a wonder to
behold; the whole floor was covered deep with these verdant
offerings of the pious. When the music ceased, a solemn procession
came forth of priests and dignitaries, with flaring lights and
smoking censers, leading in their midst the girl who played the part
of the goddess. Then they made her mount the framework, where she
stood upright on the maize and peppers and pumpkins with which it
was strewed, her hands resting on two bannisters to keep her from
falling. Then the priests swung the smoking censers round her; the
music struck up again, and while it played, a great dignitary of the
temple suddenly stepped up to her with a razor in his hand and
adroitly shore off the green feather she wore on her head, together
with the hair in which it was fastened, snipping the lock off by the
root. The feather and the hair he then presented to the wooden image
of the goddess with great solemnity and elaborate ceremonies,
weeping and giving her thanks for the fruits of the earth and the
abundant crops which she had bestowed on the people that year; and
as he wept and prayed, all the people, standing in the courts of the
temple, wept and prayed with him. When that ceremony was over, the
girl descended from the framework and was escorted to the place
where she was to spend the rest of the night. But all the people
kept watch in the courts of the temple by the light of torches till
break of day.

The morning being come, and the courts of the temple being still
crowded by the multitude, who would have deemed it sacrilege to quit
the precincts, the priests again brought forth the damsel attired in
the costume of the goddess, with the mitre on her head and the cobs
of maize about her neck. Again she mounted the portable framework or
palanquin and stood on it, supporting herself by her hands on the
bannisters. Then the elders of the temple lifted it on their
shoulders, and while some swung burning censers and others played on
instruments or sang, they carried it in procession through the great
courtyard to the hall of the god Huitzilopochtli and then back to
the chamber, where stood the wooden image of the Maize Goddess, whom
the girl personated. There they caused the damsel to descend from
the palanquin and to stand on the heaps of corn and vegetables that
had been spread in profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber.
While she stood there all the elders and nobles came in a line, one
behind the other, carrying saucers full of dry and clotted blood
which they had drawn from their ears by way of penance during the
seven days' fast. One by one they squatted on their haunches before
her, which was the equivalent of falling on their knees with us, and
scraping the crust of blood from the saucer cast it down before her
as an offering in return for the benefits which she, as the
embodiment of the Maize Goddess, had conferred upon them. When the
men had thus humbly offered their blood to the human representative
of the goddess, the women, forming a long line, did so likewise,
each of them dropping on her hams before the girl and scraping her
blood from the saucer. The ceremony lasted a long time, for great
and small, young and old, all without exception had to pass before
the incarnate deity and make their offering. When it was over, the
people returned home with glad hearts to feast on flesh and viands
of every sort as merrily, we are told, as good Christians at Easter
partake of meat and other carnal mercies after the long abstinence
of Lent. And when they had eaten and drunk their fill and rested
after the night watch, they returned quite refreshed to the temple
to see the end of the festival. And the end of the festival was
this. The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed
the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back
on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing
blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the
goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn,
peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor.
After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests
made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so
they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn; they put the
mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs about his neck,
the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed
they led him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of
drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head
of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do,
incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin of the girl and by
her clothes, which must have been much too small for a grown man.

In the foregoing custom the identification of the young girl with
the Maize Goddess appears to be complete. The golden maize-cobs
which she wore round her neck, the artificial maize-cobs which she
carried in her hands, the green feather which was stuck in her hair
in imitation (we are told) of a green ear of maize, all set her
forth as a personification of the corn-spirit; and we are expressly
informed that she was specially chosen as a young girl to represent
the young maize, which at the time of the festival had not yet fully
ripened. Further, her identification with the corn and the
corn-goddess was clearly announced by making her stand on the heaps
of maize and there receive the homage and blood-offerings of the
whole people, who thereby returned her thanks for the benefits which
in her character of a divinity she was supposed to have conferred
upon them. Once more, the practice of beheading her on a heap of
corn and seeds and sprinkling her blood, not only on the image of
the Maize Goddess, but on the piles of maize, peppers, pumpkins,
seeds, and vegetables, can seemingly have had no other object but to
quicken and strengthen the crops of corn and the fruits of the earth
in general by infusing into their representatives the blood of the
Corn Goddess herself. The analogy of this Mexican sacrifice, the
meaning of which appears to be indisputable, may be allowed to
strengthen the interpretation which I have given of other human
sacrifices offered for the crops. If the Mexican girl, whose blood
was sprinkled on the maize, indeed personated the Maize Goddess, it
becomes more than ever probable that the girl whose blood the
Pawnees similarly sprinkled on the seed corn personated in like
manner the female Spirit of the Corn; and so with the other human
beings whom other races have slaughtered for the sake of promoting
the growth of the crops.

Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of
the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with
all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before the people in
this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that
it was intended to ensure that the divine death should be
immediately followed by the divine resurrection. If that was so, we
may infer with some degree of probability that the practice of
killing a human representative of a deity has commonly, perhaps
always, been regarded merely as a means of perpetuating the divine
energies in the fulness of youthful vigour, untainted by the
weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered if
the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.

These Mexican rites suffice to prove that human sacrifices of the
sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia were, as a matter of
fact, regularly offered by a people whose level of culture was
probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to
that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the
origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred. The positive and
indubitable evidence of the prevalence of such sacrifices in one
part of the world may reasonably be allowed to strengthen the
probability of their prevalence in places for which the evidence is
less full and trustworthy. Taken all together, the facts which we
have passed in review seem to show that the custom of killing men
whom their worshippers regard as divine has prevailed in many parts
of the world.



LX. Between Heaven and Earth



1. Not to touch the Earth

AT THE OUTSET of this book two questions were proposed for answer:
Why had the priest of Aricia to slay his predecessor? And why,
before doing so, had he to pluck the Golden Bough? Of these two
questions the first has now been answered. The priest of Aricia, if
I am right, was one of those sacred kings or human divinities on
whose life the welfare of the community and even the course of
nature in general are believed to be intimately dependent. It does
not appear that the subjects or worshippers of such a spiritual
potentate form to themselves any very clear notion of the exact
relationship in which they stand to him; probably their ideas on the
point are vague and fluctuating, and we should err if we attempted
to define the relationship with logical precision. All that the
people know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves,
their cattle, and their crops are mysteriously bound up with their
divine king, so that according as he is well or ill the community is
healthy or sickly, the flocks and herds thrive or languish with
disease, and the fields yield an abundant or a scanty harvest. The
worst evil which they can conceive of is the natural death of their
ruler, whether he succumb to sickness or old age, for in the opinion
of his followers such a death would entail the most disastrous
consequences on themselves and their possessions; fatal epidemics
would sweep away man and beast, the earth would refuse her increase,
nay, the very frame of nature itself might be dissolved. To guard
against these catastrophes it is necessary to put the king to death
while he is still in the full bloom of his divine manhood, in order
that his sacred life, transmitted in unabated force to his
successor, may renew its youth, and thus by successive transmissions
through a perpetual line of vigorous incarnations may remain
eternally fresh and young, a pledge and security that men and
animals shall in like manner renew their youth by a perpetual
succession of generations, and that seedtime and harvest, and summer
and winter, and rain and sunshine shall never fail. That, if my
conjecture is right, was why the priest of Aricia, the King of the
Wood at Nemi, had regularly to perish by the sword of his successor.

But we have still to ask, What was the Golden Bough? and why had
each candidate for the Arician priesthood to pluck it before he
could slay the priest? These questions I will now try to answer.

It will be well to begin by noticing two of those rules or taboos by
which, as we have seen, the life of divine kings or priests is
regulated. The first of the rules to which I would call the reader's
attention is that the divine personage may not touch the ground with
his foot. This rule was observed by the supreme pontiff of the
Zapotecs in Mexico; he profaned his sanctity if he so much as
touched the ground with his foot. Montezuma, emperor of Mexico,
never set foot on the ground; he was always carried on the shoulders
of noblemen, and if he lighted anywhere they laid rich tapestry for
him to walk upon. For the Mikado of Japan to touch the ground with
his foot was a shameful degradation; indeed, in the sixteenth
century, it was enough to deprive him of his office. Outside his
palace he was carried on men's shoulders; within it he walked on
exquisitely wrought mats. The king and queen of Tahiti might not
touch the ground anywhere but within their hereditary domains; for
the ground on which they trod became sacred. In travelling from
place to place they were carried on the shoulders of sacred men.
They were always accompanied by several pairs of these sanctified
attendants; and when it became necessary to change their bearers,
the king and queen vaulted on to the shoulders of their new bearers
without letting their feet touch the ground. It was an evil omen if
the king of Dosuma touched the ground, and he had to perform an
expiatory ceremony. Within his palace the king of Persia walked on
carpets on which no one else might tread; outside of it he was never
seen on foot but only in a chariot or on horseback. In old days the
king of Siam never set foot upon the earth, but was carried on a
throne of gold from place to place. Formerly neither the kings of
Uganda, nor their mothers, nor their queens might walk on foot
outside of the spacious enclosures in which they lived. Whenever
they went forth they were carried on the shoulders of men of the
Buffalo clan, several of whom accompanied any of these royal
personages on a journey and took it in turn to bear the burden. The
king sat astride the bearer's neck with a leg over each shoulder and
his feet tucked under the bearer's arms. When one of these royal
carriers grew tired he shot the king onto the shoulders of a second
man without allowing the royal feet to touch the ground. In this way
they went at a great pace and travelled long distances in a day,
when the king was on a journey. The bearers had a special hut in the
king's enclosure in order to be at hand the moment they were wanted.
Among the Bakuba, or rather Bushongo, a nation in the southern
region of the Congo, down to a few years ago persons of the royal
blood were forbidden to touch the ground; they must sit on a hide, a
chair, or the back of a slave, who crouched on hands and feet; their
feet rested on the feet of others. When they travelled they were
carried on the backs of men; but the king journeyed in a litter
supported on shafts. Among the Ibo people about Awka, in Southern
Nigeria, the priest of the Earth has to observe many taboos; for
example, he may not see a corpse, and if he meets one on the road he
must hide his eyes with his wristlet. He must abstain from many
foods, such as eggs, birds of all sorts, mutton, dog, bush-buck, and
so forth. He may neither wear nor touch a mask, and no masked man
may enter his house. If a dog enters his house, it is killed and
thrown out. As priest of the Earth he may not sit on the bare
ground, nor eat things that have fallen on the ground, nor may earth
be thrown at him. According to ancient Brahmanic ritual a king at
his inauguration trod on a tiger's skin and a golden plate; he was
shod with shoes of boar's skin, and so long as he lived thereafter
he might not stand on the earth with his bare feet.

But besides persons who are permanently sacred or tabooed and are
therefore permanently forbidden to touch the ground with their feet,
there are others who enjoy the character of sanctity or taboo only
on certain occasions, and to whom accordingly the prohibition in
question only applies at the definite seasons during which they
exhale the odour of sanctity. Thus among the Kayans or Bahaus of
Central Borneo, while the priestesses are engaged in the performance
of certain rites they may not step on the ground, and boards are
laid for them to tread on. Warriors, again, on the war-path are
surrounded, so to say, by an atmosphere of taboo; hence some Indians
of North America might not sit on the bare ground the whole time
they were out on a warlike expedition. In Laos the hunting of
elephants gives rise to many taboos; one of them is that the chief
hunter may not touch the earth with his foot. Accordingly, when he
alights from his elephant, the others spread a carpet of leaves for
him to step upon.

Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call
that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or
tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a
physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged
just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the
electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good
conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be
discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on this
theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid. Hence
in order to preserve the charge from running to waste, the sacred or
tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from touching the
ground; in electrical language he must be insulated, if he is not to
be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with which he, as a
vial, is filled to the brim. And in many cases apparently the
insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a precaution not
merely for his own sake but for the sake of others; for since the
virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive
which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the
interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest
breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes
into contact with.



2. Not to see the Sun

THE SECOND rule to be here noted is that the sun may not shine upon
the divine person. This rule was observed both by the Mikado and by
the pontiff of the Zapotecs. The latter "was looked upon as a god
whom the earth was not worthy to hold, nor the sun to shine upon."
The Japanese would not allow that the Mikado should expose his
sacred person to the open air, and the sun was not thought worthy to
shine on his head. The Indians of Granada, in South America, "kept
those who were to be rulers or commanders, whether men or women,
locked up for several years when they were children, some of them
seven years, and this so close that they were not to see the sun,
for if they should happen to see it they forfeited their lordship,
eating certain sorts of food appointed; and those who were their
keepers at certain times went into their retreat or prison and
scourged them severely." Thus, for example, the heir to the throne
of Bogota, who was not the son but the sister's son of the king, had
to undergo a rigorous training from his infancy; he lived in
complete retirement in a temple, where he might not see the sun nor
eat salt nor converse with a woman; he was surrounded by guards who
observed his conduct and noted all his actions; if he broke a single
one of the rules laid down for him, he was deemed infamous and
forfeited all his rights to the throne. So, too, the heir to the
kingdom of Sogamoso, before succeeding to the crown, had to fast for
seven years in the temple, being shut up in the dark and not allowed
to see the sun or light. The prince who was to become Inca of Peru
had to fast for a month without seeing light.



3. The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

NOW it is remarkable that the foregoing two rules--not to touch the
ground and not to see the sun--are observed either separately or
conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the world. Thus
amongst the negroes of Loango girls at puberty are confined in
separate huts, and they may not touch the ground with any part of
their bare body. Among the Zulus and kindred tribes of South Africa,
when the first signs of puberty show themselves "while a girl is
walking, gathering wood, or working in the field, she runs to the
river and hides herself among the reeds for the day, so as not to be
seen by men. She covers her head carefully with her blanket that the
sun may not shine on it and shrivel her up into a withered skeleton,
as would result from exposure to the sun's beams. After dark she
returns to her home and is secluded" in a hut for some time. With
the Awa-nkonde, a tribe at the northern end of Lake Nyassa, it is a
rule that after her first menstruation a girl must be kept apart,
with a few companions of her own sex, in a darkened house. The floor
is covered with dry banana leaves, but no fire may be lit in the
house, which is called "the house of the Awasungu," that is, "of
maidens who have no hearts."

In New Ireland girls are confined for four or five years in small
cages, being kept in the dark and not allowed to set foot on the
ground. The custom has been thus described by an eye-witness. "I
heard from a teacher about some strange custom connected with some
of the young girls here, so I asked the chief to take me to the
house where they were. The house was about twenty-five feet in
length, and stood in a reed and bamboo enclosure, across the
entrance to which a bundle of dried grass was suspended to show that
it was strictly '_tabu._' Inside the house were three conical
structures about seven or eight feet in height, and about ten or
twelve feet in circumference at the bottom, and for about four feet
from the ground, at which point they tapered off to a point at the
top. These cages were made of the broad leaves of the pandanus-tree,
sewn quite close together so that no light and little or no air
could enter. On one side of each is an opening which is closed by a
double door of plaited cocoa-nut tree and pandanus-tree leaves.
About three feet from the ground there is a stage of bamboos which
forms the floor. In each of these cages we were told there was a
young woman confined, each of whom had to remain for at least four
or five years, without ever being allowed to go outside the house. I
could scarcely credit the story when I heard it; the whole thing
seemed too horrible to be true. I spoke to the chief, and told him
that I wished to see the inside of the cages, and also to see the
girls that I might make them a present of a few beads. He told me
that it was '_tabu,_' forbidden for any men but their own relations
to look at them; but I suppose the promised beads acted as an
inducement, and so he sent away for some old lady who had charge,
and who alone is allowed to open the doors. While we were waiting we
could hear the girls talking to the chief in a querulous way as if
objecting to something or expressing their fears. The old woman came
at length and certainly she did not seem a very pleasant jailor or
guardian; nor did she seem to favour the request of the chief to
allow us to see the girls, as she regarded us with anything but
pleasant looks. However, she had to undo the door when the chief
told her to do so, and then the girls peeped out at us, and, when
told to do so, they held out their hands for the beads. I, however,
purposely sat at some distance away and merely held out the beads to
them, as I wished to draw them quite outside, that I might inspect
the inside of the cages. This desire of mine gave rise to another
difficulty, as these girls were not allowed to put their feet to the
ground all the time they were confined in these places. However,
they wished to get the beads, and so the old lady had to go outside
and collect a lot of pieces of wood and bamboo, which she placed on
the ground, and then going to one of the girls, she helped her down
and held her hand as she stepped from one piece of wood to another
until she came near enough to get the beads I held out to her. I
then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had
come, but could scarely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was
so hot and stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few
short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for
the girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo
platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite
dark inside. The girls are never allowed to come out except once a
day to bathe in a dish or wooden bowl placed close to each cage.
They say that they perspire profusely. They are placed in these
stifling cages when quite young, and must remain there until they
are young women, when they are taken out and have each a great
marriage feast provided for them. One of them was about fourteen or
fifteen years old, and the chief told us that she had been there for
five years, but would soon be taken out now. The other two were
about eight and ten years old, and they have to stay there for
several years longer."

In Kabadi, a district of British New Guinea, "daughters of chiefs,
when they are about twelve or thirteen years of age, are kept
indoors for two or three years, never being allowed, under any
pretence, to descend from the house, and the house is so shaded that
the sun cannot shine on them." Among the Yabim and Bukaua, two
neighbouring and kindred tribes on the coast of Northern New Guinea,
a girl at puberty is secluded for some five or six weeks in an inner
part of the house; but she may not sit on the floor, lest her
uncleanliness should cleave to it, so a log of wood is placed for
her to squat on. Moreover, she may not touch the ground with her
feet; hence if she is obliged to quit the house for a short time,
she is muffled up in mats and walks on two halves of a coco-nut
shell, which are fastened like sandals to her feet by creeping
plants. Among the Ot Danoms of Borneo girls at the age of eight or
ten years are shut up in a little room or cell of the house, and cut
off from all intercourse with the world for a long time. The cell,
like the rest of the house, is raised on piles above the ground, and
is lit by a single small window opening on a lonely place, so that
the girl is in almost total darkness. She may not leave the room on
any pretext whatever, not even for the most necessary purposes. None
of her family may see her all the time she is shut up, but a single
slave woman is appointed to wait on her. During her lonely
confinement, which often lasts seven years, the girl occupies
herself in weaving mats or with other handiwork. Her bodily growth
is stunted by the long want of exercise, and when, on attaining
womanhood, she is brought out, her complexion is pale and wax-like.
She is now shown the sun, the earth, the water, the trees, and the
flowers, as if she were newly born. Then a great feast is made, a
slave is killed, and the girl is smeared with his blood. In Ceram
girls at puberty were formerly shut up by themselves in a hut which
was kept dark. In Yap, one of the Caroline Islands, should a girl be
overtaken by her first menstruation on the public road, she may not
sit down on the earth, but must beg for a coco-nut shell to put
under her. She is shut up for several days in a small hut at a
distance from her parents' house, and afterwards she is bound to
sleep for a hundred days in one of the special houses which are
provided for the use of menstruous women.

In the island of Mabuiag, Torres Straits, when the signs of puberty
appear on a girl, a circle of bushes is made in a dark corner of the
house. Here, decked with shoulder-belts, armlets, leglets just below
the knees, and anklets, wearing a chaplet on her head, and shell
ornaments in her ears, on her chest, and on her back, she squats in
the midst of the bushes, which are piled so high round about her
that only her head is visible. In this state of seclusion she must
remain for three months. All this time the sun may not shine upon
her, but at night she is allowed to slip out of the hut, and the
bushes that hedge her in are then changed. She may not feed herself
or handle food, but is fed by one or two old women, her maternal
aunts, who are especially appointed to look after her. One of these
women cooks food for her at a special fire in the forest. The girl
is forbidden to eat turtle or turtle eggs during the season when the
turtles are breeding; but no vegetable food is refused her. No man,
not even her own father, may come into the house while her seclusion
lasts; for if her father saw her at this time he would certainly
have bad luck in his fishing, and would probably smash his canoe the
very next time he went out in it. At the end of the three months she
is carried down to a freshwater creek by her attendants, hanging on
to their shoulders in such a way that her feet do not touch the
ground, while the women of the tribe form a ring round her, and thus
escort her to the beach. Arrived at the shore, she is stripped of
her ornaments, and the bearers stagger with her into the creek,
where they immerse her, and all the other women join in splashing
water over both the girl and her bearers. When they come out of the
water one of the two attendants makes a heap of grass for her charge
to squat upon. The other runs to the reef, catches a small crab,
tears off its claws, and hastens back with them to the creek. Here
in the meantime a fire has been kindled, and the claws are roasted
at it. The girl is then fed by her attendants with the roasted
claws. After that she is freshly decorated, and the whole party
marches back to the village in a single rank, the girl walking in
the centre between her two old aunts, who hold her by the wrists.
The husbands of her aunts now receive her and lead her into the
house of one of them, where all partake of food, and the girl is
allowed once more to feed herself in the usual manner. A dance
follows, in which the girl takes a prominent part, dancing between
the husbands of the two aunts who had charge of her in her
retirement.

Among the Yaraikanna tribe of Cape York Peninsula, in Northern
Queensland, a girl at puberty is said to live by herself for a month
or six weeks; no man may see her, though any woman may. She stays in
a hut or shelter specially made for her, on the floor of which she
lies supine. She may not see the sun, and towards sunset she must
keep her eyes shut until the sun has gone down, otherwise it is
thought that her nose will be diseased. During her seclusion she may
eat nothing that lives in salt water, or a snake would kill her. An
old woman waits upon her and supplies her with roots, yams, and
water. Some Australian tribes are wont to bury their girls at such
seasons more or less deeply in the ground, perhaps in order to hide
them from the light of the sun.

Among the Indians of California a girl at her first menstruation
"was thought to be possessed of a particular degree of supernatural
power, and this was not always regarded as entirely defiling or
malevolent. Often, however, there was a strong feeling of the power
of evil inherent in her condition. Not only was she secluded from
her family and the community, but an attempt was made to seclude the
world from her. One of the injunctions most strongly laid upon her
was not to look about her. She kept her head bowed and was forbidden
to see the world and the sun. Some tribes covered her with a
blanket. Many of the customs in this connection resembled those of
the North Pacific Coast most strongly, such as the prohibition to
the girl to touch or scratch her head with her hand, a special
implement being furnished her for the purpose. Sometimes she could
eat only when fed and in other cases fasted altogether."

Among the Chinook Indians who inhabited the coast of Washington
State, when a chief's daughter attained to puberty, she was hidden
for five days from the view of the people; she might not look at
them nor at the sky, nor might she pick berries. It was believed
that if she were to look at the sky, the weather would be bad; that
if she picked berries, it would rain; and that when she hung her
towel of cedar-bark on a spruce-tree, the tree withered up at once.
She went out of the house by a separate door and bathed in a creek
far from the village. She fasted for some days, and for many days
more she might not eat fresh food.

Amongst the Aht or Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, when girls
reach puberty they are placed in a sort of gallery in the house "and
are there surrounded completely with mats, so that neither the sun
nor any fire can be seen. In this cage they remain for several days.
Water is given them, but no food. The longer a girl remains in this
retirement the greater honour is it to the parents; but she is
disgraced for life if it is known that she has seen fire or the sun
during this initiatory ordeal." Pictures of the mythical
thunder-bird are painted on the screens behind which she hides.
During her seclusion she may neither move nor lie down, but must
always sit in a squatting posture. She may not touch her hair with
her hands, but is allowed to scratch her head with a comb or a piece
of bone provided for the purpose. To scratch her body is also
forbidden, as it is believed that every scratch would leave a scar.
For eight months after reaching maturity she may not eat any fresh
food, particularly salmon; moreover, she must eat by herself, and
use a cup and dish of her own.

In the Tsetsaut tribe of British Columbia a girl at puberty wears a
large hat of skin which comes down over her face and screens it from
the sun. It is believed that if she were to expose her face to the
sun or to the sky, rain would fall. The hat protects her face also
against the fire, which ought not to strike her skin; to shield her
hands she wears mittens. In her mouth she carries the tooth of an
animal to prevent her own teeth from becoming hollow. For a whole
year she may not see blood unless her face is blackened; otherwise
she would grow blind. For two years she wears the hat and lives in a
hut by herself, although she is allowed to see other people. At the
end of two years a man takes the hat from her head and throws it
away. In the Bilqula or Bella Coola tribe of British Columbia, when
a girl attains puberty she must stay in the shed which serves as her
bedroom, where she has a separate fireplace. She is not allowed to
descend to the main part of the house, and may not sit by the fire
of the family. For four days she is bound to remain motionless in a
sitting posture. She fasts during the day, but is allowed a little
food and drink very early in the morning. After the four days'
seclusion she may leave her room, but only through a separate
opening cut in the floor, for the houses are raised on piles. She
may not yet come into the chief room. In leaving the house she wears
a large hat which protects her face against the rays of the sun. It
is believed that if the sun were to shine on her face her eyes would
suffer. She may pick berries on the hills, but may not come near the
river or sea for a whole year. Were she to eat fresh salmon she
would lose her senses, or her mouth would be changed into a long
beak.

Amongst the Tlingit (Thlinkeet) or Kolosh Indians of Alaska, when a
girl showed signs of womanhood she used to be confined to a little
hut or cage, which was completely blocked up with the exception of a
small air-hole. In this dark and filthy abode she had to remain a
year, without fire, exercise, or associates. Only her mother and a
female slave might supply her with nourishment. Her food was put in
at the little window; she had to drink out of the wing-bone of a
white-headed eagle. The time of her seclusion was afterwards reduced
in some places to six or three months or even less. She had to wear
a sort of hat with long flaps, that her gaze might not pollute the
sky; for she was thought unfit for the sun to shine upon, and it was
imagined that her look would destroy the luck of a hunter, fisher,
or gambler, turn things to stone, and do other mischief. At the end
of her confinement her old clothes were burnt, new ones were made,
and a feast was given, at which a slit was cut in her under lip
parallel to the mouth, and a piece of wood or shell was inserted to
keep the aperture open. Among the Koniags, an Esquimau people of
Alaska, a girl at puberty was placed in a small hut in which she had
to remain on her hands and feet for six months; then the hut was
enlarged a little so as to allow her to straighten her back, but in
this posture she had to remain for six months more. All this time
she was regarded as an unclean being with whom no one might hold
intercourse.

When symptoms of puberty appeared on a girl for the first time, the
Guaranis of Southern Brazil, on the borders of Paraguay, used to sew
her up in her hammock, leaving only a small opening in it to allow
her to breathe. In this condition, wrapt up and shrouded like a
corpse, she was kept for two or three days or so long as the
symptoms lasted, and during this time she had to observe a most
rigorous fast. After that she was entrusted to a matron, who cut the
girl's hair and enjoined her to abstain most strictly from eating
flesh of any kind until her hair should be grown long enough to hide
her ears. In similar circumstances the Chiriguanos of South-eastern
Bolivia hoisted the girl in her hammock to the roof, where she
stayed for a month: the second month the hammock was let half-way
down from the roof; and in the third month old women, armed with
sticks, entered the hut and ran about striking everything they met,
saying they were hunting the snake that had wounded the girl.

Among the Matacos or Mataguayos, an Indian tribe of the Gran Chaco,
a girl at puberty has to remain in seclusion for some time. She lies
covered up with branches or other things in a corner of the hut,
seeing no one and speaking to no one, and during this time she may
eat neither flesh nor fish. Meantime a man beats a drum in front of
the house. Among the Yuracares, an Indian tribe of Eastern Bolivia,
when a girl perceives the signs of puberty, her father constructs a
little hut of palm leaves near the house. In this cabin he shuts up
his daughter so that she cannot see the light, and there she remains
fasting rigorously for four days.

Amongst the Macusis of British Guiana, when a girl shows the first
signs of puberty, she is hung in a hammock at the highest point of
the hut. For the first few days she may not leave the hammock by
day, but at night she must come down, light a fire, and spend the
night beside it, else she would break out in sores on her neck,
throat, and other parts of her body. So long as the symptoms are at
their height, she must fast rigorously. When they have abated, she
may come down and take up her abode in a little compartment that is
made for her in the darkest corner of the hut. In the morning she
may cook her food, but it must be at a separate fire and in a vessel
of her own. After about ten days the magician comes and undoes the
spell by muttering charms and breathing on her and on the more
valuable of the things with which she has come in contact. The pots
and drinking-vessels which she used are broken and the fragments
buried. After her first bath, the girl must submit to be beaten by
her mother with thin rods without uttering a cry. At the end of the
second period she is again beaten, but not afterwards. She is now
"clean," and can mix again with people. Other Indians of Guiana,
after keeping the girl in her hammock at the top of the hut for a
month, expose her to certain large ants, whose bite is very painful.
Sometimes, in addition to being stung with ants, the sufferer has to
fast day and night so long as she remains slung up on high in her
hammock, so that when she comes down she is reduced to a skeleton.

When a Hindoo maiden reaches maturity she is kept in a dark room for
four days, and is forbidden to see the sun. She is regarded as
unclean; no one may touch her. Her diet is restricted to boiled
rice, milk, sugar, curd, and tamarind without salt. On the morning
of the fifth day she goes to a neighbouring tank, accompanied by
five women whose husbands are alive. Smeared with turmeric water,
they all bathe and return home, throwing away the mat and other
things that were in the room. The Rarhi Brahmans of Bengal compel a
girl at puberty to live alone, and do not allow her to see the face
of any male. For three days she remains shut up in a dark room, and
has to undergo certain penances. Fish, flesh, and sweetmeats are
forbidden her; she must live upon rice and ghee. Among the Tiyans of
Malabar a girl is thought to be polluted for four days from the
beginning of her first menstruation. During this time she must keep
to the north side of the house, where she sleeps on a grass mat of a
particular kind, in a room festooned with garlands of young coco-nut
leaves. Another girl keeps her company and sleeps with her, but she
may not touch any other person, tree or plant. Further, she may not
see the sky, and woe betide her if she catches sight of a crow or a
cat! Her diet must be strictly vegetarian, without salt, tamarinds,
or chillies. She is armed against evil spirits by a knife, which is
placed on the mat or carried on her person.

In Cambodia a girl at puberty is put to bed under a mosquito
curtain, where she should stay a hundred days. Usually, however,
four, five, ten, or twenty days are thought enough; and even this,
in a hot climate and under the close meshes of the curtain, is
sufficiently trying. According to another account, a Cambodian
maiden at puberty is said to "enter into the shade." During her
retirement, which, according to the rank and position of her family,
may last any time from a few days to several years, she has to
observe a number of rules, such as not to be seen by a strange man,
not to eat flesh or fish, and so on. She goes nowhere, not even to
the pagoda. But this state of seclusion is discontinued during
eclipses; at such times she goes forth and pays her devotions to the
monster who is supposed to cause eclipses by catching the heavenly
bodies between his teeth. This permission to break her rule of
retirement and appear abroad during an eclipse seems to show how
literally the injunction is interpreted which forbids maidens
entering on womanhood to look upon the sun.

A superstition so widely diffused as this might be expected to leave
traces in legends and folk-tales. And it has done so. The old Greek
story of Danae, who was confined by her father in a subterranean
chamber or a brazen tower, but impregnated by Zeus, who reached her
in the shape of a shower of gold, perhaps belongs to this class of
tales. It has its counterpart in the legend which the Kirghiz of
Siberia tell of their ancestry. A certain Khan had a fair daughter,
whom he kept in a dark iron house, that no man might see her. An old
woman tended her; and when the girl was grown to maidenhood she
asked the old woman, "Where do you go so often?" "My child," said
the old dame, "there is a bright world. In that bright world your
father and mother live, and all sorts of people live there. That is
where I go." The maiden said, "Good mother, I will tell nobody, but
show me that bright world." So the old woman took the girl out of
the iron house. But when she saw the bright world, the girl tottered
and fainted; and the eye of God fell upon her, and she conceived.
Her angry father put her in a golden chest and sent her floating
away (fairy gold can float in fairyland) over the wide sea. The
shower of gold in the Greek story, and the eye of God in the Kirghiz
legend, probably stand for sunlight and the sun. The idea that women
may be impregnated by the sun is not uncommon in legends, and there
are even traces of it in marriage customs.



4. Reasons for the Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

THE MOTIVE for the restraints so commonly imposed on girls at
puberty is the deeply engrained dread which primitive man
universally entertains of menstruous blood. He fears it at all times
but especially on its first appearance; hence the restrictions under
which women lie at their first menstruation are usually more
stringent than those which they have to observe at any subsequent
recurrence of the mysterious flow. Some evidence of the fear and of
the customs based on it has been cited in an earlier part of this
work; but as the terror, for it is nothing less, which the
phenomenon periodically strikes into the mind of the savage has
deeply influenced his life and institutions, it may be well to
illustrate the subject with some further examples.

Thus in the Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia there is, or used
to be, a "superstition which obliges a woman to separate herself
from the camp at the time of her monthly illness, when if a young
man or boy should approach, she calls out, and he immediately makes
a circuit to avoid her. If she is neglectful upon this point, she
exposes herself to scolding, and sometimes to severe beating by her
husband or nearest relation, because the boys are told from their
infancy, that if they see the blood they will early become
grey-headed, and their strength will fail prematurely." The Dieri of
Central Australia believe that if women at these times were to eat
fish or bathe in a river, the fish would all die and the water would
dry up. The Arunta of the same region forbid menstruous women to
gather the _irriakura_ bulbs, which form a staple article of diet
for both men and women. They think that were a woman to break this
rule, the supply of bulbs would fail.

In some Australian tribes the seclusion of menstruous women was even
more rigid, and was enforced by severer penalties than a scolding or
a beating. Thus "there is a regulation relating to camps in the
Wakelbura tribe which forbids the women coming into the encampment
by the same path as the men. Any violation of this rule would in a
large camp be punished with death. The reason for this is the dread
with which they regard the menstrual period of women. During such a
time, a woman is kept entirely away from the camp, half a mile at
least. A woman in such a condition has boughs of some tree of her
totem tied round her loins, and is constantly watched and guarded,
for it is thought that should any male be so unfortunate as to see a
woman in such a condition, he would die. If such a woman were to let
herself be seen by a man, she would probably be put to death. When
the woman has recovered, she is painted red and white, her head
covered with feathers, and returns to the camp."

In Muralug, one of the Torres Straits Islands, a menstruous woman
may not eat anything that lives in the sea, else the natives believe
that the fisheries would fail. In Galela, to the west of New Guinea,
women at their monthly periods may not enter a tobacco-field, or the
plants would be attacked by disease. The Minangkabauers of Sumatra
are persuaded that if a woman in her unclean state were to go near a
rice-field, the crop would be spoiled.

The Bushmen of South Africa think that, by a glance of a girl's eye
at the time when she ought to be kept in strict retirement, men
become fixed in whatever positions they happen to occupy, with
whatever they were holding in their hands, and are changed into
trees that talk. Cattle-rearing tribes of South Africa hold that
their cattle would die if the milk were drunk by a menstruous woman;
and they fear the same disaster if a drop of her blood were to fall
on the ground and the oxen were to pass over it. To prevent such a
calamity women in general, not menstruous women only, are forbidden
to enter the cattle enclosure; and more than that, they may not use
the ordinary paths in entering the village or in passing from one
hut to another. They are obliged to make circuitous tracks at the
back of the huts in order to avoid the ground in the middle of the
village where the cattle stand or lie down. These women's tracks may
be seen at every Caffre village. Among the Baganda, in like manner,
no menstruous woman might drink milk or come into contact with any
milk-vessel; and she might not touch anything that belonged to her
husband, nor sit on his mat, nor cook his food. If she touched
anything of his at such a time it was deemed equivalent to wishing
him dead or to actually working magic for his destruction. Were she
to handle any article of his, he would surely fall ill; were she to
touch his weapons, he would certainly be killed in the next battle.
Further, the Baganda would not suffer a menstruous woman to visit a
well; if she did so, they feared that the water would dry up, and
that she herself would fall sick and die, unless she confessed her
fault and the medicine-man made atonement for her. Among the Akikuyu
of British East Africa, if a new hut is built in a village and the
wife chances to menstruate in it on the day she lights the first
fire there, the hut must be broken down and demolished the very next
day. The woman may on no account sleep a second night in it; there
is a curse both on her and on it.

According to the Talmud, if a woman at the beginning of her period
passes between two men, she thereby kills one of them. Peasants of
the Lebanon think that menstruous women are the cause or many
misfortunes; their shadow causes flowers to wither and trees to
perish, it even arrests the movements of serpents; if one of them
mounts a horse, the animal might die or at least be disabled for a
long time.

The Guayquiries of the Orinoco believe that when a woman has her
courses, everything upon which she steps will die, and that if a man
treads on the place where she has passed, his legs will immediately
swell up. Among the Bri-bri Indians of Costa Rica a married woman at
her periods uses for plates only banana leaves, which, when she has
done with them, she throws away in a sequestered spot; for should a
cow find and eat them, the animal would waste away and perish. Also
she drinks only out of a special vessel, because any person who
should afterwards drink out of the same vessel would infallibly pine
away and die.

Among most tribes of North American Indians the custom was that
women in their courses retired from the camp or the village and
lived during the time of their uncleanness in special huts or
shelters which were appropriated to their use. There they dwelt
apart, eating and sleeping by themselves, warming themselves at
their own fires, and strictly abstaining from all communications
with men, who shunned them just as if they were stricken with the
plague.

Thus, to take examples, the Creek and kindred Indians of the United
States compelled women at menstruation to live in separate huts at
some distance from the village. There the women had to stay, at the
risk of being surprised and cut off by enemies. It was thought "a
most horrid and dangerous pollution" to go near the women at such
times; and the danger extended to enemies who, if they slew the
women, had to cleanse themselves from the pollution by means of
certain sacred herbs and roots. The Stseelis Indians of British
Columbia imagined that if a menstruous woman were to step over a
bundle of arrows, the arrows would thereby be rendered useless and
might even cause the death of their owner; and similarly that if she
passed in front of a hunter who carried a gun, the weapon would
never shoot straight again. Among the Chippeways and other Indians
of the Hudson Bay Territory, menstruous women are excluded from the
camp, and take up their abode in huts of branches. They wear long
hoods, which effectually conceal the head and breast. They may not
touch the household furniture nor any objects used by men; for their
touch "is supposed to defile them, so that their subsequent use
would be followed by certain mischief or misfortune," such as
disease or death. They must drink out of a swan's bone. They may not
walk on the common paths nor cross the tracks of animals. They "are
never permitted to walk on the ice of rivers or lakes, or near the
part where the men are hunting beaver, or where a fishing-net is
set, for fear of averting their success. They are also prohibited at
those times from partaking of the head of any animal, and even from
walking in or crossing the track where the head of a deer, moose,
beaver, and many other animals have lately been carried, either on a
sledge or on the back. To be guilty of a violation of this custom is
considered as of the greatest importance; because they firmly
believe that it would be a means of preventing the hunter from
having an equal success in his future excursions." So the Lapps
forbid women at menstruation to walk on that part of the shore where
the fishers are in the habit of setting out their fish; and the
Esquimaux of Bering Strait believe that if hunters were to come near
women in their courses they would catch no game. For a like reason
the Carrier Indians will not suffer a menstruous woman to cross the
tracks of animals; if need be, she is carried over them. They think
that if she waded in a stream or a lake, the fish would die.

Amongst the civilised nations of Europe the superstitions which
cluster round this mysterious aspect of woman's nature are not less
extravagant than those which prevail among savages. In the oldest
existing cyclopaedia--the _Natural History_ of Pliny--the list of
dangers apprehended from menstruation is longer than any furnished
by mere barbarians. According to Pliny, the touch of a menstruous
woman turned wine to vinegar, blighted crops, killed seedlings,
blasted gardens, brought down the fruit from trees, dimmed mirrors,
blunted razors, rusted iron and brass (especially at the waning of
the moon), killed bees, or at least drove them from their hives,
caused mares to miscarry, and so forth. Similarly, in various parts
of Europe, it is still believed that if a woman in her courses
enters a brewery the beer will turn sour; if she touches beer, wine,
vinegar, or milk, it will go bad; if she makes jam, it will not
keep; if she mounts a mare, it will miscarry; if she touches buds,
they will wither; if she climbs a cherry tree, it will die. In
Brunswick people think that if a menstruous woman assists at the
killing of a pig, the pork will putrefy. In the Greek island of
Calymnos a woman at such times may not go to the well to draw water,
nor cross a running stream, nor enter the sea. Her presence in a
boat is said to raise storms.

Thus the object of secluding women at menstruation is to neutralise
the dangerous influences which are supposed to emanate from them at
such times. That the danger is believed to be especially great at
the first menstruation appears from the unusual precautions taken to
isolate girls at this crisis. Two of these precautions have been
illustrated above, namely, the rules that the girls may not touch
the ground nor see the sun. The general effect of these rules is to
keep her suspended, so to say, between heaven and earth. Whether
enveloped in her hammock and slung up to the roof, as in South
America, or raised above the ground in a dark and narrow cage, as in
New Ireland, she may be considered to be out of the way of doing
mischief, since, being shut off both from the earth and from the
sun, she can poison neither of these great sources of life by her
deadly contagion. In short, she is rendered harmless by being, in
electrical language, insulated. But the precautions thus taken to
isolate or insulate the girl are dictated by a regard for her own
safety as well as for the safety of others. For it is thought that
she herself would suffer if she were to neglect the prescribed
regimen. Thus Zulu girls, as we have seen, believe that they would
shrivel to skeletons if the sun were to shine on them at puberty,
and the Macusis imagine that, if a young woman were to transgress
the rules, she would suffer from sores on various parts of her body.
In short, the girl is viewed as charged with a powerful force which,
if not kept within bounds, may prove destructive both to herself and
to all with whom she comes in contact. To repress this force within
the limits necessary for the safety of all concerned is the object
of the taboos in question.

The same explanation applies to the observance of the same rules by
divine kings and priests. The uncleanness, as it is called, of girls
at puberty and the sanctity of holy men do not, to the primitive
mind, differ materially from each other. They are only different
manifestations of the same mysterious energy which, like energy in
general, is in itself neither good nor bad, but becomes beneficent
or maleficent according to its application. Accordingly, if, like
girls at puberty, divine personages may neither touch the ground nor
see the sun, the reason is, on the one hand, a fear lest their
divinity might, at contact with earth or heaven, discharge itself
with fatal violence on either; and, on the other hand, an
apprehension that the divine being, thus drained of his ethereal
virtue, might thereby be incapacitated for the future performance of
those magical functions, upon the proper discharge of which the
safety of the people and even of the world is believed to hang. Thus
the rules in question fall under the head of the taboos which we
examined in an earlier part of this book; they are intended to
preserve the life of the divine person and with it the life of his
subjects and worshippers. Nowhere, it is thought, can his precious
yet dangerous life be at once so safe and so harmless as when it is
neither in heaven nor in earth, but, as far as possible, suspended
between the two.




LXI. The Myth of Balder

A DEITY whose life might in a sense be said to be neither in heaven
nor on earth but between the two, was the Norse Balder, the good and
beautiful god, the son of the great god Odin, and himself the
wisest, mildest, best beloved of all the immortals. The story of his
death, as it is told in the younger or prose _Edda,_ runs thus. Once
on a time Balder dreamed heavy dreams which seemed to forebode his
death. Thereupon the gods held a council and resolved to make him
secure against every danger. So the goddess Frigg took an oath from
fire and water, iron and all metals, stones and earth, from trees,
sicknesses and poisons, and from all four-footed beasts, birds, and
creeping things, that they would not hurt Balder. When this was done
Balder was deemed invulnerable; so the gods amused themselves by
setting him in their midst, while some shot at him, others hewed at
him, and others threw stones at him. But whatever they did, nothing
could hurt him; and at this they were all glad. Only Loki, the
mischief-maker, was displeased, and he went in the guise of an old
woman to Frigg, who told him that the weapons of the gods could not
wound Balder, since she had made them all swear not to hurt him.
Then Loki asked, "Have all things sworn to spare Balder?" She
answered, "East of Walhalla grows a plant called mistletoe; it
seemed to me too young to swear." So Loki went and pulled the
mistletoe and took it to the assembly of the gods. There he found
the blind god Hother standing at the outside of the circle. Loki
asked him, "Why do you not shoot at Balder?" Hother answered,
"Because I do not see where he stands; besides I have no weapon."
Then said Loki, "Do like the rest and show Balder honour, as they
all do. I will show you where he stands, and do you shoot at him
with this twig." Hother took the mistletoe and threw it at Balder,
as Loki directed him. The mistletoe struck Balder and pierced him
through and through, and he fell down dead. And that was the
greatest misfortune that ever befell gods and men. For a while the
gods stood speechless, then they lifted up their voices and wept
bitterly. They took Balder's body and brought it to the sea-shore.
There stood Balder's ship; it was called Ringhorn, and was the
hugest of all ships. The gods wished to launch the ship and to burn
Balder's body on it, but the ship would not stir. So they sent for a
giantess called Hyrrockin. She came riding on a wolf and gave the
ship such a push that fire flashed from the rollers and all the
earth shook. Then Balder's body was taken and placed on the funeral
pile upon his ship. When his wife Nanna saw that, her heart burst
for sorrow and she died. So she was laid on the funeral pile with
her husband, and fire was put to it. Balder's horse, too, with all
its trappings, was burned on the pile.

Whether he was a real or merely a mythical personage, Balder was
worshipped in Norway. On one of the bays of the beautiful Sogne
Fiord, which penetrates far into the depths of the solemn Norwegian
mountains, with their sombre pine-forests and their lofty cascades
dissolving into spray before they reach the dark water of the fiord
far below, Balder had a great sanctuary. It was called Balder's
Grove. A palisade enclosed the hallowed ground, and within it stood
a spacious temple with the images of many gods, but none of them was
worshipped with such devotion as Balder. So great was the awe with
which the heathen regarded the place that no man might harm another
there, nor steal his cattle, nor defile himself with women. But
women cared for the images of the gods in the temple; they warmed
them at the fire, anointed them with oil, and dried them with
cloths.

Whatever may be thought of an historical kernel underlying a
mythical husk in the legend of Balder, the details of the story
suggest that it belongs to that class of myths which have been
dramatised an ritual, or, to put it otherwise, which have been
performed as magical ceremonies for the sake of producing those
natural effects which they describe in figurative language. A myth
is never so graphic and precise in its details as when it is, so to
speak, the book of the words which are spoken and acted by the
performers of the sacred rite. That the Norse story of Balder was a
myth of this sort will become probable if we can prove that
ceremonies resembling the incidents in the tale have been performed
by Norsemen and other European peoples. Now the main incidents in
the tale are two--first, the pulling of the mistletoe, and second,
the death and burning of the god; and both of them may perhaps be
found to have had their counterparts in yearly rites observed,
whether separately or conjointly, by people in various parts of
Europe. These rites will be described and discussed in the following
chapters. We shall begin with the annual festivals of fire and shall
reserve the pulling of the mistletoe for consideration later on.



LXII. The Fire-Festivals of Europe



1. The Fire-festivals in general

ALL over Europe the peasants have been accustomed from time
immemorial to kindle bonfires on certain days of the year, and to
dance round or leap over them. Customs of this kind can be traced
back on historical evidence to the Middle Ages, and their analogy to
similar customs observed in antiquity goes with strong internal
evidence to prove that their origin must be sought in a period long
prior to the spread of Christianity. Indeed the earliest proof of
their observance in Northern Europe is furnished by the attempts
made by Christian synods in the eighth century to put them down as
heathenish rites. Not uncommonly effigies are burned in these fires,
or a pretence is made of burning a living person in them; and there
are grounds for believing that anciently human beings were actually
burned on these occasions. A brief view of the customs in question
will bring out the traces of human sacrifice, and will serve at the
same time to throw light on their meaning.

The seasons of the year when these bonfires are most commonly lit
are spring and midsummer; but in some places they are kindled also
at the end of autumn or during the course of the winter,
particularly on Hallow E'en (the thirty-first of October), Christmas
Day, and the Eve of Twelfth Day. Space forbids me to describe all
these festivals at length; a few specimens must serve to illustrate
their general character. We shall begin with the fire-festivals of
spring, which usually fall on the first Sunday of Lent
(_Quadragesima_ or _Invocavit_), Easter Eve, and May Day.



2. The Lenten Fires

THE CUSTOM of kindling bonfires on the first Sunday in Lent has
prevailed in Belgium, the north of France, and many parts of
Germany. Thus in the Belgian Ardennes for a week or a fortnight
before the "day of the great fire," as it is called, children go
about from farm to farm collecting fuel. At Grand Halleux any one
who refuses their request is pursued next day by the children, who
try to blacken his face with the ashes of the extinct fire. When the
day has come, they cut down bushes, especially juniper and broom,
and in the evening great bonfires blaze on all the heights. It is a
common saying that seven bonfires should be seen if the village is
to be safe from conflagrations. If the Meuse happens to be frozen
hard at the time, bonfires are lit also on the ice. At Grand Halleux
they set up a pole called _makral,_ or "the witch," in the midst of
the pile, and the fire is kindled by the man who was last married in
the village. In the neighbourhood of Morlanwelz a straw man is burnt
in the fire. Young people and children dance and sing round the
bonfires, and leap over the embers to secure good crops or a happy
marriage within the year, or as a means of guarding themselves
against colic. In Brabant on the same Sunday, down to the beginning
of the nineteenth century, women and men disguised in female attire
used to go with burning torches to the fields, where they danced and
sang comic songs for the purpose, as they alleged, of driving away
"the wicked sower," who is mentioned in the Gospel for the day. At
Pâturages, in the province of Hainaut, down to about 1840 the custom
was observed under the name of _Escouvion_ or _Scouvion._ Every year
on the first Sunday of Lent, which was called the Day of the Little
Scouvion, young folks and children used to run with lighted torches
through the gardens and orchards. As they ran they cried at the
pitch of their voices:


    "Bear apples, bear pears, and cherries all black
     To Scouvion!"


At these words the torch-bearer whirled his blazing brand and hurled
it among the branches of the apple-trees, the pear-trees, and the
cherry-trees. The next Sunday was called the Day of the Great
Scouvion, and the same race with lighted torches among the trees of
the orchards was repeated in the afternoon till darkness fell.

In the French department of the Ardennes the whole village used to
dance and sing around the bonfires which were lighted on the first
Sunday in Lent. Here, too, it was the person last married, sometimes
a man and sometimes a woman, who put the match to the fire. The
custom is still kept up very commonly in the district. Cats used to
be burnt in the fire or roasted to death by being held over it; and
while they were burning the shepherds drove their flocks through the
smoke and flames as a sure means of guarding them against sickness
and witchcraft. In some communes it was believed that the livelier
the dance round the fire, the better would be the crops that year.

In the French province of Franche-Comté, to the west of the Jura
Mountains, the first Sunday of Lent is known as the Sunday of the
Firebrands (_Brandons_), on account of the fires which it is
customary to kindle on that day. On the Saturday or the Sunday the
village lads harness themselves to a cart and drag it about the
streets, stopping at the doors of the houses where there are girls
and begging fora faggot. When they have got enough, they cart the
fuel to a spot at some little distance from the village, pile it up,
and set it on fire. All the people of the parish come out to see the
bonfire. In some villages, when the bells have rung the Angelus, the
signal for the observance is given by cries of, "To the fire! to the
fire!" Lads, lasses, and children dance round the blaze, and when
the flames have died down they vie with each other in leaping over
the red embers. He or she who does so without singeing his or her
garments will be married within the year. Young folk also carry
lighted torches about the streets or the fields, and when they pass
an orchard they cry out, "More fruit than leaves!" Down to recent
years at Laviron, in the department of Doubs, it was the young
married couples of the year who had charge of the bonfires. In the
midst of the bonfire a pole was planted with a wooden figure of a
cock fastened to the top. Then there were races, and the winner
received the cock as a prize.

In Auvergne fires are everywhere kindled on the evening of the first
Sunday in Lent. Every village, every hamlet, even every ward, every
isolated farm has its bonfire or _figo,_ as it is called, which
blazes up as the shades of night are falling. The fires may be seen
flaring on the heights and in the plains; the people dance and sing
round about them and leap through the flames. Then they proceed to
the ceremony of the _Grannas-mias._ A _granno-mio_ is a torch of
straw fastened to the top of a pole. When the pyre is half consumed,
the bystanders kindle the torches at the expiring flames and carry
them into the neighbouring orchards, fields, and gardens, wherever
there are fruit-trees. As they march they sing at the top of their
voices, "Granno my friend, Granno my father, Granno my mother." Then
they pass the burning torches under the branches of every tree,
singing.


"_Brando, brandounci tsaque brantso, in plan panei!_"


that is, "Firebrand burn; every branch a basketful!" In some
villages the people also run across the sown fields and shake the
ashes of the torches on the ground; also they put some of the ashes
in the fowls' nests, in order that the hens may lay plenty of eggs
throughout the year. When all these ceremonies have been performed,
everybody goes home and feasts; the special dishes of the evening
are fritters and pancakes. Here the application of the fire to the
fruit-trees, to the sown fields, and to the nests of the poultry is
clearly a charm intended to ensure fertility; and the Granno to whom
the invocations are addressed, and who gives his name to the
torches, may possibly be, as Dr. Pommerol suggests, no other than
the ancient Celtic god Grannus, whom the Romans identified with
Apollo, and whose worship is attested by inscriptions found not only
in France but in Scotland and on the Danube.

The custom of carrying lighted torches of straw (_brandons_) about
the orchards and fields to fertilise them on the first Sunday of
Lent seems to have been common in France, whether it was accompanied
with the practice of kindling bonfires or not. Thus in the province
of Picardy "on the first Sunday of Lent people carried torches
through the fields, exorcising the field-mice, the darnel, and the
smut. They imagined that they did much good to the gardens and
caused the onions to grow large. Children ran about the fields,
torch in hand, to make the land more fertile." At Verges, a village
between the Jura and the Combe d'Ain, the torches at this season
were kindled on the top of a mountain, and the bearers went to every
house in the village, demanding roasted peas and obliging all
couples who had been married within the year to dance. In Berry, a
district of Central France, it appears that bonfires are not lighted
on this day, but when the sun has set the whole population of the
villages, armed with blazing torches of straw, disperse over the
country and scour the fields, the vineyards, and the orchards. Seen
from afar, the multitude of moving lights, twinkling in the
darkness, appear like will-o'-the-wisps chasing each other across
the plains, along the hillsides, and down the valleys. While the men
wave their flambeaus about the branches of the fruit-trees, the
women and children tie bands of wheaten-straw round the tree-trunks.
The effect of the ceremony is supposed to be to avert the various
plagues from which the fruits of the earth are apt to suffer; and
the bands of straw fastened round the stems of the trees are
believed to render them fruitful.

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the same season similar
customs have prevailed. Thus in the Eifel Mountains, Rhenish
Prussia, on the first Sunday in Lent young people used to collect
straw and brushwood from house to house. These they carried to an
eminence and piled up round a tall, slim beech-tree, to which a
piece of wood was fastened at right angles to form a cross. The
structure was known as the "hut" or "castle." Fire was set to it and
the young people marched round the blazing "castle" bareheaded, each
carrying a lighted torch and praying aloud. Sometimes a straw-man
was burned in the "hut." People observed the direction in which the
smoke blew from the fire. If it blew towards the corn-fields, it was
a sign that the harvest would be abundant. On the same day, in some
parts of the Eifel, a great wheel was made of straw and dragged by
three horses to the top of the hill. Thither the village boys
marched at nightfall, set fire to the wheel, and sent it rolling
down the slope. At Oberstattfeld the wheel had to be provided by the
young man who was last married. About Echternach in Luxemburg the
same ceremony is called "burning the witch." At Voralberg in the
Tyrol, on the first Sunday in Lent, a slender young fir-tree is
surrounded with a pile of straw and firewood. To the top of the tree
is fastened a human figure called the "witch," made of old clothes
and stuffed with gunpowder. At night the whole is set on fire and
boys and girls dance round it, swinging torches and singing rhymes
in which the words "corn in the winnowing-basket, the plough in the
earth" may be distinguished. In Swabia on the first Sunday in Lent a
figure called the "witch" or the "old wife" or "winter's
grandmother" is made up of clothes and fastened to a pole. This is
stuck in the middle of a pile of wood, to which fire is applied.
While the "witch" is burning, the young people throw blazing discs
into the air. The discs are thin round pieces of wood, a few inches
in diameter, with notched edges to imitate the rays of the sun or
stars. They have a hole in the middle, by which they are attached to
the end of a wand. Before the disc is thrown it is set on fire, the
wand is swung to and fro, and the impetus thus communicated to the
disc is augmented by dashing the rod sharply against a sloping
board. The burning disc is thus thrown off, and mounting high into
the air, describes a long fiery curve before it reaches the ground.
The charred embers of the burned "witch" and discs are taken home
and planted in the flax-fields the same night, in the belief that
they will keep vermin from the fields. In the Rhön Mountains,
situated on the borders of Hesse and Bavaria, the people used to
march to the top of a hill or eminence on the first Sunday in Lent.
Children and lads carried torches, brooms daubed with tar, and poles
swathed in straw. A wheel, wrapt in combustibles, was kindled and
rolled down the hill; and the young people rushed about the fields
with their burning torches and brooms, till at last they flung them
in a heap, and standing round them, struck up a hymn or a popular
song. The object of running about the fields with the blazing
torches was to "drive away the wicked sower." Or it was done in
honour of the Virgin, that she might preserve the fruits of the
earth throughout the year and bless them. In neighbouring villages
of Hesse, between the Rhön and the Vogel Mountains, it is thought
that wherever the burning wheels roll, the fields will be safe from
hail and strom.

In Switzerland, also, it is or used to be customary to kindle
bonfires on high places on the evening of the first Sunday in Lent,
and the day is therefore popularly known as Spark Sunday. The custom
prevailed, for example, throughout the canton of Lucerne. Boys went
about from house to house begging for wood and straw, then piled the
fuel on a conspicuous mountain or hill round about a pole, which
bore a straw effigy called "the witch." At nightfall the pile was
set on fire, and the young folks danced wildly round it, some of
them cracking whips or ringing bells; and when the fire burned low
enough, they leaped over it. This was called "burning the witch." In
some parts of the canton also they used to wrap old wheels in straw
and thorns, put a light to them, and send them rolling and blazing
down hill. The more bonfires could be seen sparkling and flaring in
the darkness, the more fruitful was the year expected to be; and the
higher the dancers leaped beside or over the fire, the higher, it
was thought, would grow the flax. In some districts it was the last
married man or woman who must kindle the bonfire.

It seems hardly possible to separate from these bonfires, kindled on
the first Sunday in Lent, the fires in which, about the same season,
the effigy called Death is burned as part of the ceremony of
"carrying out Death." We have seen that at Spachendorf, in Austrian
Silesia, on the morning of Rupert's Day (Shrove Tuesday?), a
straw-man, dressed in a fur coat and a fur cap, is laid in a hole
outside the village and there burned, and that while it is blazing
every one seeks to snatch a fragment of it, which he fastens to a
branch of the highest tree in his garden or buries in his field,
believing that this will make the crops to grow better. The ceremony
is known as the "burying of Death." Even when the straw-man is not
designated as Death, the meaning of the observance is probably the
same; for the name Death, as I have tried to show, does not express
the original intention of the ceremony. At Cobern in the Eifel
Mountains the lads make up a straw-man on Shrove Tuesday. The effigy
is formally tried and accused of having perpetrated all the thefts
that have been committed in the neighbourhood throughout the year.
Being condemned to death, the straw-man is led through the village,
shot, and burned upon a pyre. They dance round the blazing pile, and
the last bride must leap over it. In Oldenburg on the evening of
Shrove Tuesday people used to make long bundles of straw, which they
set on fire, and then ran about the fields waving them, shrieking,
and singing wild songs. Finally they burned a straw-man on the
field. In the district of Düsseldorf the straw-man burned on Shrove
Tuesday was made of an unthreshed sheaf of corn. On the first Monday
after the spring equinox the urchins of Zurich drag a straw-man on a
little cart through the streets, while at the same time the girls
carry about a May-tree. When vespers ring, the straw-man is burned.
In the district of Aachen on Ash Wednesday, a man used to be encased
in peas-straw and taken to an appointed place. Here he slipped
quietly out of his straw casing, which was then burned, the children
thinking that it was the man who was being burned. In the Val di
Ledro (Tyrol) on the last day of the Carnival a figure is made up of
straw and brushwood and then burned. The figure is called the Old
Woman, and the ceremony "burning the Old Woman."



3. The Easter Fires

ANOTHER occasion on which these fire-festivals are held is Easter
Eve, the Saturday before Easter Sunday. On that day it has been
customary in Catholic countries to extinguish all the lights in the
churches, and then to make a new fire, sometimes with flint and
steel, sometimes with a burning-glass. At this fire is lit the great
Paschal or Easter candle, which is then used to rekindle all the
extinguished lights in the church. In many parts of Germany a
bonfire is also kindled, by means of the new fire, on some open
space near the church. It is consecrated, and the people bring
sticks of oak, walnut, and beech, which they char in the fire, and
then take home with them. Some of these charred sticks are thereupon
burned at home in a newly-kindled fire, with a prayer that God will
preserve the homestead from fire, lightning, and hail. Thus every
house receives "new fire." Some of the sticks are kept throughout
the year and laid on the hearth-fire during heavy thunder-storms to
prevent the house from being struck by lightning, or they are
inserted in the roof with the like intention. Others are placed in
the fields, gardens, and meadows, with a prayer that God will keep
them from blight and hail. Such fields and gardens are thought to
thrive more than others; the corn and the plants that grow in them
are not beaten down by hail, nor devoured by mice, vermin, and
beetles; no witch harms them, and the ears of corn stand close and
full. The charred sticks are also applied to the plough. The ashes
of the Easter bonfire, together with the ashes of the consecrated
palm-branches, are mixed with the seed at sowing. A wooden figure
called Judas is sometimes burned in the consecrated bonfire, and
even where this custom has been abolished the bonfire itself in some
places goes by the name of "the burning of Judas."

The essentially pagan character of the Easter fire festival appears
plainly both from the mode in which it is celebrated by the peasants
and from the superstitious beliefs which they associate with it. All
over Northern and Central Germany, from Altmark and Anhalt on the
east, through Brunswick, Hanover, Oldenburg, the Harz district, and
Hesse to Westphalia the Easter bonfires still blaze simultaneously
on the hill-tops. As many as forty may sometimes be counted within
sight at once. Long before Easter the young people have been busy
collecting firewood; every farmer contributes, and tar-barrels,
petroleum cases, and so forth go to swell the pile. Neighbouring
villages vie with each other as to which shall send up the greatest
blaze. The fires are always kindled, year after year, on the same
hill, which accordingly often takes the name of Easter Mountain. It
is a fine spectacle to watch from some eminence the bonfires flaring
up one after another on the neighbouring heights. As far as their
light reaches, so far, in the belief of the peasants, the fields
will be fruitful, and the houses on which they shine will be safe
from conflagration or sickness. At Volkmarsen and other places in
Hesse the people used to observe which way the wind blew the flames,
and then they sowed flax seed in that direction, confident that it
would grow well. Brands taken from the bonfires preserve houses from
being struck by lightning; and the ashes increase the fertility of
the fields, protect them from mice, and mixed with the
drinking-water of cattle make the animals thrive and ensure them
against plague. As the flames die down, young and old leap over
them, and cattle are sometimes driven through the smouldering
embers. In some places tar-barrels or wheels wrapt in straw used to
be set on fire, and then sent rolling down the hillside. In others
the boys light torches and wisps of straw at the bonfires and rush
about brandishing them in their hands.

In Münsterland these Easter fires are always kindled upon certain
definite hills, which are hence known as Easter or Paschal
Mountains. The whole community assembles about the fire. The young
men and maidens, singing Easter hymns, march round and round the
fire, till the blaze dies down. Then the girls jump over the fire in
a line, one after the other, each supported by two young men who
hold her hands and run beside her. In the twilight boys with blazing
bundles of straw run over the fields to make them fruitful. At
Delmenhorst, in Oldenburg, it used to be the custom to cut down two
trees, plant them in the ground side by side, and pile twelve
tar-barrels against each. Brush-wood was then heaped about the
trees, and on the evening of Easter Saturday the boys, after rushing
about with blazing bean-poles in their hands, set fire to the whole.
At the end of the ceremony the urchins tried to blacken each other
and the clothes of grown-up people. In the Altmark it is believed
that as far as the blaze of the Easter bonfire is visible, the corn
will grow well throughout the year, and no conflagration will break
out. At Braunröde, in the Harz Mountains, it was the custom to burn
squirrels in the Easter bonfire. In the Altmark, bones were burned
in it.

Near Forchheim, in Upper Franken, a straw-man called the Judas used
to be burned in the churchyards on Easter Saturday. The whole
village contributed wood to the pyre on which he perished, and the
charred sticks were afterwards kept and planted in the fields on
Walpurgis Day (the first of May) to preserve the wheat from blight
and mildew. About a hundred years ago or more the custom at
Althenneberg, in Upper Bavaria, used to be as follows. On the
afternoon of Easter Saturday the lads collected wood, which they
piled in a cornfield, while in the middle of the pile they set up a
tall wooden cross all swathed in straw. After the evening service
they lighted their lanterns at the consecrated candle in the church,
and ran with them at full speed to the pyre, each striving to get
there first. The first to arrive set fire to the heap. No woman or
girl might come near the bonfire, but they were allowed to watch it
from a distance. As the flames rose the men and lads rejoiced and
made merry, shouting, "We are burning the Judas!" The man who had
been the first to reach the pyre and to kindle it was rewarded on
Easter Sunday by the women, who gave him coloured eggs at the church
door. The object of the whole ceremony was to keep off the hail. At
other villages of Upper Bavaria the ceremony, which took place
between nine and ten at night on Easter Saturday, was called
"burning the Easter Man." On a height about a mile from the village
the young fellows set up a tall cross enveloped in straw, so that it
looked like a man with his arms stretched out. This was the Easter
Man. No lad under eighteen years of age might take part in the
ceremony. One of the young men stationed himself beside the Easter
Man, holding in his hand a consecrated taper which he had brought
from the church and lighted. The rest stood at equal intervals in a
great circle round the cross. At a given signal they raced thrice
round the circle, and then at a second signal ran straight at the
cross and at the lad with the lighted taper beside it; the one who
reached the goal first had the right of setting fire to the Easter
Man. Great was the jubilation while he was burning. When he had been
consumed in the flames, three lads were chosen from among the rest,
and each of the three drew a circle on the ground with a stick
thrice round the ashes. Then they all left the spot. On Easter
Monday the villagers gathered the ashes and strewed them on their
fields; also they planted in the fields palmbranches which had been
consecrated on Palm Sunday, and sticks which had been charred and
hallowed on Good Friday, all for the purpose of protecting their
fields against showers of hail. In some parts of Swabia the Easter
fires might not be kindled with iron or steel or flint, but only by
the friction of wood.

The custom of the Easter fires appears to have prevailed all over
Central and Western Germany from north to south. We find it also in
Holland, where the fires were kindled on the highest eminences, and
the people danced round them and leaped through the flames or over
the glowing embers. Here too, as often in Germany, the materials for
the bonfire were collected by the young folk from door to door. In
many parts of Sweden firearms are discharged in all directions on
Easter Eve, and huge bonfires are lighted on hills and eminences.
Some people think that the intention is to keep off the Troll and
other evil spirits who are especially active at this season.



4. The Beltane Fires

IN THE CENTRAL Highlands of Scotland bonfires, known as the Beltane
fires, were formerly kindled with great ceremony on the first of
May, and the traces of human sacrifices at them were particularly
clear and unequivocal. The custom of lighting the bonfires lasted in
various places far into the eighteenth century, and the descriptions
of the ceremony by writers of that period present such a curious and
interesting picture of ancient heathendom surviving in our own
country that I will reproduce them in the words of their authors.
The fullest of the descriptions is the one bequeathed to us by John
Ramsay, laird of Ochtertyre, near Crieff, the patron of Burns and
the friend of Sir Walter Scott. He says: "But the most considerable
of the Druidical festivals is that of Beltane, or May-day, which was
lately observed in some parts of the Highlands with extraordinary
ceremonies. . . . Like the other public worship of the Druids, the
Beltane feast seems to have been performed on hills or eminences.
They thought it degrading to him whose temple is the universe, to
suppose that he would dwell in any house made with hands. Their
sacrifices were therefore offered in the open air, frequently upon
the tops of hills, where they were presented with the grandest views
of nature, and were nearest the seat of warmth and order. And,
according to tradition, such was the manner of celebrating this
festival in the Highlands within the last hundred years. But since
the decline of superstition, it has been celebrated by the people of
each hamlet on some hill or rising ground around which their cattle
were pasturing. Thither the young folks repaired in the morning, and
cut a trench, on the summit of which a seat of turf was formed for
the company. And in the middle a pile of wood or other fuel was
placed, which of old they kindled with _tein-eigin_--_i.e.,_
forced-fire or _need-fire._ Although, for many years past, they have
been contented with common fire, yet we shall now describe the
process, because it will hereafter appear that recourse is still had
to the _tein-eigin_ upon extraordinary emergencies.

"The night before, all the fires in the country were carefully
extinguished, and next morning the materials for exciting this
sacred fire were prepared. The most primitive method seems to be
that which was used in the islands of Skye, Mull, and Tiree. A
well-seasoned plank of oak was procured, in the midst of which a
hole was bored. A wimble of the same timber was then applied, the
end of which they fitted to the hole. But in some parts of the
mainland the machinery was different. They used a frame of green
wood, of a square form, in the centre of which was an axle-tree. In
some places three times three persons, in others three times nine,
were required for turning round by turns the axle-tree or wimble. If
any of them had been guilty of murder, adultery, theft, or other
atrocious crime, it was imagined either that the fire would not
kindle, or that it would be devoid of its usual virtue. So soon as
any sparks were emitted by means of the violent friction, they
applied a species of agaric which grows on old birch-trees, and is
very combustible. This fire had the appearance of being immediately
derived from heaven, and manifold were the virtues ascribed to it.
They esteemed it a preservative against witch-craft, and a sovereign
remedy against malignant diseases, both in the human species and in
cattle; and by it the strongest poisons were supposed to have their
nature changed.

"After kindling the bonfire with the _tein-eigin_ the company
prepared their victuals. And as soon as they had finished their
meal, they amused themselves a while in singing and dancing round
the fire. Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who
officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with
eggs and scalloped round the edge, called _am bonnach
bea-tine_--_i.e.,_ the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of
pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one
particular piece which whoever got was called _cailleach
beal-tine_--_i.e.,_ the Beltane _carline,_ a term of great reproach.
Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made
a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing,
he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground,
making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with
egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole
year. And while the feast was fresh in people's memory, they
affected to speak of the _cailleach beal-tine_ as dead."

In the parish of Callander, a beautiful district of Western
Perthshire, the Beltane custom was still in vogue towards the end of
the eighteenth century. It has been described as follows by the
parish minister of the time: "Upon the first day of May, which is
called _Beltan,_ or _Baltein_ day, all the boys in a township or
hamlet, meet in the moors. They cut a table in the green sod, of a
round figure, by casting a trench in the ground, of such
circumference as to hold the whole company. They kindle a fire, and
dress a repast of eggs and milk in the consistence of a custard.
They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is toasted at the embers against
a stone. After the custard is eaten up, they divide the cake into so
many portions, as similar as possible to one another in size and
shape, as there are persons in the company. They daub one of these
portions all over with charcoal, until it be perfectly black. They
put all the bits of the cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold,
draws out a portion. He who holds the bonnet, is entitled to the
last bit. Whoever draws the black bit, is the _devoted_ person who
is to be sacrificed to _Baal,_ whose favour they mean to implore, in
rendering the year productive of the sustenance of man and beast.
There is little doubt of these inhuman sacrifices having been once
offered in this country, as well as in the east, although they now
pass from the act of sacrificing, and only compel the _devoted_
person to leap three times through the flames; with which the
ceremonies of this festival are closed."

Thomas Pennant, who travelled in Perthshire in the year 1769, tells
us that "on the first of May, the herdsmen of every village hold
their Bel-tien, a rural sacrifice. They cut a square trench on the
ground, leaving the turf in the middle; on that they make a fire of
wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal
and milk; and bring besides the ingredients of the caudle, plenty of
beer and whisky; for each of the company must contribute something.
The rites begin with spilling some of the caudle on the ground, by
way of libation: on that every one takes a cake of oatmeal, upon
which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some
particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds,
or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them: each
person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, and
flinging it over his shoulders, says, 'This I give to thee, preserve
thou my horses; this to thee, preserve thou my sheep; and so on.'
After that, they use the same ceremony to the noxious animals: 'This
I give to thee, O fox! spare thou my lambs; this to thee, O hooded
crow! this to thee, O eagle!' When the ceremony is over, they dine
on the caudle; and after the feast is finished, what is left is hid
by two persons deputed for that purpose; but on the next Sunday they
reassemble, and finish the reliques of the first entertainment."

Another writer of the eighteenth century has described the Beltane
festival as it was held in the parish of Logierait in Perthshire. He
says: "On the first of May, O.S., a festival called _Beltan_ is
annually held here. It is chiefly celebrated by the cow-herds, who
assemble by scores in the fields, to dress a dinner for themselves,
of boiled milk and eggs. These dishes they eat with a sort of cakes
baked for the occasion, and having small lumps in the form of
_nipples,_ raised all over the surface." In this last account no
mention is made of bonfires, but they were probably lighted, for a
contemporary writer informs us that in the parish of Kirkmichael,
which adjoins the parish of Logierait on the east, the custom of
lighting a fire in the fields and baking a consecrated cake on the
first of May was not quite obsolete in his time. We may conjecture
that the cake with knobs was formerly used for the purpose of
determining who should be the "Beltane carline" or victim doomed to
the flames. A trace of this custom survived, perhaps, in the custom
of baking oatmeal cakes of a special kind and rolling them down hill
about noon on the first of May; for it was thought that the person
whose cake broke as it rolled would die or be unfortunate within the
year. These cakes, or bannocks as we call them in Scotland, were
baked in the usual way, but they were washed over with a thin batter
composed of whipped egg, milk or cream, and a little oatmeal. This
custom appears to have prevailed at or near Kingussie in
Inverness-shire.

In the north-east of Scotland the Beltane fires were still kindled
in the latter half of the eighteenth century; the herdsmen of
several farms used to gather dry wood, kindle it, and dance three
times "southways" about the burning pile. But in this region,
according to a later authority, the Beltane fires were lit not on
the first but on the second of May, Old Style. They were called
bone-fires. The people believed that on that evening and night the
witches were abroad and busy casting spells on cattle and stealing
cows' milk. To counteract their machinations, pieces of rowan-tree
and woodbine, but especially of rowan-tree, were placed over the
doors of the cow-houses, and fires were kindled by every farmer and
cottar. Old thatch, straw, furze, or broom was piled in a heap and
set on fire a little after sunset. While some of the bystanders kept
tossing the blazing mass, others hoisted portions of it on
pitchforks or poles and ran hither and thither, holding them as high
as they could. Meantime the young people danced round the fire or
ran through the smoke shouting, "Fire! blaze and burn the witches;
fire! fire! burn the witches." In some districts a large round cake
of oat or barley meal was rolled through the ashes. When all the
fuel was consumed, the people scattered the ashes far and wide, and
till the night grew quite dark they continued to run through them,
crying, "Fire! burn the witches."

In the Hebrides "the Beltane bannock is smaller than that made at
St. Michael's, but is made in the same way; it is no longer made in
Uist, but Father Allan remembers seeing his grandmother make one
about twenty-five years ago. There was also a cheese made, generally
on the first of May, which was kept to the next Beltane as a sort of
charm against the bewitching of milk-produce. The Beltane customs
seem to have been the same as elsewhere. Every fire was put out and
a large one lit on the top of the hill, and the cattle driven round
it sunwards (_dessil_), to keep off murrain all the year. Each man
would take home fire wherewith to kindle his own."

In Wales also the custom of lighting Beltane fires at the beginning
of May used to be observed, but the day on which they were kindled
varied from the eve of May Day to the third of May. The flame was
sometimes elicited by the friction of two pieces of oak, as appears
from the following description. "The fire was done in this way. Nine
men would turn their pockets inside out, and see that every piece of
money and all metals were off their persons. Then the men went into
the nearest woods, and collected sticks of nine different kinds of
trees. These were carried to the spot where the fire had to be
built. There a circle was cut in the sod, and the sticks were set
crosswise. All around the circle the people stood and watched the
proceedings. One of the men would then take two bits of oak, and rub
them together until a flame was kindled. This was applied to the
sticks, and soon a large fire was made. Sometimes two fires were set
up side by side. These fires, whether one or two, were called
_coelcerth_ or bonfire. Round cakes of oatmeal and brown meal were
split in four, and placed in a small flour-bag, and everybody
present had to pick out a portion. The last bit in the bag fell to
the lot of the bag-holder. Each person who chanced to pick up a
piece of brown-meal cake was compelled to leap three times over the
flames, or to run thrice between the two fires, by which means the
people thought they were sure of a plentiful harvest. Shouts and
screams of those who had to face the ordeal could be heard ever so
far, and those who chanced to pick the oatmeal portions sang and
danced and clapped their hands in approval, as the holders of the
brown bits leaped three times over the flames, or ran three times
between the two fires."

The belief of the people that by leaping thrice over the bonfires or
running thrice between them they ensured a plentiful harvest is
worthy of note. The mode in which this result was supposed to be
brought about is indicated by another writer on Welsh folk-lore,
according to whom it used to be held that "the bonfires lighted in
May or Midsummer protected the lands from sorcery, so that good
crops would follow. The ashes were also considered valuable as
charms." Hence it appears that the heat of the fires was thought to
fertilise the fields, not directly by quickening the seeds in the
ground, but indirectly by counteracting the baleful influence of
witchcraft or perhaps by burning up the persons of the witches.

The Beltane fires seem to have been kindled also in Ireland, for
Cormac, "or somebody in his name, says that _belltaine,_ May-day,
was so called from the 'lucky fire,' or the 'two fires,' which the
druids of Erin used to make on that day with great incantations; and
cattle, he adds, used to be brought to those fires, or to be driven
between them, as a safeguard against the diseases of the year." The
custom of driving cattle through or between fires on May Day or the
eve of May Day persisted in Ireland down to a time within living
memory.

The first of May is a great popular festival in the more midland and
southern parts of Sweden. On the eve of the festival huge bonfires,
which should be lighted by striking two flints together, blaze on
all the hills and knolls. Every large hamlet has its own fire, round
which the young people dance in a ring. The old folk notice whether
the flames incline to the north or to the south. In the former case,
the spring will be cold and backward; in the latter, it will be mild
and genial. In Bohemia, on the eve of May Day, young people kindle
fires on hills and eminences, at crossways, and in pastures, and
dance round them. They leap over the glowing embers or even through
the flames. The ceremony is called "burning the witches." In some
places an effigy representing a witch used to be burnt in the
bonfire. We have to remember that the eve of May Day is the
notorious Walpurgis Night, when the witches are everywhere speeding
unseen through the air on their hellish errands. On this witching
night children in Voigtland also light bonfires on the heights and
leap over them. Moreover, they wave burning brooms or toss them into
the air. So far as the light of the bonfire reaches, so far will a
blessing rest on the fields. The kindling of the fires on Walpurgis
Night is called "driving away the witches." The custom of kindling
fires on the eve of May Day (Walpurgis Night) for the purpose of
burning the witches is, or used to be, widespread in the Tyrol,
Moravia, Saxony and Silesia.



5. The Midsummer Fires

BUT THE SEASON at which these firefestivals have been most generally
held all over Europe is the summer solstice, that is Midsummer Eve
(the twenty-third of June) or Midsummer day (the twenty-fourth of
June). A faint tinge of Christianity has been given to them by
naming Midsummer Day after St. John the Baptist, but we cannot doubt
that the celebration dates from a time long before the beginning of
our era. The summer solstice, or Midsummer Day, is the great
turning-point in the sun's career, when, after climbing higher and
higher day by day in the sky, the luminary stops and thenceforth
retraces his steps down the heavenly road. Such a moment could not
but be regarded with anxiety by primitive man so soon as he began to
observe and ponder the courses of the great lights across the
celestial vault; and having still to learn his own powerlessness in
face of the vast cyclic changes of nature, he may have fancied that
he could help the sun in his seeming decline--could prop his failing
steps and rekindle the sinking flame of the red lamp in his feeble
hand. In some such thoughts as these the midsummer festivals of our
European peasantry may perhaps have taken their rise. Whatever their
origin, they have prevailed all over this quarter of the globe, from
Ireland on the west to Russia on the east, and from Norway and
Sweden on the north to Spain and Greece on the south. According to a
mediaeval writer, the three great features of the midsummer
celebration were the bonfires, the procession with torches round the
fields, and the custom of rolling a wheel. He tells us that boys
burned bones and filth of various kinds to make a foul smoke, and
that the smoke drove away certain noxious dragons which at this
time, excited by the summer heat, copulated in the air and poisoned
the wells and rivers by dropping their seed into them; and he
explains the custom of trundling a wheel to mean that the sun,
having now reached the highest point in the ecliptic, begins
thenceforward to descend.

The main features of the midsummer fire-festival resemble those
which we have found to characterise the vernal festivals of fire.
The similarity of the two sets of ceremonies will plainly appear
from the following examples.

A writer of the first half of the sixteenth century informs us that
in almost every village and town of Germany public bonfires were
kindled on the Eve of St. John, and young and old, of both sexes,
gathered about them and passed the time in dancing and singing.
People on this occasion wore chaplets of mugwort and vervain, and
they looked at the fire through bunches of larkspur which they held
in their hands, believing that this would preserve their eyes in a
healthy state throughout the year. As each departed, he threw the
mugwort and vervain into the fire, saying, "May all my ill-luck
depart and be burnt up with these." At Lower Konz, a village
situated on a hillside overlooking the Moselle, the midsummer
festival used to be celebrated as follows. A quantity of straw was
collected on the top of the steep Stromberg Hill. Every inhabitant,
or at least every householder, had to contribute his share of straw
to the pile. At nightfall the whole male population, men and boys,
mustered on the top of the hill; the women and girls were not
allowed to join them, but had to take up their position at a certain
spring half-way down the slope. On the summit stood a huge wheel
completely encased in some of the straw which had been jointly
contributed by the villagers; the rest of the straw was made into
torches. From each side of the wheel the axle-tree projected about
three feet, thus furnishing handles to the lads who were to guide it
in its descent. The mayor of the neighbouring town of Sierck, who
always received a basket of cherries for his services, gave the
signal; a lighted torch was applied to the wheel, and as it burst
into flame, two young fellows, strong-limbed and swift of foot,
seized the handles and began running with it down the slope. A great
shout went up. Every man and boy waved a blazing torch in the air,
and took care to keep it alight so long as the wheel was trundling
down the hill. The great object of the young men who guided the
wheel was to plunge it blazing into the water of the Moselle; but
they rarely succeeded in their efforts, for the vineyards which
cover the greater part of the declivity impeded their progress, and
the wheel was often burned out before it reached the river. As it
rolled past the women and girls at the spring, they raised cries of
joy which were answered by the men on the top of the mountain; and
the shouts were echoed by the inhabitants of neighbouring villages
who watched the spectacle from their hills on the opposite bank of
the Moselle. If the fiery wheel was successfully conveyed to the
bank of the river and extinguished in the water, the people looked
for an abundant vintage that year, and the inhabitants of Konz had
the right to exact a waggon-load of white wine from the surrounding
vineyards. On the other hand, they believed that, if they neglected
to perform the ceremony, the cattle would be attacked by giddiness
and convulsions and would dance in their stalls.

Down at least to the middle of the nineteenth century the midsummer
fires used to blaze all over Upper Bavaria. They were kindled
especially on the mountains, but also far and wide in the lowlands,
and we are told that in the darkness and stillness of night the
moving groups, lit up by the flickering glow of the flames,
presented an impressive spectacle. Cattle were driven through the
fire to cure the sick animals and to guard such as were sound
against plague and harm of every kind throughout the year. Many a
householder on that day put out the fire on the domestic hearth and
rekindled it by means of a brand taken from the midsummer bonfire.
The people judged of the height to which the flax would grow in the
year by the height to which the flames of the bonfire rose; and
whoever leaped over the burning pile was sure not to suffer from
backache in reaping the corn at harvest. In many parts of Bavaria it
was believed that the flax would grow as high as the young people
leaped over the fire. In others the old folk used to plant three
charred sticks from the bonfire in the fields, believing that this
would make the flax grow tall. Elsewhere an extinguished brand was
put in the roof of the house to protect it against fire. In the
towns about Würzburg the bonfires used to be kindled in the
market-places, and the young people who jumped over them wore
garlands of flowers, especially of mugwort and vervain, and carried
sprigs of larkspur in their hands. They thought that such as looked
at the fire holding a bit of larkspur before their face would be
troubled by no malady of the eyes throughout the year. Further, it
was customary at Würzburg, in the sixteenth century, for the
bishop's followers to throw burning discs of wood into the air from
a mountain which overhangs the town. The discs were discharged by
means of flexible rods, and in their flight through the darkness
presented the appearance of fiery dragons.

Similarly in Swabia, lads and lasses, hand in hand, leap over the
midsummer bonfire, praying that the hemp may grow three ells high,
and they set fire to wheels of straw and send them rolling down the
hill. Sometimes, as the people sprang over the midsummer bonfire
they cried out, "Flax, flax! may the flax this year grow seven ells
high!" At Rottenburg a rude effigy in human form, called the
Angelman, used to be enveloped in flowers and then burnt in the
midsummer fire by boys, who afterwards leaped over the glowing
embers.

So in Baden the children collected fuel from house to house for the
midsummer bonfire on St. John's Day; and lads and lasses leaped over
the fire in couples. Here, as elsewhere, a close connexion was
traced between these bonfires and the harvest. In some places it was
thought that those who leaped over the fires would not suffer from
backache at reaping. Sometimes, as the young folk sprang over the
flames, they cried, "Grow, that the hemp may be three ells high!"
This notion that the hemp or the corn would grow as high as the
flames blazed or as the people jumped over them, seems to have been
widespread in Baden. It was held that the parents of the young
people who bounded highest over the fire would have the most
abundant harvest; and on the other hand, if a man contributed
nothing to the bonfire, it was imagined that there would be no
blessing on his crops, and that his hemp in particular would never
grow. At Edersleben, near Sangerhausen, a high pole was planted in
the ground and a tarbarrel was hung from it by a chain which reached
to the ground. The barrel was then set on fire and swung round the
pole amid shouts of joy.

In Denmark and Norway also midsummer fires were kindled on St.
John's Eve on roads, open spaces, and hills. People in Norway
thought that the fires banished sickness from among the cattle. Even
yet the fires are said to be lighted all over Norway on Midsummer
Eve. They are kindled in order to keep off the witches, who are said
to be flying from all parts that night to the Blocksberg, where the
big witch lives. In Sweden the Eve of St. John (St. Hans) is the
most joyous night of the whole year. Throughout some parts of the
country, especially in the provinces of Bohus and Scania and in
districts bordering on Norway, it is celebrated by the frequent
discharge of firearms and by huge bonfires, formerly called Balder's
Balefires (_Balder's Balar_), which are kindled at dusk on hills and
eminences and throw a glare of light over the surrounding landscape.
The people dance round the fires and leap over or through them. In
parts of Norrland on St. John's Eve the bonfires are lit at the
cross-roads. The fuel consists of nine different sorts of wood, and
the spectators cast into the flames a kind of toad-stool (_Bäran_)
in order to counteract the power of the Trolls and other evil
spirits, who are believed to be abroad that night; for at that
mystic season the mountains open and from their cavernous depths the
uncanny crew pours forth to dance and disport themselves for a time.
The peasants believe that should any of the Trolls be in the
vicinity they will show themselves; and if an animal, for example a
he or she goat, happens to be seen near the blazing, crackling pile,
the peasants are firmly persuaded that it is no other than the Evil
One in person. Further, it deserves to be remarked that in Sweden
St. John's Eve is a festival of water as well as of fire; for
certain holy springs are then supposed to be endowed with wonderful
medicinal virtues, and many sick people resort to them for the
healing of their infirmities.

In Austria the midsummer customs and superstitions resemble those of
Germany. Thus in some parts of the Tyrol bonfires are kindled and
burning discs hurled into the air. In the lower valley of the Inn a
tatterdemalion effigy is carted about the village on Midsummer Day
and then burned. He is called the _Lotter,_ which has been corrupted
into Luther. At Ambras, one of the villages where Martin Luther is
thus burned in effigy, they say that if you go through the village
between eleven and twelve on St. John's Night and wash yourself in
three wells, you will see all who are to die in the following year.
At Gratz on St. John's Eve (the twenty-third of June) the common
people used to make a puppet called the _Tatermann,_ which they
dragged to the bleaching ground, and pelted with burning besoms till
it took fire. At Reutte, in the Tyrol, people believed that the flax
would grow as high as they leaped over the midsummer bonfire, and
they took pieces of charred wood from the fire and stuck them in
their flax-fields the same night, leaving them there till the flax
harvest had been got in. In Lower Austria bonfires are kindled on
the heights, and the boys caper round them, brandishing lighted
torches drenched in pitch. Whoever jumps thrice across the fire will
not suffer from fever within the year. Cart-wheels are often smeared
with pitch, ignited, and sent rolling and blazing down the
hillsides.

All over Bohemia bonfires still burn on Midsummer Eve. In the
afternoon boys go about with handcarts from house to house
collecting fuel and threatening with evil consequences the
curmudgeons who refuse them a dole. Sometimes the young men fell a
tall straight fir in the woods and set it up on a height, where the
girls deck it with nosegays, wreaths of leaves, and red ribbons.
Then brushwood is piled about it, and at nightfall the whole is set
on fire. While the flames break out, the young men climb the tree
and fetch down the wreaths which the girls had placed on it. After
that lads and lasses stand on opposite sides of the fire and look at
one another through the wreaths to see whether they will be true to
each other and marry within the year. Also the girls throw the
wreaths across the flames to the men, and woe to the awkward swain
who fails to catch the wreath thrown him by his sweetheart. When the
blaze has died down, each couple takes hands and leaps thrice across
the fire. He or she who does so will be free from ague throughout
the year, and the flax will grow as high as the young folks leap. A
girl who sees nine bonfires on Midsummer Eve will marry before the
year is out. The singed wreaths are carried home and carefully
preserved throughout the year. During thunderstorms a bit of the
wreath is burned on the hearth with a prayer; some of it is given to
kine that are sick or calving, and some of it serves to fumigate
house and cattle-stall, that man and beast may keep hale and well.
Sometimes an old cart-wheel is smeared with resin, ignited, and sent
rolling down the hill. Often the boys collect all the worn-out
besoms they can get hold of, dip them in pitch, and having set them
on fire wave them about or throw them high into the air. Or they
rush down the hillside in troops, brandishing the flaming brooms and
shouting. The stumps of the brooms and embers from the fire are
preserved and stuck in cabbage gardens to protect the cabbages from
caterpillars and gnats. Some people insert charred sticks and ashes
from the midsummer bonfire in their sown fields and meadows, in
their gardens and the roofs of their houses, as a talisman against
lightning and foul weather; or they fancy that the ashes placed in
the roof will prevent any fire from breaking out in the house. In
some districts they crown or gird themselves with mugwort while the
midsummer fire is burning, for this is supposed to be a protection
against ghosts, witches, and sickness; in particular, a wreath of
mugwort is a sure preventive of sore eyes. Sometimes the girls look
at the bonfires through garlands of wild flowers, praying the fire
to strengthen their eyes and eyelids. She who does this thrice will
have no sore eyes all that year. In some parts of Bohemia they used
to drive the cows through the midsummer fire to guard them against
witchcraft.

In Slavonic countries, also, the midsummer festival is celebrated
with similar rites. We have already seen that in Russia on the Eve
of St. John young men and maidens jump over a bonfire in couples
carrying a straw effigy of Kupalo in their arms. In some parts of
Russia an image of Kupalo is burnt or thrown into a stream on St.
John's Night. Again, in some districts of Russia the young folk wear
garlands of flowers and girdles of holy herbs when they spring
through the smoke or flames; and sometimes they drive the cattle
also through the fire in order to protect the animals against
wizards and witches, who are then ravenous after milk. In Little
Russia a stake is driven into the ground on St. John's Night, wrapt
in straw, and set on fire. As the flames rise the peasant women
throw birchen boughs into them, saying, "May my flax be as tall as
this bough!" In Ruthenia the bonfires are lighted by a flame
procured by the friction of wood. While the elders of the party are
engaged in thus "churning" the fire, the rest maintain a respectful
silence; but when the flame bursts from the wood, they break forth
into joyous songs. As soon as the bonfires are kindled, the young
people take hands and leap in pairs through the smoke, if not
through the flames; and after that the cattle in their turn are
driven through the fire.

In many parts of Prussia and Lithuania great fires are kindled on
Midsummer Eve. All the heights are ablaze with them, as far as the
eye can see. The fires are supposed to be a protection against
witchcraft, thunder, hail, and cattle disease, especially if next
morning the cattle are driven over the places where the fires
burned. Above all, the bonfires ensure the farmer against the arts
of witches, who try to steal the milk from his cows by charms and
spells. That is why next morning you may see the young fellows who
lit the bonfire going from house to house and receiving jugfuls of
milk. And for the same reason they stick burs and mugwort on the
gate or the hedge through which the cows go to pasture, because that
is supposed to be a preservative against witchcraft. In Masuren, a
district of Eastern Prussia inhabited by a branch of the Polish
family, it is the custom on the evening of Midsummer Day to put out
all the fires in the village. Then an oaken stake is driven into the
ground and a wheel is fixed on it as on an axle. This wheel the
villagers, working by relays, cause to revolve with great rapidity
till fire is produced by friction. Every one takes home a lighted
brand from the new fire and with it rekindles the fire on the
domestic hearth. In Serbia on Midsummer Eve herdsmen light torches
of birch bark and march round the sheepfolds and cattle-stalls; then
they climb the hills and there allow the torches to burn out.

Among the Magyars in Hungary the midsummer fire-festival is marked
by the same features that meet us in so many parts of Europe. On
Midsummer Eve in many places it is customary to kindle bonfires on
heights and to leap over them, and from the manner in which the
young people leap the bystanders predict whether they will marry
soon. On this day also many Hungarian swineherds make fire by
rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and through the
fire thus made they drive their pigs to preserve them from sickness.

The Esthonians of Russia, who, like the Magyars, belong to the great
Turanian family of mankind, also celebrate the summer solstice in
the usual way. They think that the St. John's fire keeps witches
from the cattle, and they say that he who does not come to it will
have his barley full of thistles and his oats full of weeds. In the
Esthonian island of Oesel, while they throw fuel into the midsummer
fire, they call out, "Weeds to the fire, flax to the field," or they
fling three billets into the flames, saying, "Flax grow long!" And
they take charred sticks from the bonfire home with them and keep
them to make the cattle thrive. In some parts of the island the
bonfire is formed by piling brushwood and other combustibles round a
tree, at the top of which a flag flies. Whoever succeeds in knocking
down the flag with a pole before it begins to burn will have good
luck. Formerly the festivities lasted till daybreak, and ended in
scenes of debauchery which looked doubly hideous by the growing
light of a summer morning.

When we pass from the east to the west of Europe we still find the
summer solstice celebrated with rites of the same general character.
Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century the custom of
lighting bonfires at midsummer prevailed so commonly in France that
there was hardly a town or a village, we are told, where they were
not kindled. People danced round and leaped over them, and took
charred sticks from the bonfire home with them to protect the houses
against lightning, conflagrations, and spells.

In Brittany, apparently, the custom of the midsummer bonfires is
kept up to this day. When the flames have died down, the whole
assembly kneels round about the bonfire and an old man prays aloud.
Then they all rise and march thrice round the fire; at the third
turn they stop and every one picks up a pebble and throws it on the
burning pile. After that they disperse. In Brittany and Berry it is
believed that a girl who dances round nine midsummer bonfires will
marry within the year. In the valley of the Orne the custom was to
kindle the bonfire just at the moment when the sun was about to dip
below the horizon; and the peasants drove their cattle through the
fires to protect them against witchcraft, especially against the
spells of witches and wizards who attempted to steal the milk and
butter. At Jumièges in Normandy, down to the first half of the
nineteenth century, the midsummer festival was marked by certain
singular features which bore the stamp of a very high antiquity.
Every year, on the twenty-third of June, the Eve of St. John, the
Brotherhood of the Green Wolf chose a new chief or master, who had
always to be taken from the hamlet of Conihout. On being elected,
the new head of the brotherhood assumed the title of the Green Wolf,
and donned a peculiar costume consisting of a long green mantle and
a very tall green hat of a conical shape and without a brim. Thus
arrayed he stalked solemnly at the head of the brothers, chanting
the hymn of St. John, the crucifix and holy banner leading the way,
to a place called Chouquet. Here the procession was met by the
priest, precentors, and choir, who conducted the brotherhood to the
parish church. After hearing mass the company adjourned to the house
of the Green Wolf, where a simple repast was served up to them. At
night a bonfire was kindled to the sound of hand-bells by a young
man and a young woman, both decked with flowers. Then the Green Wolf
and his brothers, with their hoods down on their shoulders and
holding each other by the hand, ran round the fire after the man who
had been chosen to be the Green Wolf of the following year. Though
only the first and the last man of the chain had a hand free, their
business was to surround and seize thrice the future Green Wolf, who
in his efforts to escape belaboured the brothers with a long wand
which he carried. When at last they succeeded in catching him they
carried him to the burning pile and made as if they would throw him
on it. This ceremony over, they returned to the house of the Green
Wolf, where a supper, still of the most meagre fare, was set before
them. Up till midnight a sort of religious solemnity prevailed. But
at the stroke of twelve all this was changed. Constraint gave way to
license; pious hymns were replaced by Bacchanalian ditties, and the
shrill quavering notes of the village fiddle hardly rose above the
roar of voices that went up from the merry brotherhood of the Green
Wolf. Next day, the twenty-fourth of June or Midsummer Day, was
celebrated by the same personages with the same noisy gaiety. One of
the ceremonies consisted in parading, to the sound of musketry, an
enormous loaf of consecrated bread, which, rising in tiers, was
surmounted by a pyramid of verdure adorned with ribbons. After that
the holy hand-bells, deposited on the step of the altar, were
entrusted as insignia of office to the man who was to be the Green
Wolf next year.

At Château-Thierry, in the department of Aisne, the custom of
lighting bonfires and dancing round them at the midsummer festival
of St. John lasted down to about 1850; the fires were kindled
especially when June had been rainy, and the people thought that the
lighting of the bonfires would cause the rain to cease. In the
Vosges it is still customary to kindle bonfires upon the hill-tops
on Midsummer Eve; the people believe that the fires help to preserve
the fruits of the earth and ensure good crops.

Bonfires were lit in almost all the hamlets of Poitou on the Eve of
St. John. People marched round them thrice, carrying a branch of
walnut in their hand. Shepherdesses and children passed sprigs of
mullein (_verbascum_) and nuts across the flames; the nuts were
supposed to cure toothache, and the mullein to protect the cattle
from sickness and sorcery. When the fire died down people took some
of the ashes home with them, either to keep them in the house as a
preservative against thunder or to scatter them on the fields for
the purpose of destroying corn-cockles and darnel. In Poitou also it
used to be customary on the Eve of St. John to trundle a blazing
wheel wrapt in straw over the fields to fertilise them.

In the mountainous part of Comminges, a province of Southern France,
the midsummer fire is made by splitting open the trunk of a tall
tree, stuffing the crevice with shavings, and igniting the whole. A
garland of flowers is fastened to the top of the tree, and at the
moment when the fire is lighted the man who was last married has to
climb up a ladder and bring the flowers down. In the flat parts of
the same district the materials of the midsummer bonfires consist of
fuel piled in the usual way; but they must be put together by men
who have been married since the last midsummer festival, and each of
these benedicts is obliged to lay a wreath of flowers on the top of
the pile.

In Provence the midsummer fires are still popular. Children go from
door to door begging for fuel, and they are seldom sent empty away.
Formerly the priest, the mayor, and the aldermen used to walk in
procession to the bonfire, and even deigned to light it; after which
the assembly marched thrice round the burning pile. At Aix a nominal
king, chosen from among the youth for his skill in shooting at a
popinjay, presided over the midsummer festival. He selected his own
officers, and escorted by a brilliant train marched to the bonfire,
kindled it, and was the first to dance round it. Next day he
distributed largesse to his followers. His reign lasted a year,
during which he enjoyed certain privileges. He was allowed to attend
the mass celebrated by the commander of the Knights of St. John on
St. John's Day; the right of hunting was accorded to him, and
soldiers might not be quartered in his house. At Marseilles also on
this day one of the guilds chose a king of the _badache_ or double
axe; but it does not appear that he kindled the bonfire, which is
said to have been lighted with great ceremony by the préfet and
other authorities.

In Belgium the custom of kindling the midsummer bonfires has long
disappeared from the great cities, but it is still kept up in rural
districts and small towns. In that country the Eve of St. Peter's
Day (the twenty-ninth of June) is celebrated by bonfires and dances
exactly like those which commemorate St. John's Eve. Some people say
that the fires of St. Peter, like those of St. John, are lighted in
order to drive away dragons. In French Flanders down to 1789 a straw
figure representing a man was always burned in the midsummer
bonfire, and the figure of a woman was burned on St. Peter's Day,
the twenty-ninth of June. In Belgium people jump over the midsummer
bonfires as a preventive of colic, and they keep the ashes at home
to hinder fire from breaking out.

The custom of lighting bonfires at midsummer has been observed in
many parts of our own country, and as usual people danced round and
leaped over them. In Wales three or nine different kinds of wood and
charred faggots carefully preserved from the last midsummer were
deemed necessary to build the bonfire, which was generally done on
rising ground. In the Vale of Glamorgan a cart-wheel swathed in
straw used to be ignited and sent rolling down the hill. If it kept
alight all the way down and blazed for a long time, an abundant
harvest was expected. On Midsummer Eve people in the Isle of Man
were wont to light fires to the windward of every field, so that the
smoke might pass over the corn; and they folded their cattle and
carried blazing furze or gorse round them several times. In Ireland
cattle, especially barren cattle, were driven through the midsummer
fires, and the ashes were thrown on the fields to fertilise them, or
live coals were carried into them to prevent blight. In Scotland the
traces of midsummer fires are few; but at that season in the
highlands of Perthshire cowherds used to go round their folds
thrice, in the direction of the sun, with lighted torches. This they
did to purify the flocks and herds and to keep them from falling
sick.

The practice of lighting bonfires on Midsummer Eve and dancing or
leaping over them is, or was till recently, common all over Spain
and in some parts of Italy and Sicily. In Malta great fires are
kindled in the streets and squares of the towns and villages on the
Eve of St. John (Midsummer Eve); formerly the Grand Master of the
Order of St. John used on that evening to set fire to a heap of
pitch barrels placed in front of the sacred Hospital. In Greece,
too, the custom of kindling fires on St. John's Eve and jumping over
them is said to be still universal. One reason assigned for it is a
wish to escape from the fleas. According to another account, the
women cry out, as they leap over the fire, "I leave my sins behind
me." In Lesbos the fires on St. John's Eve are usually lighted by
threes, and the people spring thrice over them, each with a stone on
his head, saying, "I jump the hare's fire, my head a stone!" In
Calymnos the midsummer fire is supposed to ensure abundance in the
coming year as well as deliverance from fleas. The people dance
round the fires singing, with stones on their heads, and then jump
over the blaze or the glowing embers. When the fire is burning low,
they throw the stones into it; and when it is nearly out, they make
crosses on their legs and then go straightway and bathe in the sea.

The custom of kindling bonfires on Midsummer Day or on Midsummer Eve
is widely spread among the Mohammedan peoples of North Africa,
particularly in Morocco and Algeria; it is common both to the
Berbers and to many of the Arabs or Arabic-speaking tribes. In these
countries Midsummer Day (the twenty-fourth of June, Old Style) is
called _l'ánsara._ The fires are lit in the courtyards, at
cross-roads, in the fields, and sometimes on the threshing-floors.
Plants which in burning give out a thick smoke and an aromatic smell
are much sought after for fuel on these occasions; among the plants
used for the purpose are giant-fennel, thyme, rue, chervil-seed,
camomile, geranium, and penny-royal. People expose themselves, and
especially their children, to the smoke, and drive it towards the
orchards and the crops. Also they leap across the fires; in some
places everybody ought to repeat the leap seven times. Moreover they
take burning brands from the fires and carry them through the houses
in order to fumigate them. They pass things through the fire, and
bring the sick into contact with it, while they utter prayers for
their recovery. The ashes of the bonfires are also reputed to
possess beneficial properties; hence in some places people rub their
hair or their bodies with them. In some places they think that by
leaping over the fires they rid themselves of all misfortune, and
that childless couples thereby obtain offspring. Berbers of the Rif
province, in Northern Morocco, make great use of fires at midsummer
for the good of themselves, their cattle, and their fruit-trees.
They jump over the bonfires in the belief that this will preserve
them in good health, and they light fires under fruit-trees to keep
the fruit from falling untimely. And they imagine that by rubbing a
paste of the ashes on their hair they prevent the hair from falling
off their heads. In all these Moroccan customs, we are told, the
beneficial effect is attributed wholly to the smoke, which is
supposed to be endued with a magical quality that removes misfortune
from men, animals, fruit-trees and crops.

The celebration of a midsummer festival by Mohammedan peoples is
particularly remarkable, because the Mohammedan calendar, being
purely lunar and uncorrected by intercalation, necessarily takes no
note of festivals which occupy fixed points in the solar year; all
strictly Mohammedan feasts, being pinned to the moon, slide
gradually with that luminary through the whole period of the earth's
revolution about the sun. This fact of itself seems to prove that
among the Mohammedan peoples of Northern Africa, as among the
Christian peoples of Europe, the midsummer festival is quite
independent of the religion which the people publicly profess, and
is a relic of a far older paganism.



6. The Hallowe'en Fires

FROM THE FOREGOING survey we may infer that among the heathen
forefathers of the European peoples the most popular and widespread
fire-festival of the year was the great celebration of Midsummer Eve
or Midsummer Day. The coincidence of the festival with the summer
solstice can hardly be accidental. Rather we must suppose that our
pagan ancestors purposely timed the ceremony of fire on earth to
coincide with the arrival of the sun at the highest point of his
course in the sky. If that was so, it follows that the old founders
of the midsummer rites had observed the solstices or turning-points
of the sun's apparent path in the sky, and that they accordingly
regulated their festal calendar to some extent by astronomical
considerations.

But while this may be regarded as fairly certain for what we may
call the aborigines throughout a large part of the continent, it
appears not to have been true of the Celtic peoples who inhabited
the Land's End of Europe, the islands and promontories that stretch
out into the Atlantic Ocean on the North-West. The principal
fire-festivals of the Celts, which have survived, though in a
restricted area and with diminished pomp, to modern times and even
to our own day, were seemingly timed without any reference to the
position of the sun in the heaven. They were two in number, and fell
at an interval of six months, one being celebrated on the eve of May
Day and the other on Allhallow Even or Hallowe'en, as it is now
commonly called, that is, on the thirty-first of October, the day
preceding All Saints' or Allhallows' Day. These dates coincide with
none of the four great hinges on which the solar year revolves, to
wit, the solstices and the equinoxes. Nor do they agree with the
principal seasons of the agricultural year, the sowing in spring and
the reaping in autumn. For when May Day comes, the seed has long
been committed to the earth; and when November opens, the harvest
has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the
fruit-trees are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast
fluttering to the ground. Yet the first of May and the first of
November mark turning-points of the year in Europe; the one ushers
in the genial heat and the rich vegetation of summer, the other
heralds, if it does not share, the cold and barrenness of winter.
Now these particular points of the year, as has been well pointed
out by a learned and ingenious writer, while they are of
comparatively little moment to the European husbandman, do deeply
concern the European herdsman; for it is on the approach of summer
that he drives his cattle out into the open to crop the fresh grass,
and it is on the approach of winter that he leads them back to the
safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems not improbable
that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at the
beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time
when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their
subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of
the year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from
the homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early
winter. Even in Central Europe, remote from the region now occupied
by the Celts, a similar bisection of the year may be clearly traced
in the great popularity, on the one hand, of May Day and its Eve
(Walpurgis Night), and, on the other hand, of the Feast of All Souls
at the beginning of November, which under a thin Christian cloak
conceals an ancient pagan festival of the dead. Hence we may
conjecture that everywhere throughout Europe the celestial division
of the year according to the solstices was preceded by what we may
call a terrestrial division of the year according to the beginning
of summer and the beginning of winter.

Be that as it may, the two great Celtic festivals of May Day and the
first of November or, to be more accurate, the Eves of these two
days, closely resemble each other in the manner of their celebration
and in the superstitions associated with them, and alike, by the
antique character impressed upon both, betray a remote and purely
pagan origin. The festival of May Day or Beltane, as the Celts
called it, which ushered in summer, has already been described; it
remains to give some account of the corresponding festival of
Hallowe'en, which announced the arrival of winter.

Of the two feasts Hallowe'en was perhaps of old the more important,
since the Celts would seem to have dated the beginning of the year
from it rather than from Beltane. In the Isle of Man, one of the
fortresses in which the Celtic language and lore longest held out
against the siege of the Saxon invaders, the first of November, Old
Style, has been regarded as New Year's day down to recent times.
Thus Manx mummers used to go round on Hallowe'en (Old Style),
singing, in the Manx language, a sort of Hogmanay song which began
"To-night is New Year's Night, _Hogunnaa!_" In ancient Ireland, a
new fire used to be kindled every year on Hallowe'en or the Eve of
Samhain, and from this sacred flame all the fires in Ireland were
rekindled. Such a custom points strongly to Samhain or All Saints'
Day (the first of November) as New Year's Day; since the annual
kindling of a new fire takes place most naturally at the beginning
of the year, in order that the blessed influence of the fresh fire
may last throughout the whole period of twelve months. Another
confirmation of the view that the Celts dated their year from the
first of November is furnished by the manifold modes of divination
which were commonly resorted to by Celtic peoples on Hallowe'en for
the purpose of ascertaining their destiny, especially their fortune
in the coming year; for when could these devices for prying into the
future be more reasonably put in practice than at the beginning of
the year? As a season of omens and auguries Hallowe'en seems to have
far surpassed Beltane in the imagination of the Celts; from which we
may with some probability infer that they reckoned their year from
Hallowe'en rather than Beltane. Another circumstance of great moment
which points to the same conclusion is the association of the dead
with Hallowe'en. Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe,
Hallowe'en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to
winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of
the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to
warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good
cheer provided for them in the kitchen or the parlour by their
affectionate kinsfolk. It was, perhaps, a natural thought that the
approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts
from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of
the cottage with its familiar fireside. Did not the lowing kine then
troop back from the summer pastures in the forests and on the hills
to be fed and cared for in the stalls, while the bleak winds
whistled among the swaying boughs and the snow-drifts deepened in
the hollows? and could the good-man and the good-wife deny to the
spirits of their dead the welcome which they gave to the cows?

But it is not only the souls of the departed who are supposed to be
hovering unseen on the day "when autumn to winter resigns the pale
year." Witches then speed on their errands of mischief, some
sweeping through the air on besoms, others galloping along the roads
on tabby-cats, which for that evening are turned into coal-black
steeds. The fairies, too, are all let loose, and hobgoblins of every
sort roam freely about.

Yet while a glamour of mystery and awe has always clung to
Hallowe'en in the minds of the Celtic peasantry, the popular
celebration of the festival has been, at least in modern times, by
no means of a prevailing gloomy cast; on the contrary it has been
attended by picturesque features and merry pastimes, which rendered
it the gayest night of all the year. Amongst the things which in the
Highlands of Scotland contributed to invest the festival with a
romantic beauty were the bonfires which used to blaze at frequent
intervals on the heights. "On the last day of autumn children
gathered ferns, tar-barrels, the long thin stalks called _gàinisg,_
and everything suitable for a bonfire. These were placed in a heap
on some eminence near the house, and in the evening set fire to. The
fires were called _Samhnagan._ There was one for each house, and it
was an object of ambition who should have the biggest. Whole
districts were brilliant with bonfires, and their glare across a
Highland loch, and from many eminences, formed an exceedingly
picturesque scene." Like the Beltane fires on the first of May, the
Hallowe'en bonfires seem to have been kindled most commonly in the
Perthshire Highlands. In the parish of Callander they still blazed
down to near the end of the eighteenth century. When the fire had
died down, the ashes were carefully collected in the form of a
circle, and a stone was put in, near the circumference, for every
person of the several families interested in the bonfire. Next
morning, if any of these stones was found to be displaced or
injured, the people made sure that the person represented by it was
_fey_ or devoted, and that he could not live twelve months from that
day. At Balquhidder down to the latter part of the nineteenth
century each household kindled its bonfire at Hallowe'en, but the
custom was chiefly observed by children. The fires were lighted on
any high knoll near the house; there was no dancing round them.
Hallowe'en fires were also lighted in some districts of the
north-east of Scotland, such as Buchan. Villagers and farmers alike
must have their fire. In the villages the boys went from house to
house and begged a peat from each householder, usually with the
words, "Ge's a peat t' burn the witches." When they had collected
enough peats, they piled them in a heap, together with straw, furze,
and other combustible materials, and set the whole on fire. Then
each of the youths, one after another, laid himself down on the
ground as near to the fire as he could without being scorched, and
thus lying allowed the smoke to roll over him. The others ran
through the smoke and jumped over their prostrate comrade. When the
heap was burned down, they scattered the ashes, vying with each
other who should scatter them most.

In the northern part of Wales it used to be customary for every
family to make a great bonfire called _Coel Coeth_ on Hallowe'en.
The fire was kindled on the most conspicuous spot near the house;
and when it had nearly gone out every one threw into the ashes a
white stone, which he had first marked. Then having said their
prayers round the fire, they went to bed. Next morning, as soon as
they were up, they came to search out the stones, and if any one of
them was found to be missing, they had a notion that the person who
threw it would die before he saw another Hallowe'en. According to
Sir John Rhys, the habit of celebrating Hallowe'en by lighting
bonfires on the hills is perhaps not yet extinct in Wales, and men
still living can remember how the people who assisted at the
bonfires would wait till the last spark was out and then would
suddenly take to their heels, shouting at the top of their voices,
"The cropped black sow seize the hindmost!" The saying, as Sir John
Rhys justly remarks, implies that originally one of the company
became a victim in dead earnest. Down to the present time the saying
is current in Carnarvonshire, where allusions to the cutty black sow
are still occasionally made to frighten children. We can now
understand why in Lower Brittany every person throws a pebble into
the midsummer bonfire. Doubtless there, as in Wales and the
Highlands of Scotland, omens of life and death have at one time or
other been drawn from the position and state of the pebbles on the
morning of All Saints' Day. The custom, thus found among three
separate branches of the Celtic stock, probably dates from a period
before their dispersion, or at least from a time when alien races
had not yet driven home the wedges of separation between them.

In the Isle of Man also, another Celtic country, Hallowe'en was
celebrated down to modern times by the kindling of fires,
accompanied with all the usual ceremonies designed to prevent the
baneful influence of fairies and witches.



7. The Midwinter Fires

IF THE HEATHEN of ancient Europe celebrated, as we have good reason
to believe, the season of Midsummer with a great festival of fire,
of which the traces have survived in many places down to our own
time, it is natural to suppose that they should have observed with
similar rites the corresponding season of Midwinter; for Midsummer
and Midwinter, or, in more technical language, the summer solstice
and the winter solstice, are the two great turningpoints in the
sun's apparent course through the sky, and from the standpoint of
primitive man nothing might seem more appropriate than to kindle
fires on earth at the two moments when the fire and heat of the
great luminary in heaven begin to wane or to wax.

In modern Christendom the ancient fire-festival of the winter
solstice appears to survive, or to have survived down to recent
years, in the old custom of the Yule log, clog, or block, as it was
variously called in England. The custom was widespread in Europe,
but seems to have flourished especially in England, France, and
among the South Slavs; at least the fullest accounts of the custom
come from these quarters. That the Yule log was only the winter
counterpart of the midsummer bonfire, kindled within doors instead
of in the open air on account of the cold and inclement weather of
the season, was pointed out long ago by our English antiquary John
Brand; and the view is supported by the many quaint superstitions
attaching to the Yule log, superstitions which have no apparent
connexion with Christianity but carry their heathen origin plainly
stamped upon them. But while the two solstitial celebrations were
both festivals of fire, the necessity or desirability of holding the
winter celebration within doors lent it the character of a private
or domestic festivity, which contrasts strongly with the publicity
of the summer celebration, at which the people gathered on some open
space or conspicuous height, kindled a huge bonfire in common, and
danced and made merry round it together.

Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century the old rite of
the Yule log was kept up in some parts of Central Germany. Thus in
the valleys of the Sieg and Lahn the Yule log, a heavy block of oak,
was fitted into the floor of the hearth, where, though it glowed
under the fire, it was hardly reduced to ashes within a year. When
the new log was laid next year, the remains of the old one were
ground to powder and strewed over the fields during the Twelve
Nights, which was supposed to promote the growth of the crops. In
some villages of Westphalia, the practice was to withdraw the Yule
log (_Christbrand_) from the fire so soon as it was slightly
charred; it was then kept carefully to be replaced on the fire
whenever a thunderstorm broke, because the people believed that
lightning would not strike a house in which the Yule log was
smouldering. In other villages of Westphalia the old custom was to
tie up the Yule log in the last sheaf cut at harvest.

In several provinces of France, and particularly in Provence, the
custom of the Yule log or _tréfoir,_ as it was called in many
places, was long observed. A French writer of the seventeenth
century denounces as superstitious "the belief that a log called the
_tréfoir_ or Christmas brand, which you put on the fire for the
first time on Christmas Eve and continue to put on the fire for a
little while every day till Twelfth Night, can, if kept under the
bed, protect the house for a whole year from fire and thunder; that
it can prevent the inmates from having chilblains on their heels in
winter; that it can cure the cattle of many maladies; that if a
piece of it be steeped in the water which cows drink it helps them
to calve; and lastly that if the ashes of the log be strewn on the
fields it can save the wheat from mildew."

In some parts of Flanders and France the remains of the Yule log
were regularly kept in the house under a bed as a protection against
thunder and lightning; in Berry, when thunder was heard, a member of
the family used to take a piece of the log and throw it on the fire,
which was believed to avert the lightning. Again, in Perigord, the
charcoal and ashes are carefully collected and kept for healing
swollen glands; the part of the trunk which has not been burnt in
the fire is used by ploughmen to make the wedge for their plough,
because they allege that it causes the seeds to thrive better; and
the women keep pieces of it till Twelfth Night for the sake of their
chickens. Some people imagine that they will have as many chickens
as there are sparks that fly out of the brands of the log when they
shake them; and others place the extinct brands under the bed to
drive away vermin. In various parts of France the charred log is
thought to guard the house against sorcery as well as against
lightning.

In England the customs and beliefs concerning the Yule log used to
be similar. On the night of Christmas Eve, says the antiquary John
Brand, "our ancestors were wont to light up candles of an uncommon
size, called Christmas Candles, and lay a log of wood upon the fire,
called a Yule-clog or Christmas-block, to illuminate the house, and,
as it were, to turn night into day." The old custom was to light the
Yule log with a fragment of its predecessor, which had been kept
throughout the year for the purpose; where it was so kept, the fiend
could do no mischief. The remains of the log were also supposed to
guard the house against fire and lightning.

To this day the ritual of bringing in the Yule log is observed with
much solemnity among the Southern Slavs, especially the Serbians.
The log is usually a block of oak, but sometimes of olive or beech.
They seem to think that they will have as many calves, lambs, pigs,
and kids as they strike sparks out of the burning log. Some people
carry a piece of the log out to the fields to protect them against
hail. In Albania down to recent years it was a common custom to burn
a Yule log at Christmas, and the ashes of the fire were scattered on
the fields to make them fertile. The Huzuls, a Slavonic people of
the Carpathians, kindle fire by the friction of wood on Christmas
Eve (Old Style, the fifth of January) and keep it burning till
Twelfth Night.

It is remarkable how common the belief appears to have been that the
remains of the Yule log, if kept throughout the year, had power to
protect the house against fire and especially against lightning. As
the Yule log was frequently of oak, it seems possible that this
belief may be a relic of the old Aryan creed which associated the
oak-tree with the god of thunder. Whether the curative and
fertilising virtues ascribed to the ashes of the Yule log, which are
supposed to heal cattle as well as men, to enable cows to calve, and
to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, may not be derived from
the same ancient source, is a question which deserves to be
considered.



8. The Need-fire

THE FIRE-FESTIVALS hitherto described are all celebrated
periodically at certain stated times of the year. But besides these
regularly recurring celebrations the peasants in many parts of
Europe have been wont from time immemorial to resort to a ritual of
fire at irregular intervals in seasons of distress and calamity,
above all when their cattle were attacked by epidemic disease. No
account of the popular European fire-festivals would be complete
without some notice of these remarkable rites, which have all the
greater claim on our attention because they may perhaps be regarded
as the source and origin of all the other fire-festivals; certainly
they must date from a very remote antiquity. The general name by
which they are known among the Teutonic peoples is need-fire.
Sometimes the need-fire was known as "wild fire," to distinguish it
no doubt from the tame fire produced by more ordinary methods. Among
Slavonic peoples it is called "living fire."

The history of the custom can be traced from the early Middle Ages,
when it was denounced by the Church as a heathen superstition, down
to the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was still
occasionally practised in various parts of Germany, England,
Scotland, and Ireland. Among Slavonic peoples it appears to have
lingered even longer. The usual occasion for performing the rite was
an outbreak of plague or cattle-disease, for which the need-fire was
believed to be an infallible remedy. The animals which were
subjected to it included cows, pigs, horses, and sometimes geese. As
a necessary preliminary to the kindling of the need-fire all other
fires and lights in the neighbourhood were extinguished, so that not
so much as a spark remained alight; for so long as even a
night-light burned in a house, it was imagined that the need-fire
could not kindle. Sometimes it was deemed enough to put out all the
fires in the village; but sometimes the extinction extended to
neighbouring villages or to a whole parish. In some parts of the
Highlands of Scotland the rule was that all householders who dwelt
within the two nearest running streams should put out their lights
and fires on the day appointed. Usually the need-fire was made in
the open air, but in some parts of Serbia it was kindled in a dark
room; sometimes the place was a cross-way or a hollow in a road. In
the Highlands of Scotland the proper places for performing the rite
seem to have been knolls or small islands in rivers.

The regular method of producing the need-fire was by the friction of
two pieces of wood; it might not be struck by flint and steel. Very
exceptionally among some South Slavs we read of a practice of
kindling a need-fire by striking a piece of iron on an anvil. Where
the wood to be employed is specified, it is generally said to be
oak; but on the Lower Rhine the fire was kindled by the friction of
oak-wood or fir-wood. In Slavonic countries we hear of poplar, pear,
and cornel wood being used for the purpose. Often the material is
simply described as two pieces of dry wood. Sometimes nine different
kinds of wood were deemed necessary, but rather perhaps to be burned
in the bonfire than to be rubbed together for the production of the
need-fire. The particular mode of kindling the need-fire varied in
different districts; a very common one was this. Two poles were
driven into the ground about a foot and a half from each other. Each
pole had in the side facing the other a socket into which a smooth
cross-piece or roller was fitted. The sockets were stuffed with
linen, and the two ends of the roller were rammed tightly into the
sockets. To make it more inflammable the roller was often coated
with tar. A rope was then wound round the roller, and the free ends
at both sides were gripped by two or more persons, who by pulling
the rope to and fro caused the roller to revolve rapidly, till
through the friction the linen in the sockets took fire. The sparks
were immediately caught in tow or oakum and waved about in a circle
until they burst into a bright glow, when straw was applied to it,
and the blazing straw used to kindle the fuel that had been stacked
to make the bonfire. Often a wheel, sometimes a cart-wheel or even a
spinning-wheel, formed part of the mechanism; in Aberdeenshire it
was called "the muckle wheel"; in the island of Mull the wheel was
turned from east to west over nine spindles of oak-wood. Sometimes
we are merely told that two wooden planks were rubbed together.
Sometimes it was prescribed that the cart-wheel used for fire-making
and the axle on which it turned should both be new. Similarly it was
said that the rope which turned the roller should be new; if
possible it should be woven of strands taken from a gallows rope
with which people had been hanged, but this was a counsel of
perfection rather than a strict necessity.

Various rules were also laid down as to the kind of persons who
might or should make the need-fire. Sometimes it was said that the
two persons who pulled the rope which twirled the roller should
always be brothers or at least bear the same baptismal name;
sometimes it was deemed sufficient if they were both chaste young
men. In some villages of Brunswick people thought that if everybody
who lent a hand in kindling the need-fire did not bear the same
Christian name, they would labour in vain. In Silesia the tree
employed to produce the need-fire used to be felled by a pair of
twin brothers. In the western islands of Scotland the fire was
kindled by eighty-one married men, who rubbed two great planks
against each other, working in relays of nine; in North Uist the
nine times nine who made the fire were all first-begotten sons, but
we are not told whether they were married or single. Among the
Serbians the need-fire is sometimes kindled by a boy and girl
between eleven and fourteen years of age, who work stark naked in a
dark room; sometimes it is made by an old man and an old woman also
in the dark. In Bulgaria, too, the makers of need-fire strip
themselves of their clothes; in Caithness they divested themselves
of all kinds of metal. If after long rubbing of the wood no fire was
elicited they concluded that some fire must still be burning in the
village; so a strict search was made from house to house, any fire
that might be found was put out, and the negligent householder
punished or upbraided; indeed a heavy fine might be inflicted on
him.

When the need-fire was at last kindled, the bonfire was lit from it,
and as soon as the blaze had somewhat died down, the sick animals
were driven over the glowing embers, sometimes in a regular order of
precedence, first the pigs, next the cows, and last of all the
horses. Sometimes they were driven twice or thrice through the smoke
and flames, so that occasionally some of them were scorched to
death. As soon as all the beasts were through, the young folk would
rush wildly at the ashes and cinders, sprinkling and blackening each
other with them; those who were most blackened would march in
triumph behind the cattle into the village and would not wash
themselves for a long time. From the bonfire people carried live
embers home and used them to rekindle the fires in their houses.
These brands, after being extinguished in water, they sometimes put
in the managers at which the cattle fed, and kept them there for a
while. Ashes from the need-fire were also strewed on the fields to
protect the crops against vermin; sometimes they were taken home to
be employed as remedies in sickness, being sprinkled on the ailing
part or mixed in water and drunk by the patient. In the western
islands of Scotland and on the adjoining mainland, as soon as the
fire on the domestic hearth had been rekindled from the need-fire a
pot full of water was set on it, and the water thus heated was
afterwards sprinkled upon the people infected with the plague or
upon the cattle that were tainted by the murrain. Special virtue was
attributed to the smoke of the bonfire; in Sweden fruit-trees and
nets were fumigated with it, in order that the trees might bear
fruit and the nets catch fish. In the Highlands of Scotland the
need-fire was accounted a sovereign remedy for witchcraft. In the
island of Mull, when the fire was kindled as a cure for the murrain,
we hear of the rite being accompanied by the sacrifice of a sick
heifer, which was cut in pieces and burnt. Slavonian and Bulgarian
peasants conceive cattle-plague as a foul fiend or vampyre which can
be kept at bay by interposing a barrier of fire between it and the
herds. A similar conception may perhaps have originally everywhere
underlain the use of the need-fire as a remedy for the murrain. It
appears that in some parts of Germany the people did not wait for an
outbreak of cattleplague, but, taking time by the forelock, kindled
a need-fire annually to prevent the calamity. Similarly in Poland
the peasants are said to kindle fires in the village streets every
year on St. Rochus's day and to drive the cattle thrice through them
in order to protect the beasts against the murrain. We have seen
that in the Hebrides the cattle were in like manner driven annually
round the Beltane fires for the same purpose. In some cantons of
Switzerland children still kindle a need-fire by the friction of
wood for the sake of dispelling a mist.




LXIII. The Interpretation of the Fire-Festivals



1. On the Fire-festivals in general

THE FOREGOING survey of the popular fire-festivals of Europe
suggests some general observations. In the first place we can hardly
help being struck by the resemblance which the ceremonies bear to
each other, at whatever time of the year and in whatever part of
Europe they are celebrated. The custom of kindling great bonfires,
leaping over them, and driving cattle through or round them would
seem to have been practically universal throughout Europe, and the
same may be said of the processions or races with blazing torches
round fields, orchards, pastures, or cattle-stalls. Less widespread
are the customs of hurling lighted discs into the air and trundling
a burning wheel down hill. The ceremonial of the Yule log is
distinguished from that of the other fire-festivals by the privacy
and domesticity which characterise it; but this distinction may well
be due simply to the rough weather of midwinter, which is apt not
only to render a public assembly in the open air disagreeable, but
also at any moment to defeat the object of the assembly by
extinguishing the all-important fire under a downpour of rain or a
fall of snow. Apart from these local or seasonal differences, the
general resemblance between the fire-festivals at all times of the
year and in all places is tolerably close. And as the ceremonies
themselves resemble each other, so do the benefits which the people
expect to reap from them. Whether applied in the form of bonfires
blazing at fixed points, or of torches carried about from place to
place, or of embers and ashes taken from the smouldering heap of
fuel, the fire is believed to promote the growth of the crops and
the welfare of man and beast, either positively by stimulating them,
or negatively by averting the dangers and calamities which threaten
them from such causes as thunder and lightning, conflagration,
blight, mildew, vermin, sterility, disease, and not least of all
witchcraft.

But we naturally ask, How did it come about that benefits so great
and manifold were supposed to be attained by means so simple? In
what way did people imagine that they could procure so many goods or
avoid so many ills by the application of fire and smoke, of embers
and ashes? Two different explanations of the fire-festivals have
been given by modern enquirers. On the one hand it has been held
that they are sun-charms or magical ceremonies intended, on the
principle of imitative magic, to ensure a needful supply of sunshine
for men, animals, and plants by kindling fires which mimic on earth
the great source of light and heat in the sky. This was the view of
Wilhelm Mannhardt. It may be called the solar theory. On the other
hand it has been maintained that the ceremonial fires have no
necessary reference to the sun but are simply purificatory in
intention, being designed to burn up and destroy all harmful
influences, whether these are conceived in a personal form as
witches, demons, and monsters, or in an impersonal form as a sort of
pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr.
Edward Westermarck and apparently of Professor Eugen Mogk. It may be
called the purificatory theory. Obviously the two theories postulate
two very different conceptions of the fire which plays the principal
part in the rites. On the one view, the fire, like sunshine in our
latitude, is a genial creative power which fosters the growth of
plants and the development of all that makes for health and
happiness; on the other view, the fire is a fierce destructive power
which blasts and consumes all the noxious elements, whether
spiritual or material, that menace the life of men, of animals, and
of plants. According to the one theory the fire is a stimulant,
according to the other it is a disinfectant; on the one view its
virtue is positive, on the other it is negative.

Yet the two explanations, different as they are in the character
which they attribute to the fire, are perhaps not wholly
irreconcilable. If we assume that the fires kindled at these
festivals were primarily intended to imitate the sun's light and
heat, may we not regard the purificatory and disinfecting qualities,
which popular opinion certainly appears to have ascribed to them, as
attributes derived directly from the purificatory and disinfecting
qualities of sunshine? In this way we might conclude that, while the
imitation of sunshine in these ceremonies was primary and original,
the purification attributed to them was secondary and derivative.
Such a conclusion, occupying an intermediate position between the
two opposing theories and recognising an element of truth in both of
them, was adopted by me in earlier editions of this work; but in the
meantime Dr. Westermarck has argued powerfully in favour of the
purificatory theory alone, and I am bound to say that his arguments
carry great weight, and that on a fuller review of the facts the
balance of evidence seems to me to incline decidedly in his favour.
However, the case is not so clear as to justify us in dismissing the
solar theory without discussion, and accordingly I propose to adduce
the considerations which tell for it before proceeding to notice
those which tell against it. A theory which had the support of so
learned and sagacious an investigator as W. Mannhardt is entitled to
a respectful hearing.



2. The Solar Theory of the Fire-festivals

IN AN EARLIER part of this work we saw that savages resort to charms
for making sunshine, and it would be no wonder if primitive man in
Europe did the same. Indeed, when we consider the cold and cloudy
climate of Europe during a great part of the year, we shall find it
natural that sun-charms should have played a much more prominent
part among the superstitious practices of European peoples than
among those of savages who live nearer the equator and who
consequently are apt to get in the course of nature more sunshine
than they want. This view of the festivals may be supported by
various arguments drawn partly from their dates, partly from the
nature of the rites, and partly from the influence which they are
believed to exert upon the weather and on vegetation.

First, in regard to the dates of the festivals it can be no mere
accident that two of the most important and widely spread of the
festivals are timed to coincide more or less exactly with the summer
and winter solstices, that is, with the two turning-points in the
sun's apparent course in the sky when he reaches respectively his
highest and his lowest elevation at noon. Indeed with respect to the
midwinter celebration of Christmas we are not left to conjecture; we
know from the express testimony of the ancients that it was
instituted by the church to supersede an old heathen festival of the
birth of the sun, which was apparently conceived to be born again on
the shortest day of the year, after which his light and heat were
seen to grow till they attained their full maturity at midsummer.
Therefore it is no very far-fetched conjecture to suppose that the
Yule log, which figures so prominently in the popular celebration of
Christmas, was originally designed to help the labouring sun of
midwinter to rekindle his seemingly expiring light.

Not only the date of some of the festivals but the manner of their
celebration suggests a conscious imitation of the sun. The custom of
rolling a burning wheel down a hill, which is often observed at
these ceremonies, might well pass for an imitation of the sun's
course in the sky, and the imitation would be especially appropriate
on Midsummer Day when the sun's annual declension begins. Indeed the
custom has been thus interpreted by some of those who have recorded
it. Not less graphic, it may be said, is the mimicry of his apparent
revolution by swinging a burning tar-barrel round a pole. Again, the
common practice of throwing fiery discs, sometimes expressly said to
be shaped like suns, into the air at the festivals may well be a
piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic
force may be supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy: by
imitating the desired result you actually produce it: by
counterfeiting the sun's progress through the heavens you really
help the luminary to pursue his celestial journey with punctuality
and despatch. The name "fire of heaven," by which the midsummer fire
is sometimes popularly known, clearly implies a consciousness of a
connexion between the earthly and the heavenly flame.

Again, the manner in which the fire appears to have been originally
kindled on these occasions has been alleged in support of the view
that it was intended to be a mock-sun. As some scholars have
perceived, it is highly probable that at the periodic festivals in
former times fire was universally obtained by the friction of two
pieces of wood. It is still so procured in some places both at the
Easter and the Midsummer festivals, and it is expressly said to have
been formerly so procured at the Beltane celebration both in
Scotland and Wales. But what makes it nearly certain that this was
once the invariable mode of kindling the fire at these periodic
festivals is the analogy of the needfire, which has almost always
been produced by the friction of wood, and sometimes by the
revolution of a wheel. It is a plausible conjecture that the wheel
employed for this purpose represents the sun, and if the fires at
the regularly recurring celebrations were formerly produced in the
same way, it might be regarded as a confirmation of the view that
they were originally sun-charms. In point of fact there is, as Kuhn
has indicated, some evidence to show that the midsummer fire was
originally thus produced. We have seen that many Hungarian
swine-herds make fire on Midsummer Eve by rotating a wheel round a
wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they drive their pigs through
the fire thus made. At Obermedlingen, in Swabia, the "fire of
heaven," as it was called, was made on St. Vitus's Day (the
fifteenth of June) by igniting a cart-wheel, which, smeared with
pitch and plaited with straw, was fastened on a pole twelve feet
high, the top of the pole being inserted in the nave of the wheel.
This fire was made on the summit of a mountain, and as the flame
ascended, the people uttered a set form of words, with eyes and arms
directed heavenward. Here the fixing of a wheel on a pole and
igniting it suggests that originally the fire was produced, as in
the case of the need-fire, by the revolution of a wheel. The day on
which the ceremony takes place (the fifteenth of June) is near
midsummer; and we have seen that in Masuren fire is, or used to be,
actually made on Midsummer Day by turning a wheel rapidly about an
oaken pole, though it is not said that the new fire so obtained is
used to light a bonfire. However, we must bear in mind that in all
such cases the use of a wheel may be merely a mechanical device to
facilitate the operation of fire-making by increasing the friction;
it need not have any symbolical significance.

Further, the influence which these fires, whether periodic or
occasional, are supposed to exert on the weather and vegetation may
be cited in support of the view that they are sun-charms, since the
effects ascribed to them resemble those of sunshine. Thus, the
French belief that in a rainy June the lighting of the midsummer
bonfires will cause the rain to cease appears to assume that they
can disperse the dark clouds and make the sun to break out in
radiant glory, drying the wet earth and dripping trees. Similarly
the use of the need-fire by Swiss children on foggy days for the
purpose of clearing away the mist may very naturally be interpreted
as a sun-charm. In the Vosges Mountains the people believe that the
midsummer fires help to preserve the fruits of the earth and ensure
good crops. In Sweden the warmth or cold of the coming season is
inferred from the direction in which the flames of the May Day
bonfire are blown; if they blow to the south, it will be warm, if to
the north, cold. No doubt at present the direction of the flames is
regarded merely as an augury of the weather, not as a mode of
influencing it. But we may be pretty sure that this is one of the
cases in which magic has dwindled into divination. So in the Eifel
Mountains, when the smoke blows towards the corn-fields, this is an
omen that the harvest will be abundant. But the older view may have
been not merely that the smoke and flames prognosticated, but that
they actually produced an abundant harvest, the heat of the flames
acting like sunshine on the corn. Perhaps it was with this view that
people in the Isle of Man lit fires to windward of their fields in
order that the smoke might blow over them. So in South Africa, about
the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to the windward
of their gardens, "their idea being that the smoke, by passing over
the crops, will assist the ripening of them." Among the Zulus also
"medicine is burned on a fire placed to windward of the garden, the
fumigation which the plants in consequence receive being held to
improve the crop." Again, the idea of our European peasants that the
corn will grow well as far as the blaze of the bonfire is visible,
may be interpreted as a remnant of the belief in the quickening and
fertilising power of the bonfires. The same belief, it may be
argued, reappears in the notion that embers taken from the bonfires
and inserted in the fields will promote the growth of the crops, and
it may be thought to underlie the customs of sowing flax-seed in the
direction in which the flames blow, of mixing the ashes of the
bonfire with the seed-corn at sowing, of scattering the ashes by
themselves over the field to fertilise it, and of incorporating a
piece of the Yule log in the plough to make the seeds thrive. The
opinion that the flax or hemp will grow as high as the flames rise
or the people leap over them belongs clearly to the same class of
ideas. Again, at Konz, on the banks of the Moselle, if the blazing
wheel which was trundled down the hillside reached the river without
being extinguished, this was hailed as a proof that the vintage
would be abundant. So firmly was this belief held that the
successful performance of the ceremony entitled the villagers to
levy a tax upon the owners of the neighbouring vineyards. Here the
unextinguished wheel might be taken to represent an unclouded sun,
which in turn would portend an abundant vintage. So the waggon-load
of white wine which the villagers received from the vineyards round
about might pass for a payment for the sunshine which they had
procured for the grapes. Similarly in the Vale of Glamorgan a
blazing wheel used to be trundled down hill on Midsummer Day, and if
the fire were extinguished before the wheel reached the foot of the
hill, the people expected a bad harvest; whereas if the wheel kept
alight all the way down and continued to blaze for a long time, the
farmers looked forward to heavy crops that summer. Here, again, it
is natural to suppose that the rustic mind traced a direct connexion
between the fire of the wheel and the fire of the sun, on which the
crops are dependent.

But in popular belief the quickening and fertilising influence of
the bonfires is not limited to the vegetable world; it extends also
to animals. This plainly appears from the Irish custom of driving
barren cattle through the midsummer fires, from the French belief
that the Yule log steeped in water helps cows to calve, from the
French and Serbian notion that there will be as many chickens,
calves, lambs, and kids as there are sparks struck out of the Yule
log, from the French custom of putting the ashes of the bonfires in
the fowls' nests to make the hens lay eggs, and from the German
practice of mixing the ashes of the bonfires with the drink of
cattle in order to make the animals thrive. Further, there are clear
indications that even human fecundity is supposed to be promoted by
the genial heat of the fires. In Morocco the people think that
childless couples can obtain offspring by leaping over the midsummer
bonfire. It is an Irish belief that a girl who jumps thrice over the
midsummer bonfire will soon marry and become the mother of many
children; in Flanders women leap over the midsummer fires to ensure
an easy delivery; in various parts of France they think that if a
girl dances round nine fires she will be sure to marry within the
year, and in Bohemia they fancy that she will do so if she merely
sees nine of the bonfires. On the other hand, in Lechrain people say
that if a young man and woman, leaping over the midsummer fire
together, escape unsmirched, the young woman will not become a
mother within twelve months; the flames have not touched and
fertilised her. In parts of Switzerland and France the lighting of
the Yule log is accompanied by a prayer that the women may bear
children, the she-goats bring forth kids, and the ewes drop lambs.
The rule observed in some places that the bonfires should be kindled
by the person who was last married seems to belong to the same class
of ideas, whether it be that such a person is supposed to receive
from, or to impart to, the fire a generative and fertilising
influence. The common practice of lovers leaping over the fires hand
in hand may very well have originated in a notion that thereby their
marriage would be blessed with offspring; and the like motive would
explain the custom which obliges couples married within the year to
dance to the light of torches. And the scenes of profligacy which
appear to have marked the midsummer celebration among the
Esthonians, as they once marked the celebration of May Day among
ourselves, may have sprung, not from the mere licence of
holiday-makers, but from a crude notion that such orgies were
justified, if not required, by some mysterious bond which linked the
life of man to the courses of the heavens at this turning-point of
the year.

At the festivals which we are considering the custom of kindling
bonfires is commonly associated with a custom of carrying lighted
torches about the fields, the orchards, the pastures, the flocks and
the herds; and we can hardly doubt that the two customs are only two
different ways of attaining the same object, namely, the benefits
which are believed to flow from the fire, whether it be stationary
or portable. Accordingly if we accept the solar theory of the
bonfires, we seem bound to apply it also to the torches; we must
suppose that the practice of marching or running with blazing
torches about the country is simply a means of diffusing far and
wide the genial influence of the sunshine of which these flickering
flames are a feeble imitation. In favour of this view it may be said
that sometimes the torches are carried about the fields for the
express purpose of fertilising them, and with the same intention
live coals from the bonfires are sometimes placed in the fields to
prevent blight. On the eve of Twelfth Day in Normandy men, women,
and children run wildly through the fields and orchards with lighted
torches, which they wave about the branches and dash against the
trunks of the fruit-trees for the sake of burning the moss and
driving away the moles and field-mice. "They believe that the
ceremony fulfills the double object of exorcising the vermin whose
multiplication would be a real calamity, and of imparting fecundity
to the trees, the fields, and even the cattle"; and they imagine
that the more the ceremony is prolonged, the greater will be the
crop of fruit next autumn. In Bohemia they say that the corn will
grow as high as they fling the blazing besoms into the air. Nor are
such notions confined to Europe. In Corea, a few days before the New
Year festival, the eunuchs of the palace swing burning torches,
chanting invocations the while, and this is supposed to ensure
bountiful crops for the next season. The custom of trundling a
burning wheel over the fields, which used to be observed in Poitou
for the express purpose of fertilising them, may be thought to
embody the same idea in a still more graphic form; since in this way
the mock-sun itself, not merely its light and heat represented by
torches, is made actually to pass over the ground which is to
receive its quickening and kindly influence. Once more, the custom
of carrying lighted brands round cattle is plainly equivalent to
driving the animals through the bonfire; and if the bonfire is a
suncharm, the torches must be so also.



3. The Purificatory Theory of the Fire-festivals

THUS far we have considered what may be said for the theory that at
the European fire-festivals the fire is kindled as a charm to ensure
an abundant supply of sunshine for man and beast, for corn and
fruits. It remains to consider what may be said against this theory
and in favour of the view that in these rites fire is employed not
as a creative but as a cleansing agent, which purifies men, animals,
and plants by burning up and consuming the noxious elements, whether
material or spiritual, which menace all living things with disease
and death.

First, then, it is to be observed that the people who practise the
fire-customs appear never to allege the solar theory in explanation
of them, while on the contrary they do frequently and emphatically
put forward the purificatory theory. This is a strong argument in
favour of the purificatory and against the solar theory; for the
popular explanation of a popular custom is never to be rejected
except for grave cause. And in the present case there seems to be no
adequate reason for rejecting it. The conception of fire as a
destructive agent, which can be turned to account for the
consumption of evil things, is so simple and obvious that it could
hardly escape the minds even of the rude peasantry with whom these
festivals originated. On the other hand the conception of fire as an
emanation of the sun, or at all events as linked to it by a bond of
physical sympathy, is far less simple and obvious; and though the
use of fire as a charm to produce sunshine appears to be undeniable,
nevertheless in attempting to explain popular customs we should
never have recourse to a more recondite idea when a simpler one lies
to hand and is supported by the explicit testimony of the people
themselves. Now in the case of the fire-festivals the destructive
aspect of fire is one upon which the people dwell again and again;
and it is highly significant that the great evil against which the
fire is directed appears to be witchcraft. Again and again we are
told that the fires are intended to burn or repel the witches; and
the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by burning an
effigy of a witch in the fire. Hence, when we remember the great
hold which the dread of witchcraft has had on the popular European
mind in all ages, we may suspect that the primary intention of all
these fire-festivals was simply to destroy or at all events get rid
of the witches, who were regarded as the causes of nearly all the
misfortunes and calamities that befall men, their cattle, and their
crops.

This suspicion is confirmed when we examine the evils for which the
bonfires and torches were supposed to provide a remedy. Foremost,
perhaps, among these evils we may reckon the diseases of cattle; and
of all the ills that witches are believed to work there is probably
none which is so constantly insisted on as the harm they do to the
herds, particularly by stealing the milk from the cows. Now it is
significant that the need-fire, which may perhaps be regarded as the
parent of the periodic fire-festivals, is kindled above all as a
remedy for a murrain or other disease of cattle; and the
circumstance suggests, what on general grounds seems probable, that
the custom of kindling the need-fire goes back to a time when the
ancestors of the European peoples subsisted chiefly on the products
of their herds, and when agriculture as yet played a subordinate
part in their lives. Witches and wolves are the two great foes still
dreaded by the herdsman in many parts of Europe; and we need not
wonder that he should resort to fire as a powerful means of banning
them both. Among Slavonic peoples it appears that the foes whom the
need-fire is designed to combat are not so much living witches as
vampyres and other evil spirits, and the ceremony aims rather at
repelling these baleful beings than at actually consuming them in
the flames. But for our present purpose these distinctions are
immaterial. The important thing to observe is that among the Slavs
the need-fire, which is probably the original of all the ceremonial
fires now under consideration, is not a sun-charm, but clearly and
unmistakably nothing but a means of protecting man and beast against
the attacks of maleficent creatures, whom the peasant thinks to burn
or scare by the heat of the fire, just as he might burn or scare
wild animals.

Again, the bonfires are often supposed to protect the fields against
hail and the homestead against thunder and lightning. But both hail
and thunderstorms are frequently thought to be caused by witches;
hence the fire which bans the witches necessarily serves at the same
time as a talisman against hail, thunder, and lightning. Further,
brands taken from the bonfires are commonly kept in the houses to
guard them against conflagration; and though this may perhaps be
done on the principle of homoeopathic magic, one fire being thought
to act as a preventive of another, it is also possible that the
intention may be to keep witch-incendiaries at bay. Again, people
leap over the bonfires as a preventive of colic, and look at the
flames steadily in order to preserve their eyes in good health; and
both colic and sore eyes are in Germany, and probably elsewhere, set
down to the machinations of witches. Once more, to leap over the
midsummer fires or to circumambulate them is thought to prevent a
person from feeling pains in his back at reaping; and in Germany
such pains are called "witch-shots" and ascribed to witchcraft.

But if the bonfires and torches of the fire-festivals are to be
regarded primarily as weapons directed against witches and wizards,
it becomes probable that the same explanation applies not only to
the flaming discs which are hurled into the air, but also to the
burning wheels which are rolled down hill on these occasions; discs
and wheels, we may suppose, are alike intended to burn the witches
who hover invisible in the air or haunt unseen the fields, the
orchards, and the vineyards on the hillside. Certainly witches are
constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other
equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at
them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs,
torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the
gloom? The South Slavonian peasant believes that witches ride in the
dark hail-clouds; so he shoots at the clouds to bring down the hags,
while he curses them, saying, "Curse, curse Herodias, thy mother is
a heathen, damned of God and fettered through the Redeemer's blood."
Also he brings out a pot of glowing charcoal on which he has thrown
holy oil, laurel leaves, and wormwood to make a smoke. The fumes are
supposed to ascend to the clouds and stupefy the witches, so that
they tumble down to earth. And in order that they may not fall soft,
but may hurt themselves very much, the yokel hastily brings out a
chair and tilts it bottom up so that the witch in falling may break
her legs on the legs of the chair. Worse than that, he cruelly lays
scythes, bill-hooks, and other formidable weapons edge upwards so as
to cut and mangle the poor wretches when they drop plump upon them
from the clouds.

On this view the fertility supposed to follow the application of
fire in the form of bonfires, torches, discs, rolling wheels, and so
forth, is not conceived as resulting directly from an increase of
solar heat which the fire has magically generated; it is merely an
indirect result obtained by freeing the reproductive powers of
plants and animals from the fatal obstruction of witchcraft. And
what is true of the reproduction of plants and animals may hold good
also of the fertility of the human sexes. The bonfires are supposed
to promote marriage and to procure offspring for childless couples.
This happy effect need not flow directly from any quickening or
fertilising energy in the fire; it may follow indirectly from the
power of the fire to remove those obstacles which the spells of
witches and wizards notoriously present to the union of man and
wife.

On the whole, then, the theory of the purificatory virtue of the
ceremonial fires appears more probable and more in accordance with
the evidence than the opposing theory of their connexion with the
sun.




LXIV. The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires



1. The Burning of Effigies in the Fires

WE have still to ask, What is the meaning of burning effigies in the
fire at these festivals? After the preceding investigation the
answer to the question seems obvious. As the fires are often alleged
to be kindled for the purpose of burning the witches, and as the
effigy burnt in them is sometimes called "the Witch," we might
naturally be disposed to conclude that all the effigies consumed in
the flames on these occasions represent witches or warlocks, and
that the custom of burning them is merely a substitute for burning
the wicked men and women themselves, since on the principle of
homoeopathic or imitative magic you practically destroy the witch
herself in destroying her effigy. On the whole this explanation of
the burning of straw figures in human shape at the festivals is
perhaps the most probable.

Yet it may be that this explanation does not apply to all the cases,
and that certain of them may admit and even require another
interpretation. For the effigies so burned, as I have already
remarked, can hardly be separated from the effigies of Death which
are burned or otherwise destroyed in spring; and grounds have been
already given for regarding the so-called effigies of Death as
really representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation.
Are the other effigies, which are burned in the spring and midsummer
bonfires, susceptible of the same explanation? It would seem so. For
just as the fragments of the so-called Death are stuck in the fields
to make the crops grow, so the charred embers of the figure burned
in the spring bonfires are sometimes laid on the fields in the
belief that they will keep vermin from the crop. Again, the rule
that the last married bride must leap over the fire in which the
straw-man is burned on Shrove Tuesday, is probably intended to make
her fruitful. But, as we have seen, the power of blessing women with
offspring is a special attribute of tree-spirits; it is therefore a
fair presumption that the burning effigy over which the bride must
leap is a representative of the fertilising tree-spirit or spirit of
vegetation. This character of the effigy, as representative of the
spirit of vegetation, is almost unmistakable when the figure is
composed of an unthreshed sheaf of corn or is covered from head to
foot with flowers. Again, it is to be noted that, instead of a
puppet, trees, either living or felled, are sometimes burned both in
the spring and midsummer bonfires. Now, considering the frequency
with which the tree-spirit is represented in human shape, it is
hardly rash to suppose that when sometimes a tree and sometimes an
effigy is burned in these fires, the effigy and the tree are
regarded as equivalent to each other, each being a representative of
the tree-spirit. This, again, is confirmed by observing, first, that
sometimes the effigy which is to be burned is carried about
simultaneously with a May-tree, the former being carried by the
boys, the latter by the girls; and, second, that the effigy is
sometimes tied to a living tree and burned with it. In these cases,
we can scarcely doubt, the tree-spirit is represented, as we have
found it represented before, in duplicate, both by the tree and by
the effigy. That the true character of the effigy as a
representative of the beneficent spirit of vegetation should
sometimes be forgotten, is natural. The custom of burning a
beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape
misinterpretation. Naturally enough the people who continued to burn
his image came in time to identify it as the effigy of persons,
whom, on various grounds, they regarded with aversion, such as Judas
Iscariot, Luther, and a witch.

The general reasons for killing a god or his representative have
been examined in a preceding chapter. But when the god happens to be
a deity of vegetation, there are special reasons why he should die
by fire. For light and heat are necessary to vegetable growth; and,
on the principle of sympathetic magic, by subjecting the personal
representative of vegetation to their influence, you secure a supply
of these necessaries for trees and crops. In other words, by burning
the spirit of vegetation in a fire which represents the sun, you
make sure that, for a time at least, vegetation shall have plenty of
sun. It may be objected that, if the intention is simply to secure
enough sunshine for vegetation, this end would be better attained,
on the principles of sympathetic magic, by merely passing the
representative of vegetation through the fire instead of burning
him. In point of fact this is sometimes done. In Russia, as we have
seen, the straw figure of Kupalo is not burned in the midsummer
fire, but merely carried backwards and forwards across it. But, for
the reasons already given, it is necessary that the god should die;
so next day Kupalo is stripped of her ornaments and thrown into a
stream. In this Russian custom the passage of the image through the
fire, if it is not simply a purification, may possibly be a
sun-charm; the killing of the god is a separate act, and the mode of
killing him--by drowning--is probably a rain-charm. But usually
people have not thought it necessary to draw this fine distinction;
for the various reasons already assigned, it is advantageous, they
think, to expose the god of vegetation to a considerable degree of
heat, and it is also advantageous to kill him, and they combine
these advantages in a rough-and-ready way by burning him.



2. The Burning of Men and Animals in the Fires

IN THE POPULAR customs connected with the fire-festivals of Europe
there are certain features which appear to point to a former
practice of human sacrifice. We have seen reasons for believing that
in Europe living persons have often acted as representatives of the
tree-spirit and corn-spirit and have suffered death as such. There
is no reason, therefore, why they should not have been burned, if
any special advantages were likely to be attained by putting them to
death in that way. The consideration of human suffering is not one
which enters into the calculations of primitive man. Now, in the
fire-festivals which we are discussing, the pretence of burning
people is sometimes carried so far that it seems reasonable to
regard it as a mitigated survival of an older custom of actually
burning them. Thus in Aachen, as we saw, the man clad in peas-straw
acts so cleverly that the children really believe he is being
burned. At Jumièges in Normandy the man clad all in green, who bore
the title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by his comrades, and when
they caught him they feigned to fling him upon the midsummer
bonfire. Similarly at the Beltane fires in Scotland the pretended
victim was seized, and a show made of throwing him into the flames,
and for some time afterwards people affected to speak of him as
dead. Again, in the Hallowe'en bonfires of Northeastern Scotland we
may perhaps detect a similar pretence in the custom observed by a
lad of lying down as close to the fire as possible and allowing the
other lads to leap over him. The titular king at Aix, who reigned
for a year and danced the first dance round the midsummer bonfire,
may perhaps in days of old have discharged the less agreeable duty
of serving as fuel for that fire which in later times he only
kindled. In the following customs Mannhardt is probably right in
recognising traces of an old custom of burning a leaf-clad
representative of the spirit of vegetation. At Wolfeck, in Austria,
on Midsummer Day, a boy completely clad in green fir branches goes
from house to house, accompanied by a noisy crew, collecting wood
for the bonfire. As he gets the wood he sings:


   "Forest trees I want,
    No sour milk for me,
    But beer and wine,
    So can the wood-man be jolly and gay."


In some parts of Bavaria, also, the boys who go from house to house
collecting fuel for the midsummer bonfire envelop one of their
number from head to foot in green branches of firs, and lead him by
a rope through the whole village. At Moosheim, in Wurtemberg, the
festival of St. John's Fire usually lasted for fourteen days, ending
on the second Sunday after Midsummer Day. On this last day the
bonfire was left in charge of the children, while the older people
retired to a wood. Here they encased a young fellow in leaves and
twigs, who, thus disguised, went to the fire, scattered it, and trod
it out. All the people present fled at the sight of him.

But it seems possible to go farther than this. Of human sacrifices
offered on these occasions the most unequivocal traces, as we have
seen, are those which, about a hundred years ago, still lingered at
the Beltane fires in the Highlands of Scotland, that is, among a
Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of Europe and almost
completely isolated from foreign influence, had till then conserved
their old heathenism better perhaps than any other people in the
West of Europe. It is significant, therefore, that human sacrifices
by fire are known, on unquestionable evidence, to have been
systematically practised by the Celts. The earliest description of
these sacrifices has been bequeathed to us by Julius Caesar. As
conqueror of the hitherto independent Celts of Gaul, Caesar had
ample opportunity of observing the national Celtic religion and
manners, while these were still fresh and crisp from the native mint
and had not yet been fused in the melting-pot of Roman civilisation.
With his own notes Caesar appears to have incorporated the
observations of a Greek explorer, by name Posidonius, who travelled
in Gaul about fifty years before Caesar carried the Roman arms to
the English Channel. The Greek geographer Strabo and the historian
Diodorus seem also to have derived their descriptions of the Celtic
sacrifices from the work of Posidonius, but independently of each
other, and of Caesar, for each of the three derivative accounts
contain some details which are not to be found in either of the
others. By combining them, therefore, we can restore the original
account of Posidonius with some probability, and thus obtain a
picture of the sacrifices offered by the Celts of Gaul at the close
of the second century before our era. The following seem to have
been the main outlines of the custom. Condemned criminals were
reserved by the Celts in order to be sacrificed to the gods at a
great festival which took place once in every five years. The more
there were of such victims, the greater was believed to be the
fertility of the land. If there were not enough criminals to furnish
victims, captives taken in war were immolated to supply the
deficiency. When the time came the victims were sacrificed by the
Druids or priests. Some they shot down with arrows, some they
impaled, and some they burned alive in the following manner.
Colossal images of wicker-work or of wood and grass were
constructed; these were filled with live men, cattle, and animals of
other kinds; fire was then applied to the images, and they were
burned with their living contents.

Such were the great festivals held once every five years. But
besides these quinquennial festivals, celebrated on so grand a
scale, and with, apparently, so large an expenditure of human life,
it seems reasonable to suppose that festivals of the same sort, only
on a lesser scale, were held annually, and that from these annual
festivals are lineally descended some at least of the fire-festivals
which, with their traces of human sacrifices, are still celebrated
year by year in many parts of Europe. The gigantic images
constructed of osiers or covered with grass in which the Druids
enclosed their victims remind us of the leafy framework in which the
human representative of the tree-spirit is still so often encased.
Hence, seeing that the fertility of the land was apparently supposed
to depend upon the due performance of these sacrifices, Mannhardt
interpreted the Celtic victims, cased in osiers and grass, as
representatives of the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation.

These wicker giants of the Druids seem to have had till lately, if
not down to the present time, their representatives at the spring
and midsummer festivals of modern Europe. At Douay, down at least to
the early part of the nineteenth century, a procession took place
annually on the Sunday nearest to the seventh of July. The great
feature of the procession was a colossal figure, some twenty or
thirty feet high, made of osiers, and called "the giant," which was
moved through the streets by means of rollers and ropes worked by
men who were enclosed within the effigy. The figure was armed as a
knight with lance and sword, helmet and shield. Behind him marched
his wife and his three children, all constructed of osiers on the
same principle, but on a smaller scale. At Dunkirk the procession of
the giants took place on Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth of June.
The festival, which was known as the Follies of Dunkirk, attracted
multitudes of spectators. The giant was a huge figure of
wicker-work, occasionally as much as forty-five feet high, dressed
in a long blue robe with gold stripes, which reached to his feet,
concealing the dozen or more men who made it dance and bob its head
to the spectators. This colossal effigy went by the name of Papa
Reuss, and carried in its pocket a bouncing infant of Brobdingnagian
proportions. The rear was brought up by the daughter of the giant,
constructed, like her sire, of wicker-work, and little, if at all,
inferior to him in size. Most towns and even villages of Brabant and
Flanders have, or used to have, similar wicker giants which were
annually led about to the delight of the populace, who loved these
grotesque figures, spoke of them with patriotic enthusiasm, and
never wearied of gazing at them. At Antwerp the giant was so big
that no gate in the city was large enough to let him go through;
hence he could not visit his brother giants in neighbouring towns,
as the other Belgian giants used to do on solemn occasions.

In England artificial giants seem to have been a standing feature of
the midsummer festival. A writer of the sixteenth century speaks of
"Midsommer pageants in London, where to make the people wonder, are
set forth great and uglie gyants marching as if they were alive, and
armed at all points, but within they are stuffed full of browne
paper and tow, which the shrewd boyes, underpeering, do guilefully
discover, and turne to a greate derision." At Chester the annual
pageant on Midsummer Eve included the effigies of four giants, with
animals, hobby-horses, and other figures. At Coventry it appears
that the giant's wife figured beside the giant. At Burford, in
Oxfordshire, Midsummer Eve used to be celebrated with great jollity
by the carrying of a giant and a dragon up and down the town. The
last survivor of these perambulating English giants lingered at
Salisbury, where an antiquary found him mouldering to decay in the
neglected hall of the Tailors' Company about the year 1844. His
bodily framework was a lath and hoop, like the one which used to be
worn by Jack-in-the-Green on May Day.

In these cases the giants merely figured in the processions. But
sometimes they were burned in the summer bonfires. Thus the people
of the Rue aux Ours in Paris used annually to make a great
wicker-work figure, dressed as a soldier, which they promenaded up
and down the streets for several days, and solemnly burned on the
third of July, the crowd of spectators singing _Salve Regina._ A
personage who bore the title of king presided over the ceremony with
a lighted torch in his hand. The burning fragments of the image were
scattered among the people, who eagerly scrambled for them. The
custom was abolished in 1743. In Brie, Isle de France, a wicker-work
giant, eighteen feet high, was annually burned on Midsummer Eve.

Again, the Druidical custom of burning live animals, enclosed in
wicker-work, has its counterpart at the spring and midsummer
festivals. At Luchon in the Pyrenees on Midsummer Eve "a hollow
column, composed of strong wicker-work, is raised to the height of
about sixty feet in the centre of the principal suburb, and
interlaced with green foliage up to the very top; while the most
beautiful flowers and shrubs procurable are artistically arranged in
groups below, so as to form a sort of background to the scene. The
column is then filled with combustible materials, ready for
ignition. At an appointed hour--about 8 P.M.--a grand procession,
composed of the clergy, followed by young men and maidens in holiday
attire, pour forth from the town chanting hymns, and take up their
position around the column. Meanwhile, bonfires are lit, with
beautiful effect, in the surrounding hills. As many living serpents
as could be collected are now thrown into the column, which is set
on fire at the base by means of torches, armed with which about
fifty boys and men dance around with frantic gestures. The serpents,
to avoid the flames, wriggle their way to the top, whence they are
seen lashing out laterally until finally obliged to drop, their
struggles for life giving rise to enthusiastic delight among the
surrounding spectators. This is a favourite annual ceremony for the
inhabitants of Luchon and its neighbourhood, and local tradition
assigns it to a heathen origin." In the midsummer fires formerly
kindled on the Place de Grève at Paris it was the custom to burn a
basket, barrel, or sack full of live cats, which was hung from a
tall mast in the midst of the bonfire; sometimes a fox was burned.
The people collected the embers and ashes of the fire and took them
home, believing that they brought good luck. The French kings often
witnessed these spectacles and even lit the bonfire with their own
hands. In 1648 Louis the Fourteenth, crowned with a wreath of roses
and carrying a bunch of roses in his hand, kindled the fire, danced
at it and partook of the banquet afterwards in the town hall. But
this was the last occasion when a monarch presided at the midsummer
bonfire in Paris. At Metz midsummer fires were lighted with great
pomp on the esplanade, and a dozen cats, enclosed in wicker cages,
were burned alive in them, to the amusement of the people. Similarly
at Gap, in the department of the High Alps, cats used to be roasted
over the midsummer bonfire. In Russia a white cock was sometimes
burned in the midsummer bonfire; in Meissen or Thuringia a horse's
head used to be thrown into it. Sometimes animals are burned in the
spring bonfires. In the Vosges cats were burned on Shrove Tuesday;
in Alsace they were thrown into the Easter bonfire. In the
department of the Ardennes cats were flung into the bonfires kindled
on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, by a refinement of cruelty,
they were hung over the fire from the end of a pole and roasted
alive. "The cat, which represented the devil, could never suffer
enough." While the creatures were perishing in the flames, the
shepherds guarded their flocks and forced them to leap over the
fire, esteeming this an infallible means of preserving them from
disease and witchcraft. We have seen that squirrels were sometimes
burned in the Easter fire.

Thus it appears that the sacrificial rites of the Celts of ancient
Gaul can be traced in the popular festivals of modern Europe.
Naturally it is in France, or rather in the wider area comprised
within the limits of ancient Gaul, that these rites have left the
clearest traces in the customs of burning giants of wicker-work and
animals enclosed in wicker-work or baskets. These customs, it will
have been remarked, are generally observed at or about midsummer.
From this we may infer that the original rites of which these are
the degenerate successors were solemnised at midsummer. This
inference harmonises with the conclusion suggested by a general
survey of European folk-custom, that the midsummer festival must on
the whole have been the most widely diffused and the most solemn of
all the yearly festivals celebrated by the primitive Aryans in
Europe. At the same time we must bear in mind that among the British
Celts the chief fire-festivals of the year appear certainly to have
been those of Beltane (May Day) and Hallowe'en (the last day of
October); and this suggests a doubt whether the Celts of Gaul also
may not have celebrated their principal rites of fire, including
their burnt sacrifices of men and animals, at the beginning of May
or the beginning of November rather than at Midsummer.

We have still to ask, What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why
were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals? If we are
right in interpreting the modern European fire-festivals as attempts
to break the power of witchcraft by burning or banning the witches
and warlocks, it seems to follow that we must explain the human
sacrifices of the Celts in the same manner; that is, we must suppose
that the men whom the Druids burnt in wicker-work images were
condemned to death on the ground that they were witches or wizards,
and that the mode of execution by fire was chosen because burning
alive is deemed the surest mode of getting rid of these noxious and
dangerous beings. The same explanation would apply to the cattle and
wild animals of many kinds which the Celts burned along with the
men. They, too, we may conjecture, were supposed to be either under
the spell of witchcraft or actually to be the witches and wizards,
who had transformed themselves into animals for the purpose of
prosecuting their infernal plots against the welfare of their
fellow-creatures. This conjecture is confirmed by the observation
that the victims most commonly burned in modern bonfires have been
cats, and that cats are precisely the animals into which, with the
possible exception of hares, witches were most usually supposed to
transform themselves. Again, we have seen that serpents and foxes
used sometimes to be burnt in the midsummer fires; and Welsh and
German witches are reported to have assumed the form both of foxes
and serpents. In short, when we remember the great variety of
animals whose forms witches can assume at pleasure, it seems easy on
this hypothesis to account for the variety of living creatures that
have been burnt at festivals both in ancient Gaul and modern Europe;
all these victims, we may surmise, were doomed to the flames, not
because they were animals, but because they were believed to be
witches who had taken the shape of animals for their nefarious
purposes. One advantage of explaining the ancient Celtic sacrifices
in this way is that it introduces, as it were, a harmony and
consistency into the treatment which Europe has meted out to witches
from the earliest times down to about two centuries ago, when the
growing influence of rationalism discredited the belief in
witchcraft and put a stop to the custom of burning witches. Be that
as it may, we can now perhaps understand why the Druids believed
that the more persons they sentenced to death, the greater would be
the fertility of the land. To a modern reader the connexion at first
sight may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the
productivity of the earth. But a little reflection may satisfy him
that when the criminals who perish at the stake or on the gallows
are witches, whose delight it is to blight the crops of the farmer
or to lay them low under storms of hail, the execution of these
wretches is really calculated to ensure an abundant harvest by
removing one of the principal causes which paralyse the efforts and
blast the hopes of the husbandman.

The Druidical sacrifices which we are considering were explained in
a different way by W. Mannhardt. He supposed that the men whom the
Druids burned in wicker-work images represented the spirits of
vegetation, and accordingly that the custom of burning them was a
magical ceremony intended to secure the necessary sunshine for the
crops. Similarly, he seems to have inclined to the view that the
animals which used to be burnt in the bonfires represented the
cornspirit, which, as we saw in an earlier part of this work, is
often supposed to assume the shape of an animal. This theory is no
doubt tenable, and the great authority of W. Mannhardt entitles it
to careful consideration. I adopted it in former editions of this
book; but on reconsideration it seems to me on the whole to be less
probable than the theory that the men and animals burnt in the fires
perished in the character of witches. This latter view is strongly
supported by the testimony of the people who celebrate the
fire-festivals, since a popular name for the custom of kindling the
fires is "burning the witches," effigies of witches are sometimes
consumed in the flames, and the fires, their embers, or their ashes
are supposed to furnish protection against witchcraft. On the other
hand there is little to show that the effigies or the animals burnt
in the fires are regarded by the people as representatives of the
vegetation-spirit, and that the bonfires are sun-charms. With regard
to serpents in particular, which used to be burnt in the midsummer
fire at Luchon, I am not aware of any certain evidence that in
Europe snakes have been regarded as embodiments of the tree-spirit
or corn-spirit, though in other parts of the world the conception
appears to be not unknown. Whereas the popular faith in the
transformation of witches into animals is so general and deeply
rooted, and the fear of these uncanny beings is so strong, that it
seems safer to suppose that the cats and other animals which were
burnt in the fire suffered death as embodiments of witches than that
they perished as representatives of vegetation-spirits.




LXV. Balder and the Mistletoe

THE READER may remember that the preceding account of the popular
fire-festivals of Europe was suggested by the myth of the Norse god
Balder, who is said to have been slain by a branch of mistletoe and
burnt in a great fire. We have now to enquire how far the customs
which have been passed in review help to shed light on the myth. In
this enquiry it may be convenient to begin with the mistletoe, the
instrument of Balder's death.

From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of
superstitious veneration in Europe. It was worshipped by the Druids,
as we learn from a famous passage of Pliny. After enumerating the
different kinds of mistletoe, he proceeds: "In treating of this
subject, the admiration in which the mistletoe is held throughout
Gaul ought not to pass unnoticed. The Druids, for so they call their
wizards, esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree
on which it grows, provided only that the tree is an oak. But apart
from this they choose oak-woods for their sacred groves and perform
no sacred rites without oak-leaves; so that the very name of Druids
may be regarded as a Greek appellation derived from their worship of
the oak. For they believe that whatever grows on these trees is sent
from heaven, and is a sign that the tree has been chosen by the god
himself. The mistletoe is very rarely to be met with; but when it is
found, they gather it with solemn ceremony. This they do above all
on the sixth day of the moon, from whence they date the beginnings
of their months, of their years, and of their thirty years' cycle,
because by the sixth day the moon has plenty of vigour and has not
run half its course. After due preparations have been made for a
sacrifice and a feast under the tree, they hail it as the universal
healer and bring to the spot two white bulls, whose horns have never
been bound before. A priest clad in a white robe climbs the tree and
with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe, which is caught in a white
cloth. Then they sacrifice the victims, praying that God may make
his own gift to prosper with those upon whom he has bestowed it.
They believe that a potion prepared from mistletoe will make barren
animals to bring forth, and that the plant is a remedy against all
poison."

In another passage Pliny tells us that in medicine the mistletoe
which grows on an oak was esteemed the most efficacious, and that
its efficacy was by some superstitious people supposed to be
increased if the plant was gathered on the first day of the moon
without the use of iron, and if when gathered it was not allowed to
touch the earth; oak-mistletoe thus obtained was deemed a cure for
epilepsy; carried about by women it assisted them to conceive; and
it healed ulcers most effectually, if only the sufferer chewed a
piece of the plant and laid another piece on the sore. Yet, again,
he says that mistletoe was supposed, like vinegar and an egg, to be
an excellent means of extinguishing a fire.

If in these latter passages Pliny refers, as he apparently does, to
the beliefs current among his contemporaries in Italy, it will
follow that the Druids and the Italians were to some extent agreed
as to the valuable properties possessed by mistletoe which grows on
an oak; both of them deemed it an effectual remedy for a number of
ailments, and both of them ascribed to it a quickening virtue, the
Druids believing that a potion prepared from mistletoe would
fertilise barren cattle, and the Italians holding that a piece of
mistletoe carried about by a woman would help her to conceive a
child. Further, both peoples thought that if the plant were to exert
its medicinal properties it must be gathered in a certain way and at
a certain time. It might not be cut with iron, hence the Druids cut
it with gold; and it might not touch the earth, hence the Druids
caught it in a white cloth. In choosing the time for gathering the
plant, both peoples were determined by observation of the moon; only
they differed as to the particular day of the moon, the Italians
preferring the first, and the Druids the sixth.

With these beliefs of the ancient Gauls and Italians as to the
wonderful medicinal properties of mistletoe we may compare the
similar beliefs of the modern Aino of Japan. We read that they,
"like many nations of the Northern origin, hold the mistletoe in
peculiar veneration. They look upon it as a medicine, good in almost
every disease, and it is sometimes taken in food and at others
separately as a decoction. The leaves are used in preference to the
berries, the latter being of too sticky a nature for general
purposes. . . . But many, too, suppose this plant to have the power
of making the gardens bear plentifully. When used for this purpose,
the leaves are cut up into fine pieces, and, after having been
prayed over, are sown with the millet and other seeds, a little also
being eaten with the food. Barren women have also been known to eat
the mistletoe, in order to be made to bear children. That mistletoe
which grows upon the willow is supposed to have the greatest
efficacy. This is because the willow is looked upon by them as being
an especially sacred tree."

Thus the Aino agree with the Druids in regarding mistletoe as a cure
for almost every disease, and they agree with the ancient Italians
that applied to women it helps them to bear children. Again, the
Druidical notion that the mistletoe was an "all-healer" or panacea
may be compared with a notion entertained by the Walos of
Senegambia. These people "have much veneration for a sort of
mistletoe, which they call _tob;_ they carry leaves of it on their
persons when they go to war as a preservative against wounds, just
as if the leaves were real talismans (_gris-gris_)." The French
writer who records this practice adds: "Is it not very curious that
the mistletoe should be in this part of Africa what it was in the
superstitions of the Gauls? This prejudice, common to the two
countries, may have the same origin; blacks and whites will
doubtless have seen, each of them for themselves, something
supernatural in a plant which grows and flourishes without having
roots in the earth. May they not have believed, in fact, that it was
a plant fallen from the sky, a gift of the divinity?"

This suggestion as to the origin of the superstition is strongly
confirmed by the Druidical belief, reported by Pliny, that whatever
grew on an oak was sent from heaven and was a sign that the tree had
been chosen by the god himself. Such a belief explains why the
Druids cut the mistletoe, not with a common knife, but with a golden
sickle, and why, when cut, it was not suffered to touch the earth;
probably they thought that the celestial plant would have been
profaned and its marvellous virtue lost by contact with the ground.
With the ritual observed by the Druids in cutting the mistletoe we
may compare the ritual which in Cambodia is prescribed in a similar
case. They say that when you see an orchid growing as a parasite on
a tamarind tree, you should dress in white, take a new earthenware
pot, then climb the tree at noon, break off the plant, put it in the
pot and let the pot fall to the ground. After that you make in the
pot a decoction which confers the gift of invulnerability. Thus just
as in Africa the leaves of one parasitic plant are supposed to
render the wearer invulnerable, so in Cambodia a decoction made from
another parasitic plant is considered to render the same service to
such as make use of it, whether by drinking or washing. We may
conjecture that in both places the notion of invulnerability is
suggested by the position of the plant, which, occupying a place of
comparative security above the ground, appears to promise to its
fortunate possessor a similar security from some of the ills that
beset the life of man on earth. We have already met with examples of
the store which the primitive mind sets on such vantage grounds.

Whatever may be the origin of these beliefs and practices concerning
the mistletoe, certain it is that some of them have their analogies
in the folk-lore of modern European peasants. For example, it is
laid down as a rule in various parts of Europe that mistletoe may
not be cut in the ordinary way but must be shot or knocked down with
stones from the tree on which it is growing. Thus, in the Swiss
canton of Aargau "all parasitic plants are esteemed in a certain
sense holy by the country folk, but most particularly so the
mistletoe growing on an oak. They ascribe great powers to it, but
shrink from cutting it off in the usual manner. Instead of that they
procure it in the following manner. When the sun is in Sagittarius
and the moon is on the wane, on the first, third, or fourth day
before the new moon, one ought to shoot down with an arrow the
mistletoe of an oak and to catch it with the left hand as it falls.
Such mistletoe is a remedy for every ailment of children." Here
among the Swiss peasants, as among the Druids of old, special virtue
is ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an oak: it may not be cut in
the usual way: it must be caught as it falls to the ground; and it
is esteemed a panacea for all diseases, at least of children. In
Sweden, also, it is a popular superstition that if mistletoe is to
possess its peculiar virtue, it must either be shot down out of the
oak or knocked down with stones. Similarly, "so late as the early
part of the nineteenth century, people in Wales believed that for
the mistletoe to have any power, it must be shot or struck down with
stones off the tree where it grew."

Again, in respect of the healing virtues of mistletoe the opinion of
modern peasants, and even of the learned, has to some extent agreed
with that of the ancients. The Druids appear to have called the
plant, or perhaps the oak on which it grew, the "all-healer"; and
"all-healer" is said to be still a name of the mistletoe in the
modern Celtic speech of Brittany, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. On
St. John's morning (Midsummer morning) peasants of Piedmont and
Lombardy go out to search the oak-leaves for the "oil of St. John,"
which is supposed to heal all wounds made with cutting instruments.
Originally, perhaps, the "oil of St. John" was simply the mistletoe,
or a decoction made from it. For in Holstein the mistletoe,
especially oak-mistletoe, is still regarded as a panacea for green
wounds and as a sure charm to secure success in hunting; and at
Lacaune, in the south of France, the old Druidical belief in the
mistletoe as an antidote to all poisons still survives among the
peasantry; they apply the plant to the stomach of the sufferer or
give him a decoction of it to drink. Again, the ancient belief that
mistletoe is a cure for epilepsy has survived in modern times not
only among the ignorant but among the learned. Thus in Sweden
persons afflicted with the falling sickness think they can ward off
attacks of the malady by carrying about with them a knife which has
a handle of oak mistletoe; and in Germany for a similar purpose
pieces of mistletoe used to be hung round the necks of children. In
the French province of Bourbonnais a popular remedy for epilepsy is
a decoction of mistletoe which has been gathered on an oak on St.
John's Day and boiled with rye-flour. So at Bottesford in
Lincolnshire a decoction of mistletoe is supposed to be a palliative
for this terrible disease. Indeed mistletoe was recommended as a
remedy for the falling sickness by high medical authorities in
England and Holland down to the eighteenth century.

However, the opinion of the medical profession as to the curative
virtues of mistletoe has undergone a radical alteration. Whereas the
Druids thought that mistletoe cured everything, modern doctors
appear to think that it cures nothing. If they are right, we must
conclude that the ancient and widespread faith in the medicinal
virtue of mistletoe is a pure superstition based on nothing better
than the fanciful inferences which ignorance has drawn from the
parasitic nature of the plant, its position high up on the branch of
a tree seeming to protect it from the dangers to which plants and
animals are subject on the surface of the ground. From this point of
view we can perhaps understand why mistletoe has so long and so
persistently been prescribed as a cure for the falling sickness. As
mistletoe cannot fall to the ground because it is rooted on the
branch of a tree high above the earth, it seems to follow as a
necessary consequence that an epileptic patient cannot possibly fall
down in a fit so long as he carries a piece of mistletoe in his
pocket or a decoction of mistletoe in his stomach. Such a train of
reasoning would probably be regarded even now as cogent by a large
portion of the human species.

Again the ancient Italian opinion that mistletoe extinguishes fire
appears to be shared by Swedish peasants, who hang up bunches of
oak-mistletoe on the ceilings of their rooms as a protection against
harm in general and conflagration in particular. A hint as to the
way in which mistletoe comes to be possessed of this property is
furnished by the epithet "thunder-bosom," which people of the Aargau
canton in Switzerland apply to the plant. For a thunder-besom is a
shaggy, bushy excrescence on branches of trees, which is popularly
believed to be produced by a flash of lightning; hence in Bohemia a
thunder-besom burnt in the fire protects the house against being
struck by a thunder-bolt. Being itself a product of lightning it
naturally serves, on homoeopathic principles, as a protection
against lightning, in fact as a kind of lightning-conductor. Hence
the fire which mistletoe in Sweden is designed especially to avert
from houses may be fire kindled by lightning; though no doubt the
plant is equally effective against conflagration in general.

Again, mistletoe acts as a master-key as well as a
lightning-conductor; for it is said to open all locks. But perhaps
the most precious of all the virtues of mistletoe is that it affords
efficient protection against sorcery and witchcraft. That, no doubt,
is the reason why in Austria a twig of mistletoe is laid on the
threshold as a preventive of nightmare; and it may be the reason why
in the north of England they say that if you wish your dairy to
thrive you should give your bunch of mistletoe to the first cow that
calves after New Year's Day, for it is well known that nothing is so
fatal to milk and butter as witchcraft. Similarly in Wales, for the
sake of ensuring good luck to the dairy, people used to give a
branch of mistletoe to the first cow that gave birth to a calf after
the first hour of the New Year; and in rural districts of Wales,
where mistletoe abounded, there was always a profusion of it in the
farmhouses. When mistletoe was scarce, Welsh farmers used to say,
"No mistletoe, no luck"; but if there was a fine crop of mistletoe,
they expected a fine crop of corn. In Sweden mistletoe is diligently
sought after on St. John's Eve, the people "believing it to be, in a
high degree, possessed of mystic qualities; and that if a sprig of
it be attached to the ceiling of the dwelling-house, the horse's
stall, or the cow's crib, the Troll will then be powerless to injure
either man or beast."

With regard to the time when the mistletoe should be gathered
opinions have varied. The Druids gathered it above all on the sixth
day of the moon, the ancient Italians apparently on the first day of
the moon. In modern times some have preferred the full moon of March
and others the waning moon of winter when the sun is in Sagittarius.
But the favourite time would seem to be Midsummer Eve or Midsummer
Day. We have seen that both in France and Sweden special virtues are
ascribed to mistletoe gathered at Midsummer. The rule in Sweden is
that "mistletoe must be cut on the night of Midsummer Eve when sun
and moon stand in the sign of their might." Again, in Wales it was
believed that a sprig of mistletoe gathered on St. John's Eve
(Midsummer Eve), or at any time before the berries appeared, would
induce dreams of omen, both good and bad, if it were placed under
the pillow of the sleeper. Thus mistletoe is one of the many plants
whose magical or medicinal virtues are believed to culminate with
the culmination of the sun on the longest day of the year. Hence it
seems reasonable to conjecture that in the eyes of the Druids, also,
who revered the plant so highly, the sacred mistletoe may have
acquired a double portion of its mystic qualities at the solstice in
June, and that accordingly they may have regularly cut it with
solemn ceremony on Midsummer Eve.

Be that as it may, certain it is that the mistletoe, the instrument
of Balder's death, has been regularly gathered for the sake of its
mystic qualities on Midsummer Eve in Scandinavia, Balder's home. The
plant is found commonly growing on pear-trees, oaks, and other trees
in thick damp woods throughout the more temperate parts of Sweden.
Thus one of the two main incidents of Balder's myth is reproduced in
the great midsummer festival of Scandinavia. But the other main
incident of the myth, the burning of Balder's body on a pyre, has
also its counterpart in the bonfires which still blaze, or blazed
till lately, in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden on Midsummer Eve. It
does not appear, indeed, that any effigy is burned in these
bonfires; but the burning of an effigy is a feature which might
easily drop out after its meaning was forgotten. And the name of
Balder's balefires (_Balder's Balar_), by which these midsummer
fires were formerly known in Sweden, puts their connexion with
Balder beyond the reach of doubt, and makes it probable that in
former times either a living representative or an effigy of Balder
was annually burned in them. Midsummer was the season sacred to
Balder, and the Swedish poet Tegner, in placing the burning of
Balder at midsummer, may very well have followed an old tradition
that the summer solstice was the time when the good god came to his
untimely end.

Thus it has been shown that the leading incidents of the Balder myth
have their counterparts in those fire-festivals of our European
peasantry which undoubtedly date from a time long prior to the
introduction of Christianity. The pretence of throwing the victim
chosen by lot into the Beltane fire, and the similar treatment of
the man, the future Green Wolf, at the midsummer bonfire in
Normandy, may naturally be interpreted as traces of an older custom
of actually burning human beings on these occasions; and the green
dress of the Green Wolf, coupled with the leafy envelope of the
young fellow who trod out the midsummer fire at Moosheim, seems to
hint that the persons who perished at these festivals did so in the
character of tree-spirits or deities of vegetation. From all this we
may reasonably infer that in the Balder myth on the one hand, and
the fire-festivals and custom of gathering mistletoe on the other
hand, we have, as it were, the two broken and dissevered halves of
an original whole. In other words, we may assume with some degree of
probability that the myth of Balder's death was not merely a myth,
that is, a description of physical phenomena in imagery borrowed
from human life, but that it was at the same time the story which
people told to explain why they annually burned a human
representative of the god and cut the mistletoe with solemn
ceremony. If I am right, the story of Balder's tragic end formed, so
to say, the text of the sacred drama which was acted year by year as
a magical rite to cause the sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to
thrive, and to guard man and beast from the baleful arts of fairies
and trolls, of witches and warlocks. The tale belonged, in short, to
that class of nature myths which are meant to be supplemented by
ritual; here, as so often, myth stood to magic in the relation of
theory to practice.

But if the victims--the human Balders--who died by fire, whether in
spring or at midsummer, were put to death as living embodiments of
tree-spirits or deities of vegetation, it would seem that Balder
himself must have been a tree-spirit or deity of vegetation. It
becomes desirable, therefore, to determine, if we can, the
particular kind of tree or trees, of which a personal representative
was burned at the fire-festivals. For we may be quite sure that it
was not as a representative of vegetation in general that the victim
suffered death. The idea of vegetation in general is too abstract to
be primitive. Most probably the victim at first represented a
particular kind of sacred tree. But of all European trees none has
such claims as the oak to be considered as pre-eminently the sacred
tree of the Aryans. We have seen that its worship is attested for
all the great branches of the Aryan stock in Europe; hence we may
certainly conclude that the tree was venerated by the Aryans in
common before the dispersion, and that their primitive home must
have lain in a land which was clothed with forests of oak.

Now, considering the primitive character and remarkable similarity
of the fire-festivals observed by all the branches of the Aryan race
in Europe, we may infer that these festivals form part of the common
stock of religious observances which the various peoples carried
with them in their wanderings from their old home. But, if I am
right, an essential feature of those primitive fire-festivals was
the burning of a man who represented the tree-spirit. In view, then,
of the place occupied by the oak in the religion of the Aryans, the
presumption is that the tree so represented at the fire-festivals
must originally have been the oak. So far as the Celts and
Lithuanians are concerned, this conclusion will perhaps hardly be
contested. But both for them and for the Germans it is confirmed by
a remarkable piece of religious conservatism. The most primitive
method known to man of producing fire is by rubbing two pieces of
wood against each other till they ignite; and we have seen that this
method is still used in Europe for kindling sacred fires such as the
need-fire, and that most probably it was formerly resorted to at all
the fire-festivals under discussion. Now it is sometimes required
that the need-fire, or other sacred fire, should be made by the
friction of a particular kind of wood; and when the kind of wood is
prescribed, whether among Celts, Germans, or Slavs, that wood
appears to be generally the oak. But if the sacred fire was
regularly kindled by the friction of oak-wood, we may infer that
originally the fire was also fed with the same material. In point of
fact, it appears that the perpetual fire of Vesta at Rome was fed
with oak-wood, and that oak-wood was the fuel consumed in the
perpetual fire which burned under the sacred oak at the great
Lithuanian sanctuary of Romove. Further, that oak-wood was formerly
the fuel burned in the midsummer fires may perhaps be inferred from
the custom, said to be still observed by peasants in many mountain
districts of Germany, of making up the cottage fire on Midsummer Day
with a heavy block of oak-wood. The block is so arranged that it
smoulders slowly and is not finally reduced to charcoal till the
expiry of a year. Then upon next Midsummer Day the charred embers of
the old log are removed to make room for the new one, and are mixed
with the seed-corn or scattered about the garden. This is believed
to guard the food cooked on the hearth from witchcraft, to preserve
the luck of the house, to promote the growth of the crops, and to
keep them from blight and vermin. Thus the custom is almost exactly
parallel to that of the Yule-log, which in parts of Germany, France,
England, Serbia, and other Slavonic lands was commonly of oak-wood.
The general conclusion is, that at those periodic or occasional
ceremonies the ancient Aryans both kindled and fed the fire with the
sacred oak-wood.

But if at these solemn rites the fire was regularly made of oakwood,
it follows that any man who was burned in it as a personification of
the tree-spirit could have represented no tree but the oak. The
sacred oak was thus burned in duplicate; the wood of the tree was
consumed in the fire, and along with it was consumed a living man as
a personification of the oak-spirit. The conclusion thus drawn for
the European Aryans in general is confirmed in its special
application to the Scandinavians by the relation in which amongst
them the mistletoe appears to have stood to the burning of the
victim in the midsummer fire. We have seen that among Scandinavians
it has been customary to gather the mistletoe at midsummer. But so
far as appears on the face of this custom, there is nothing to
connect it with the midsummer fires in which human victims or
effigies of them were burned. Even if the fire, as seems probable,
was originally always made with oak-wood, why should it have been
necessary to pull the mistletoe? The last link between the midsummer
customs of gathering the mistletoe and lighting the bonfires is
supplied by Balder's myth, which can hardly be disjoined from the
customs in question. The myth suggests that a vital connexion may
once have been believed to subsist between the mistletoe and the
human representative of the oak who was burned in the fire.
According to the myth, Balder could be killed by nothing in heaven
or earth except the mistletoe; and so long as the mistletoe remained
on the oak, he was not only immortal but invulnerable. Now, if we
suppose that Balder was the oak, the origin of the myth becomes
intelligible. The mistletoe was viewed as the seat of life of the
oak, and so long as it was uninjured nothing could kill or even
wound the oak. The conception of the mistletoe as the seat of life
of the oak would naturally be suggested to primitive people by the
observation that while the oak is deciduous, the mistletoe which
grows on it is evergreen. In winter the sight of its fresh foliage
among the bare branches must have been hailed by the worshippers of
the tree as a sign that the divine life which had ceased to animate
the branches yet survived in the mistletoe, as the heart of a
sleeper still beats when his body is motionless. Hence when the god
had to be killed--when the sacred tree had to be burnt--it was
necessary to begin by breaking off the mistletoe. For so long as the
mistletoe remained intact, the oak (so people might think) was
invulnerable; all the blows of their knives and axes would glance
harmless from its surface. But once tear from the oak its sacred
heart--the mistletoe--and the tree nodded to its fall. And when in
later times the spirit of the oak came to be represented by a living
man, it was logically necessary to suppose that, like the tree he
personated, he could neither be killed nor wounded so long as the
mistletoe remained uninjured. The pulling of the mistletoe was thus
at once the signal and the cause of his death.

On this view the invulnerable Balder is neither more nor less than a
personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak. The interpretation is
confirmed by what seems to have been an ancient Italian belief, that
the mistletoe can be destroyed neither by fire nor water; for if the
parasite is thus deemed indestructible, it might easily be supposed
to communicate its own indestructibility to the tree on which it
grows, so long as the two remain in conjunction. Or, to put the same
idea in mythical form, we might tell how the kindly god of the oak
had his life securely deposited in the imperishable mistletoe which
grew among the branches; how accordingly so long as the mistletoe
kept its place there, the deity himself remained invulnerable; and
how at last a cunning foe, let into the secret of the god's
invulnerability, tore the mistletoe from the oak, thereby killing
the oak-god and afterwards burning his body in a fire which could
have made no impression on him so long as the incombustible parasite
retained its seat among the boughs.

But since the idea of a being whose life is thus, in a sense,
outside himself, must be strange to many readers, and has, indeed,
not yet been recognised in its full bearing on primitive
superstition, it will be worth while to illustrate it by examples
drawn both from story and custom. The result will be to show that,
in assuming this idea as the explanation of Balder's relation to the
mistletoe, I assume a principle which is deeply engraved on the mind
of primitive man.



LXVI. The External Soul in Folk-Tales

IN A FORMER part of this work we saw that, in the opinion of
primitive people, the soul may temporarily absent itself from the
body without causing death. Such temporary absences of the soul are
often believed to involve considerable risk, since the wandering
soul is liable to a variety of mishaps at the hands of enemies, and
so forth. But there is another aspect to this power of disengaging
the soul from the body. If only the safety of the soul can be
ensured during its absence, there is no reason why the soul should
not continue absent for an indefinite time; indeed a man may, on a
pure calculation of personal safety, desire that his soul should
never return to his body. Unable to conceive of life abstractly as a
"permanent possibility of sensation" or a "continuous adjustment of
internal arrangements to external relations," the savage thinks of
it as a concrete material thing of a definite bulk, capable of being
seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised,
fractured, or smashed in pieces. It is not needful that the life, so
conceived, should be in the man; it may be absent from his body and
still continue to animate him by virtue of a sort of sympathy or
action at a distance. So long as this object which he calls his life
or soul remains unharmed, the man is well; if it is injured, he
suffers; if it is destroyed, he dies. Or, to put it otherwise, when
a man is ill or dies, the fact is explained by saying that the
material object called his life or soul, whether it be in his body
or out of it, has either sustained injury or been destroyed. But
there may be circumstances in which, if the life or soul remains in
the man, it stands a greater chance of sustaining injury than if it
were stowed away in some safe and secret place. Accordingly, in such
circumstances, primitive man takes his soul out of his body and
deposits it for security in some snug spot, intending to replace it
in his body when the danger is past. Or if he should discover some
place of absolute security, he may be content to leave his soul
there permanently. The advantage of this is that, so long as the
soul remains unharmed in the place where he has deposited it, the
man himself is immortal; nothing can kill his body, since his life
is not in it.

Evidence of this primitive belief is furnished by a class of
folk-tales of which the Norse story of "The giant who had no heart
in his body" is perhaps the best-known example. Stories of this kind
are widely diffused over the world, and from their number and the
variety of incident and of details in which the leading idea is
embodied, we may infer that the conception of an external soul is
one which has had a powerful hold on the minds of men at an early
stage of history. For folk-tales are a faithful reflection of the
world as it appeared to the primitive mind; and we may be sure that
any idea which commonly occurs in them, however absurd it may seem
to us, must once have been an ordinary article of belief. This
assurance, so far as it concerns the supposed power of disengaging
the soul from the body for a longer or shorter time, is amply
corroborated by a comparison of the folk-tales in question with the
actual beliefs and practices of savages. To this we shall return
after some specimens of the tales have been given. The specimens
will be selected with a view of illustrating both the characteristic
features and the wide diffusion of this class of tales.

In the first place, the story of the external soul is told, in
various forms, by all Aryan peoples from Hindoostan to the Hebrides.
A very common form of it is this: A warlock, giant, or other
fairyland being is invulnerable and immortal because he keeps his
soul hidden far away in some secret place; but a fair princess, whom
he holds enthralled in his enchanted castle, wiles his secret from
him and reveals it to the hero, who seeks out the warlock's soul,
heart, life, or death (as it is variously called), and by destroying
it, simultaneously kills the warlock. Thus a Hindoo story tells how
a magician called Punchkin held a queen captive for twelve years,
and would fain marry her, but she would not have him. At last the
queen's son came to rescue her, and the two plotted together to kill
Punchkin. So the queen spoke the magician fair, and pretended that
she had at last made up her mind to marry him. "And do tell me," she
said, "are you quite immortal? Can death never touch you? And are
you too great an enchanter ever to feel human suffering?" "It is
true," he said, "that I am not as others. Far, far away, hundreds of
thousands of miles from this, there lies a desolate country covered
with thick jungle. In the midst of the jungle grows a circle of palm
trees, and in the centre of the circle stand six chattees full of
water, piled one above another: below the sixth chattee is a small
cage, which contains a little green parrot;--on the life of the
parrot depends my life;--and if the parrot is killed I must die. It
is, however," he added, "impossible that the parrot should sustain
any injury, both on account of the inaccessibility of the country,
and because, by my appointment, many thousand genii surround the
palm trees, and kill all who approach the place." But the queen's
young son overcame all difficulties, and got possession of the
parrot. He brought it to the door of the magician's palace, and
began playing with it. Punchkin, the magician, saw him, and, coming
out, tried to persuade the boy to give him the parrot. "Give me my
parrot!" cried Punchkin. Then the boy took hold of the parrot and
tore off one of his wings; and as he did so the magician's right arm
fell off. Punchkin then stretched out his left arm, crying, "Give me
my parrot!" The prince pulled off the parrot's second wing, and the
magician's left arm tumbled off. "Give me my parrot!" cried he, and
fell on his knees. The prince pulled off the parrot's right leg, the
magician's right leg fell off; the prince pulled off the parrot's
left leg, down fell the magician's left. Nothing remained of him
except the trunk and the head; but still he rolled his eyes, and
cried, "Give me my parrot!" "Take your parrot, then," cried the boy;
and with that he wrung the bird's neck, and threw it at the
magician; and, as he did so, Punchkin's head twisted round, and,
with a fearful groan, he died! In another Hindoo tale an ogre is
asked by his daughter, "Papa, where do you keep your soul?" "Sixteen
miles away from this place," he said, "is a tree. Round the tree are
tigers, and bears, and scorpions, and snakes; on the top of the tree
is a very great fat snake; on his head is a little cage; in the cage
is a bird; and my soul is in that bird." The end of the ogre is like
that of the magician in the previous tale. As the bird's wings and
legs are torn off, the ogre's arms and legs drop off; and when its
neck is wrung he falls down dead. In a Bengalee story it is said
that all the ogres dwell in Ceylon, and that all their lives are in
a single lemon. A boy cuts the lemon in pieces, and all the ogres
die.

In a Siamese or Cambodian story, probably derived from India, we are
told that Thossakan or Ravana, the King of Ceylon, was able by magic
art to take his soul out of his body and leave it in a box at home,
while he went to the wars. Thus he was invulnerable in battle. When
he was about to give battle to Rama, he deposited his soul with a
hermit called Fire-eye, who was to keep it safe for him. So in the
fight Rama was astounded to see that his arrows struck the king
without wounding him. But one of Rama's allies, knowing the secret
of the king's invulnerability, transformed himself by magic into the
likeness of the king, and going to the hermit asked back his soul.
On receiving it he soared up into the air and flew to Rama,
brandishing the box and squeezing it so hard that all the breath
left the King of Ceylon's body, and he died. In a Bengalee story a
prince going into a far country planted with his own hands a tree in
the courtyard of his father's palace, and said to his parents, "This
tree is my life. When you see the tree green and fresh, then know
that it is well with me; when you see the tree fade in some parts,
then know that I am in an ill case; and when you see the whole tree
fade, then know that I am dead and gone." In another Indian tale a
prince, setting forth on his travels, left behind him a barley
plant, with instructions that it should be carefully tended and
watched; for if it flourished, he would be alive and well, but if it
drooped, then some mischance was about to happen to him. And so it
fell out. For the prince was beheaded, and as his head rolled off,
the barley plant snapped in two and the ear of barley fell to the
ground.

In Greek tales, ancient and modern, the idea of an external soul is
not uncommon. When Meleager was seven days old, the Fates appeared
to his mother and told her that Meleager would die when the brand
which was blazing on the hearth had burnt down. So his mother
snatched the brand from the fire and kept it in a box. But in
after-years, being enraged at her son for slaying her brothers, she
burnt the brand in the fire and Meleager expired in agonies, as if
flames were preying on his vitals. Again, Nisus King of Megara had a
purple or golden hair on the middle of his head, and it was fated
that whenever the hair was pulled out the king should die. When
Megara was besieged by the Cretans, the king's daughter Scylla fell
in love with Minos, their king, and pulled out the fatal hair from
her father's head. So he died. In a modern Greek folk-tale a man's
strength lies in three golden hairs on his head. When his mother
pulls them out, he grows weak and timid and is slain by his enemies.
In another modern Greek story the life of an enchanter is bound up
with three doves which are in the belly of a wild boar. When the
first dove is killed, the magician grows sick; when the second is
killed, he grows very sick; and when the third is killed, he dies.
In another Greek story of the same sort an ogre's strength is in
three singing birds which are in a wild boar. The hero kills two of
the birds, and then coming to the ogre's house finds him lying on
the ground in great pain. He shows the third bird to the ogre, who
begs that the hero will either let it fly away or give it to him to
eat. But the hero wrings the bird's neck, and the ogre dies on the
spot.

In a modern Roman version of "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," the
magician tells the princess, whom he holds captive in a floating
rock in mid-ocean, that he will never die. The princess reports this
to the prince her husband, who has come to rescue her. The prince
replies, "It is impossible but that there should be some one thing
or other that is fatal to him; ask him what that one fatal thing
is." So the princess asked the magician, and he told her that in the
wood was a hydra with seven heads; in the middle head of the hydra
was a leveret, in the head of the leveret was a bird, in the bird's
head was a precious stone, and if this stone were put under his
pillow he would die. The prince procured the stone, and the princess
laid it under the magician's pillow. No sooner did the enchanter lay
his head on the pillow than he gave three terrible yells, turned
himself round and round three times, and died.

Stories of the same sort are current among Slavonic peoples. Thus a
Russian story tells how a warlock called Koshchei the Deathless
carried off a princess and kept her prisoner in his golden castle.
However, a prince made up to her one day as she was walking alone
and disconsolate in the castle garden, and cheered by the prospect
of escaping with him she went to the warlock and coaxed him with
false and flattering words, saying, "My dearest friend, tell me, I
pray you, will you never die?" "Certainly not," says he. "Well,"
says she, "and where is your death? is it in your dwelling?" "To be
sure it is," says he, "it is in the broom under the threshold."
Thereupon the princess seized the broom and threw it on the fire,
but although the broom burned, the deathless Koshchei remained
alive; indeed not so much as a hair of him was singed. Balked in her
first attempt, the artful hussy pouted and said, "You do not love me
true, for you have not told me where your death is; yet I am not
angry, but love you with all my heart." With these fawning words she
besought the warlock to tell her truly where his death was. So he
laughed and said, "Why do you wish to know? Well then, out of love I
will tell you where it lies. In a certain field there stand three
green oaks, and under the roots of the largest oak is a worm, and if
ever this worm is found and crushed, that instant I shall die." When
the princess heard these words, she went straight to her lover and
told him all; and he searched till he found the oaks and dug up the
worm and crushed it. Then he hurried to the warlock's castle, but
only to learn from the princess that the warlock was still alive.
Then she fell to wheedling and coaxing Koshchei once more, and this
time, overcome by her wiles, he opened his heart to her and told her
the truth. "My death," said he, "is far from here and hard to find,
on the wide ocean. In that sea is an island, and on the island there
grows a green oak, and beneath the oak is an iron chest, and in the
chest is a small basket, and in the basket is a hare, and in the
hare is a duck, and in the duck is an egg; and he who finds the egg
and breaks it, kills me at the same time." The prince naturally
procured the fateful egg and with it in his hands he confronted the
deathless warlock. The monster would have killed him, but the prince
began to squeeze the egg. At that the warlock shrieked with pain,
and turning to the false princess, who stood by smirking and
smiling, "Was it not out of love for you," said he, "that I told you
where my death was? And is this the return you make to me?" With
that he grabbed at his sword, which hung from a peg on the wall; but
before he could reach it, the prince had crushed the egg, and sure
enough the deathless warlock found his death at the same moment. "In
one of the descriptions of Koshchei's death, he is said to be killed
by a blow on the forehead inflicted by the mysterious egg--that last
link in the magic chain by which his life is darkly bound. In
another version of the same story, but told of a snake, the fatal
blow is struck by a small stone found in the yolk of an egg, which
is inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is inside a stone,
which is on an island."

Amongst peoples of the Teutonic stock stories of the external soul
are not wanting. In a tale told by the Saxons of Transylvania it is
said that a young man shot at a witch again and again. The bullets
went clean through her but did her no harm, and she only laughed and
mocked at him. "Silly earthworm," she cried, "shoot as much as you
like. It does me no harm. For know that my life resides not in me
but far, far away. In a mountain is a pond, on the pond swims a
duck, in the duck is an egg, in the egg burns a light, that light is
my life. If you could put out that light, my life would be at an
end. But that can never, never be." However, the young man got hold
of the egg, smashed it, and put out the light, and with it the
witch's life went out also. In a German story a cannibal called Body
without Soul or Soulless keeps his soul in a box, which stands on a
rock in the middle of the Red Sea. A soldier gets possession of the
box and goes with it to Soulless, who begs the soldier to give him
back his soul. But the soldier opens the box, takes out the soul,
and flings it backward over his head. At the same moment the
cannibal drops dead to the ground.

In another German story and old warlock lives with a damsel all
alone in the midst of a vast and gloomy wood. She fears that being
old he may die and leave her alone in the forest. But he reassures
her. "Dear child," he said, "I cannot die, and I have no heart in my
breast." But she importuned him to tell her where his heart was. So
he said, "Far, far from here in an unknown and lonesome land stands
a great church. The church is well secured with iron doors, and
round about it flows a broad deep moat. In the church flies a bird
and in the bird is my heart. So long as the bird lives, I live. It
cannot die of itself, and no one can catch it; therefore I cannot
die, and you need have no anxiety." However the young man, whose
bride the damsel was to have been before the warlock spirited her
away, contrived to reach the church and catch the bird. He brought
it to the damsel, who stowed him and it away under the warlock's
bed. Soon the old warlock came home. He was ailing, and said so. The
girl wept and said, "Alas, daddy is dying; he has a heart in his
breast after all." "Child," replied the warlock, "hold your tongue.
I _can't_ die. It will soon pass over." At that the young man under
the bed gave the bird a gentle squeeze; and as he did so, the old
warlock felt very unwell and sat down. Then the young man gripped
the bird tighter, and the warlock fell senseless from his chair.
"Now squeeze him dead," cried the damsel. Her lover obeyed, and when
the bird was dead, the old warlock also lay dead on the floor.

In the Norse tale of "the giant who had no heart in his body," the
giant tells the captive princess, "Far, far away in a lake lies an
island, on that island stands a church, in that church is a well, in
that well swims a duck, in that duck there is an egg, and in that
egg there lies my heart." The hero of the tale, with the help of
some animals to whom he had been kind, obtains the egg and squeezes
it, at which the giant screams piteously and begs for his life. But
the hero breaks the egg in pieces and the giant at once bursts. In
another Norse story a hill-ogre tells the captive princess that she
will never be able to return home unless she finds the grain of sand
which lies under the ninth tongue of the ninth head of a certain
dragon; but if that grain of sand were to come over the rock in
which the ogres live, they would all burst "and the rock itself
would become a gilded palace, and the lake green meadows." The hero
finds the grain of sand and takes it to the top of the high rock in
which the ogres live. So all the ogres burst and the rest falls out
as one of the ogres had foretold.

In a Celtic tale, recorded in the West Highlands of Scotland, a
giant is questioned by a captive queen as to where he keeps his
soul. At last, after deceiving her several times, he confides to her
the fatal secret: "There is a great flagstone under the threshold.
There is a wether under the flag. There is a duck in the wether's
belly, and an egg in the belly of the duck, and it is in the egg
that my soul is." On the morrow when the giant was gone, the queen
contrived to get possession of the egg and crushed it in her hands,
and at that very moment the giant, who was coming home in the dusk,
fell down dead. In another Celtic tale, a sea beast has carried off
a king's daughter, and an old smith declares that there is no way of
killing the beast but one. "In the island that is in the midst of
the loch is Eillid Chaisfhion--the white-footed hind, of the
slenderest legs, and the swiftest step, and though she should be
caught, there would spring a hoodie out of her, and though the
hoodie should be caught, there would spring a trout out of her, but
there is an egg in the mouth of the trout, and the soul of the beast
is in the egg, and if the egg breaks, the beast is dead." As usual
the egg is broken and the beast dies.

In an Irish story we read how a giant kept a beautiful damsel a
prisoner in his castle on the top of a hill, which was white with
the bones of the champions who had tried in vain to rescue the fair
captive. At last the hero, after hewing and slashing at the giant
all to no purpose, discovered that the only way to kill him was to
rub a mole on the giant's right breast with a certain egg, which was
in a duck, which was in a chest, which lay locked and bound at the
bottom of the sea. With the help of some obliging animals, the hero
made himself master of the precious egg and slew the giant by merely
striking it against the mole on his right breast. Similarly in a
Breton story there figures a giant whom neither fire nor water nor
steel can harm. He tells his seventh wife, whom he has just married
after murdering all her predecessors, "I am immortal, and no one can
hurt me unless he crushes on my breast an egg, which is in a pigeon,
which is in the belly of a hare; this hare is in the belly of a
wolf, and this wolf is in the belly of my brother, who dwells a
thousand leagues from here. So I am quite easy on that score." A
soldier contrived to obtain the egg and crush it on the breast of
the giant, who immediately expired. In another Breton tale the life
of a giant resides in an old box-tree which grows in his castle
garden; and to kill him it is necessary to sever the tap-root of the
tree at a single blow of an axe without injuring any of the lesser
roots. This task the hero, as usual, successfully accomplishes, and
at the same moment the giant drops dead.

The notion of an external soul has now been traced in folk-tales
told by Aryan peoples from India to Ireland. We have still to show
that the same idea occurs commonly in the popular stories of peoples
who do not belong to the Aryan stock. In the ancient Egyptian tale
of "The Two Brothers," which was written down in the reign of
Rameses II., about 1300 B.C., we read how one of the brothers
enchanted his heart and placed it in the flower of an acacia tree,
and how, when the flower was cut at the instigation of his wife, he
immediately fell down dead, but revived when his brother found the
lost heart in the berry of the acacia and threw it into a cup of
fresh water.

In the story of Seyf el-Mulook in the _Arabian Nights_ the jinnee
tells the captive daughter of the King of India, "When I was born,
the astrologers declared that the destruction of my soul would be
effected by the hand of one of the sons of the human kings. I
therefore took my soul, and put it into the crop of a sparrow, and I
imprisoned the sparrow in a little box, and put this into another
small box, and this I put within seven other small boxes, and I put
these within seven chests, and the chests I put into a coffer of
marble within the verge of this circumambient ocean; for this part
is remote from the countries of mankind, and none of mankind can
gain access to it." But Seyf el-Mulook got possession of the sparrow
and strangled it, and the jinnee fell upon the ground a heap of
black ashes. In a Kabyle story an ogre declares that his fate is far
away in an egg, which is in a pigeon, which is in a camel, which is
in the sea. The hero procures the egg and crushes it between his
hands, and the ogre dies. In a Magyar folk-tale, an old witch
detains a young prince called Ambrose in the bowels of the earth. At
last she confided to him that she kept a wild boar in a silken
meadow, and if it were killed, they would find a hare inside, and
inside the hare a pigeon, and inside the pigeon a small box, and
inside the box one black and one shining beetle: the shining beetle
held her life, and the black one held her power; if these two
beetles died, then her life would come to an end also. When the old
hag went out, Ambrose killed the wild boar, and took out the hare;
from the hare he took the pigeon, from the pigeon the box, and from
the box the two beetles; he killed the black beetle, but kept the
shining one alive. So the witch's power left her immediately, and
when she came home, she had to take to her bed. Having learned from
her how to escape from his prison to the upper air, Ambrose killed
the shining beetle, and the old hag's spirit left her at once. In a
Kalmuck tale we read how a certain khan challenged a wise man to
show his skill by stealing a precious stone on which the khan's life
depended. The sage contrived to purloin the talisman while the khan
and his guards slept; but not content with this he gave a further
proof of his dexterity by bonneting the slumbering potentate with a
bladder. This was too much for the khan. Next morning he informed
the sage that he could overlook everything else, but that the
indignity of being bonneted with a bladder was more than he could
bear; and he ordered his facetious friend to instant execution.
Pained at this exhibition of royal ingratitude, the sage dashed to
the ground the talisman which he still held in his hand; and at the
same instant blood flowed from the nostrils of the khan, and he gave
up the ghost.

In a Tartar poem two heroes named Ak Molot and Bulat engage in
mortal combat. Ak Molot pierces his foe through and through with an
arrow, grapples with him, and dashes him to the ground, but all in
vain, Bulat could not die. At last when the combat has lasted three
years, a friend of Ak Molot sees a golden casket hanging by a white
thread from the sky, and bethinks him that perhaps this casket
contains Bulat's soul. So he shot through the white thread with an
arrow, and down fell the casket. He opened it, and in the casket sat
ten white birds, and one of the birds was Bulat's soul. Bulat wept
when he saw that his soul was found in the casket. But one after the
other the birds were killed, and then Ak Molot easily slew his foe.
In another Tartar poem, two brothers going to fight two other
brothers take out their souls and hide them in the form of a white
herb with six stalks in a deep pit. But one of their foes sees them
doing so and digs up their souls, which he puts into a golden ram's
horn, and then sticks the ram's horn in his quiver. The two warriors
whose souls have thus been stolen know that they have no chance of
victory, and accordingly make peace with their enemies. In another
Tartar poem a terrible demon sets all the gods and heroes at
defiance. At last a valiant youth fights the demon, binds him hand
and foot, and slices him with his sword. But still the demon is not
slain. So the youth asked him, "Tell me, where is your soul hidden?
For if your soul had been hidden in your body, you must have been
dead long ago." The demon replied, "On the saddle of my horse is a
bag. In the bag is a serpent with twelve heads. In the serpent is my
soul. When you have killed the serpent, you have killed me also." So
the youth took the saddle-bag from the horse and killed the
twelve-headed serpent, whereupon the demon expired. In another
Tartar poem a hero called Kök Chan deposits with a maiden a golden
ring, in which is half his strength. Afterwards when Kök Chan is
wrestling long with a hero and cannot kill him, a woman drops into
his mouth the ring which contains half his strength. Thus inspired
with fresh force he slays his enemy.

In a Mongolian story the hero Joro gets the better of his enemy the
lama Tschoridong in the following way. The lama, who is an
enchanter, sends out his soul in the form of a wasp to sting Joro's
eyes. But Joro catches the wasp in his hand, and by alternately
shutting and opening his hand he causes the lama alternately to lose
and recover consciousness. In a Tartar poem two youths cut open the
body of an old witch and tear out her bowels, but all to no purpose,
she still lives. On being asked where her soul is, she answers that
it is in the middle of her shoe-sole in the form of a seven-headed
speckled snake. So one of the youths slices her shoe-sole with his
sword, takes out the speckled snake, and cuts off its seven heads.
Then the witch dies. Another Tartar poem describes how the hero
Kartaga grappled with the Swan-woman. Long they wrestled. Moons
waxed and waned and still they wrestled; years came and went, and
still the struggle went on. But the piebald horse and the black
horse knew that the Swan-woman's soul was not in her. Under the
black earth flow nine seas; where the seas meet and form one, the
sea comes to the surface of the earth. At the mouth of the nine seas
rises a rock of copper; it rises to the surface of the ground, it
rises up between heaven and earth, this rock of copper. At the foot
of the copper rock is a black chest, in the black chest is a golden
casket, and in the golden casket is the soul of the Swan-woman.
Seven little birds are the soul of the Swan-woman; if the birds are
killed the Swan-woman will die straightway. So the horses ran to the
foot of the copper rock, opened the black chest, and brought back
the golden casket. Then the piebald horse turned himself into a
bald-headed man, opened the golden casket, and cut off the heads of
the seven birds. So the Swan-woman died. In another Tartar poem the
hero, pursuing his sister who has driven away his cattle, is warned
to desist from the pursuit because his sister has carried away his
soul in a golden sword and a golden arrow, and if he pursues her she
will kill him by throwing the golden sword or shooting the golden
arrow at him.

A Malay poem relates how once upon a time in the city of Indrapoora
there was a certain merchant who was rich and prosperous, but he had
no children. One day as he walked with his wife by the river they
found a baby girl, fair as an angel. So they adopted the child and
called her Bidasari. The merchant caused a golden fish to be made,
and into this fish he transferred the soul of his adopted daughter.
Then he put the golden fish in a golden box full of water, and hid
it in a pond in the midst of his garden. In time the girl grew to be
a lovely woman. Now the King of Indrapoora had a fair young queen,
who lived in fear that the king might take to himself a second wife.
So, hearing of the charms of Bidasari, the queen resolved to put her
out of the way. She lured the girl to the palace and tortured her
cruelly; but Bidasari could not die, because her soul was not in
her. At last she could stand the torture no longer and said to the
queen, "If you wish me to die, you must bring the box which is in
the pond in my father's garden." So the box was brought and opened,
and there was the golden fish in the water. The girl said, "My soul
is in that fish. In the morning you must take the fish out of the
water, and in the evening you must put it back into the water. Do
not let the fish lie about, but bind it round your neck. If you do
this, I shall soon die." So the queen took the fish out of the box
and fastened it round her neck; and no sooner had she done so than
Bidasari fell into a swoon. But in the evening, when the fish was
put back into the water, Bidasari came to herself again. Seeing that
she thus had the girl in her power, the queen sent her home to her
adopted parents. To save her from further persecution her parents
resolved to remove their daughter from the city. So in a lonely and
desolate spot they built a house and brought Bidasari thither. There
she dwelt alone, undergoing vicissitudes that corresponded with the
vicissitudes of the golden fish in which was her soul. All day long,
while the fish was out of the water, she remained unconscious; but
in the evening, when the fish was put into the water, she revived.
One day the king was out hunting, and coming to the house where
Bidasari lay unconscious, was smitten with her beauty. He tried to
waken her, but in vain. Next day, towards evening, he repeated his
visit, but still found her unconscious. However, when darkness fell,
she came to herself and told the king the secret of her life. So the
king returned to the palace, took the fish from the queen, and put
it in water. Immediately Bidasari revived, and the king took her to
wife.

Another story of an external soul comes from Nias, an island to the
west of Sumatra. Once on a time a chief was captured by his enemies,
who tried to put him to death but failed. Water would not drown him
nor fire burn him nor steel pierce him. At last his wife revealed
the secret. On his head he had a hair as hard as a copper wire; and
with this wire his life was bound up. So the hair was plucked out,
and with it his spirit fled.

A West African story from Southern Nigeria relates how a king kept
his soul in a little brown bird, which perched on a tall tree beside
the gate of the palace. The king's life was so bound up with that of
the bird that whoever should kill the bird would simultaneously kill
the king and succeed to the kingdom. The secret was betrayed by the
queen to her lover, who shot the bird with an arrow and thereby slew
the king and ascended the vacant throne. A tale told by the Ba-Ronga
of South Africa sets forth how the lives of a whole family were
contained in one cat. When a girl of the family, named Titishan,
married a husband, she begged her parents to let her take the
precious cat with her to her new home. But they refused, saying,
"You know that our life is attached to it"; and they offered to give
her an antelope or even an elephant instead of it. But nothing would
satisfy her but the cat. So at last she carried it off with her and
shut it up in a place where nobody saw it; even her husband knew
nothing about it. One day, when she went to work in the fields, the
cat escaped from its place of concealment, entered the hut, put on
the warlike trappings of the husband, and danced and sang. Some
children, attracted by the noise, discovered the cat at its antics,
and when they expressed their astonishment, the animal only capered
the more and insulted them besides. So they went to the owner and
said, "There is somebody dancing in your house, and he insulted us."
"Hold your tongues," said he, "I'll soon put a stop to your lies."
So he went and hid behind the door and peeped in, and there sure
enough was the cat prancing about and singing. He fired at it, and
the animal dropped down dead. At the same moment his wife fell to
the ground in the field where she was at work; said she, "I have
been killed at home." But she had strength enough left to ask her
husband to go with her to her parents' village, taking with him the
dead cat wrapt up in a mat. All her relatives assembled, and
bitterly they reproached her for having insisted on taking the
animal with her to her husband's village. As soon as the mat was
unrolled and they saw the dead cat, they all fell down lifeless one
after the other. So the Clan of the Cat was destroyed; and the
bereaved husband closed the gate of the village with a branch, and
returned home, and told his friends how in killing the cat he had
killed the whole clan, because their lives depended on the life of
the cat.

Ideas of the same sort meet us in stories told by the North American
Indians. Thus the Navajoes tell of a certain mythical being called
"the Maiden that becomes a Bear," who learned the art of turning
herself into a bear from the prairie wolf. She was a great warrior
and quite invulnerable; for when she went to war she took out her
vital organs and hid them, so that no one could kill her; and when
the battle was over she put the organs back in their places again.
The Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia tell of an ogress, who
could not be killed because her life was in a hemlock branch. A
brave boy met her in the woods, smashed her head with a stone,
scattered her brains, broke her bones, and threw them into the
water. Then, thinking he had disposed of the ogress, he went into
her house. There he saw a woman rooted to the floor, who warned him,
saying, "Now do not stay long. I know that you have tried to kill
the ogress. It is the fourth time that somebody has tried to kill
her. She never dies; she has nearly come to life. There in that
covered hemlock branch is her life. Go there, and as soon as you see
her enter, shoot her life. Then she will be dead." Hardly had she
finished speaking when sure enough in came the ogress, singing as
she walked. But the boy shot at her life, and she fell dead to the
floor.



LXVII. The External Soul in Folk-Custom



1. The External Soul in Inanimate Things

THUS the idea that the soul may be deposited for a longer or shorter
time in some place of security outside the body, or at all events in
the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It remains to
show that the idea is not a mere figment devised to adorn a tale,
but is a real article of primitive faith, which has given rise to a
corresponding set of customs.

We have seen that in the tales the hero, as a preparation for
battle, sometimes removes his soul from his body, in order that his
body may be invulnerable and immortal in the combat. With a like
intention the savage removes his soul from his body on various
occasions of real or imaginary peril. Thus among the people of
Minahassa in Celebes, when a family moves into a new house, a priest
collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and afterwards
restores them to their owners, because the moment of entering a new
house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger. In
Southern Celebes, when a woman is brought to bed, the messenger who
fetches the doctor or the midwife always carries with him something
made of iron, such as a chopping-knife, which he delivers to the
doctor. The doctor must keep the thing in his house till the
confinement is over, when he gives it back, receiving a fixed sum of
money for doing so. The chopping-knife, or whatever it is,
represents the woman's soul, which at this critical time is believed
to be safer out of her body than in it. Hence the doctor must take
great care of the object; for were it lost, the woman's soul would
assuredly, they think, be lost with it.

Among the Dyaks of Pinoeh, a district of South-eastern Borneo, when
a child is born, a medicine-man is sent for, who conjures the soul
of the infant into half a coco-nut, which he thereupon covers with a
cloth and places on a square platter or charger suspended by cords
from the roof. This ceremony he repeats at every new moon for a
year. The intention of the ceremony is not explained by the writer
who describes it, but we may conjecture that it is to place the soul
of the child in a safer place than its own frail little body. This
conjecture is confirmed by the reason assigned for a similar custom
observed elsewhere in the Indian Archipelago. In the Kei Islands,
when there is a newly-born child in a house, an empty coco-nut,
split and spliced together again, may sometimes be seen hanging
beside a rough wooden image of an ancestor. The soul of the infant
is believed to be temporarily deposited in the coco-nut in order
that it may be safe from the attacks of evil spirits; but when the
child grows bigger and stronger, the soul will take up its permanent
abode in its own body. Similarly among the Esquimaux of Alaska, when
a child is sick, the medicine-man will sometimes extract its soul
from its body and place it for safe-keeping in an amulet, which for
further security he deposits in his own medicine-bag. It seems
probable that many amulets have been similarly regarded as
soul-boxes, that is, as safes in which the souls of the owners are
kept for greater security. An old Mang'anje woman in the West Shire
district of British Central Africa used to wear round her neck an
ivory ornament, hollow, and about three inches long, which she
called her life or soul. Naturally, she would not part with it; a
planter tried to buy it of her, but in vain. When Mr. James
Macdonald was one day sitting in the house of a Hlubi chief,
awaiting the appearance of that great man, who was busy decorating
his person, a native pointed to a pair of magnificent ox-horns, and
said, "Ntame has his soul in these horns." The horns were those of
an animal which had been sacrificed, and they were held sacred. A
magician had fastened them to the roof to protect the house and its
inmates from the thunder-bolt. "The idea," adds Mr. Macdonald, "is
in no way foreign to South African thought. A man's soul there may
dwell in the roof of his house, in a tree, by a spring of water, or
on some mountain scaur." Among the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula
in New Britain there is a secret society which goes by the name of
Ingniet or Ingiet. On his entrance into it every man receives a
stone in the shape either of a human being or of an animal, and
henceforth his soul is believed to be knit up in a manner with the
stone. If it breaks, it is an evil omen for him; they say that the
thunder has struck the stone and that he who owns it will soon die.
If nevertheless the man survives the breaking of his soul-stone,
they say that it was not a proper soul-stone and he gets a new one
instead. The emperor Romanus Lecapenus was once informed by an
astronomer that the life of Simeon, prince of Bulgaria, was bound up
with a certain column in Constantinople, so that if the capital of
the column were removed, Simeon would immediately die. The emperor
took the hint and removed the capital, and at the same hour, as the
emperor learned by enquiry, Simeon died of heart disease in
Bulgaria.

Again, we have seen that in folk-tales a man's soul or strength is
sometimes represented as bound up with his hair, and that when his
hair is cut off he dies or grows weak. So the natives of Amboyna
used to think that their strength was in their hair and would desert
them if it were shorn. A criminal under torture in a Dutch Court of
that island persisted in denying his guilt till his hair was cut
off, when he immediately confessed. One man, who was tried for
murder, endured without flinching the utmost ingenuity of his
torturers till he saw the surgeon standing with a pair of shears. On
asking what this was for, and being told that it was to cut his
hair, he begged they would not do it, and made a clean breast. In
subsequent cases, when torture failed to wring a confession from a
prisoner, the Dutch authorities made a practice of cutting off his
hair.

Here in Europe it used to be thought that the maleficent powers of
witches and wizards resided in their hair, and that nothing could
make any impression on the miscreants so long as they kept their
hair on. Hence in France it was customary to shave the whole bodies
of persons charged with sorcery before handing them over to the
torturer. Millaeus witnessed the torture of some persons at
Toulouse, from whom no confession could be wrung until they were
stripped and completely shaven, when they readily acknowledged the
truth of the charge. A woman also, who apparently led a pious life,
was put to the torture on suspicion of witchcraft, and bore her
agonies with incredible constancy, until complete depilation drove
her to admit her guilt. The noted inquisitor Sprenger contented
himself with shaving the head of the suspected witch or wizard; but
his more thoroughgoing colleague Cumanus shaved the whole bodies of
forty-seven women before committing them all to the flames. He had
high authority for this rigorous scrutiny, since Satan himself, in a
sermon preached from the pulpit of North Berwick church, comforted
his many servants by assuring them that no harm could befall them
"sa lang as their hair wes on, and sould newir latt ane teir fall
fra thair ene." Similarly in Bastar, a province of India, "if a man
is adjudged guilty of witchcraft, he is beaten by the crowd, his
hair is shaved, the hair being supposed to constitute his power of
mischief, his front teeth are knocked out, in order, it is said, to
prevent him from muttering incantations. . . . Women suspected of
sorcery have to undergo the same ordeal; if found guilty, the same
punishment is awarded, and after being shaved, their hair is
attached to a tree in some public place." So among the Bhils of
India, when a woman was convicted of witchcraft and had been
subjected to various forms of persuasion, such as hanging head
downwards from a tree and having pepper put into her eyes, a lock of
hair was cut from her head and buried in the ground, "that the last
link between her and her former powers of mischief might be broken."
In like manner among the Aztecs of Mexico, when wizards and witches
"had done their evil deeds, and the time came to put an end to their
detestable life, some one laid hold of them and cropped the hair on
the crown of their heads, which took from them all their power of
sorcery and enchantment, and then it was that by death they put an
end to their odious existence."



2. The External Soul in Plants

FURTHER it has been shown that in folk-tales the life of a person is
sometimes so bound up with the life of a plant that the withering of
the plant will immediately follow or be followed by the death of the
person. Among the M'Bengas in Western Africa, about the Gaboon, when
two children are born on the same day, the people plant two trees of
the same kind and dance round them. The life of each of the children
is believed to be bound up with the life of one of the trees; and if
the tree dies or is thrown down, they are sure that the child will
soon die. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is believed
to be sympathetically bound up with that of a tree. The chief of Old
Town in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of
water. When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of
the grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the
perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of
evil.

Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born babe
sympathetically with that of a tree by driving a pebble into the
bark of the tree. This is supposed to give them complete mastery
over the child's life; if the tree is cut down, the child will die.
After a birth the Maoris used to bury the navel-string in a sacred
place and plant a young sapling over it. As the tree grew, it was a
_tohu oranga_ or sign of life for the child; if it flourished, the
child would prosper; if it withered and died, the parents augured
the worst for the little one. In some parts of Fiji the navel-string
of a male infant is planted together with a coco-nut or the slip of
a breadfruit-tree, and the child's life is supposed to be intimately
connected with that of the tree. Amongst the Dyaks of Landak and
Tajan, districts of Dutch Borneo, it is customary to plant a
fruit-tree for a baby, and henceforth in the popular belief the fate
of the child is bound up with that of the tree. If the tree shoots
up rapidly, it will go well with the child; but if the tree is
dwarfed or shrivelled, nothing but misfortune can be expected for
its human counterpart.

It is said that there are still families in Russia, Germany,
England, France, and Italy who are accustomed to plant a tree at the
birth of a child. The tree, it is hoped, will grow with the child,
and it is tended with special care. The custom is still pretty
general in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland; an apple-tree is
planted for a boy and a pear-tree for a girl, and the people think
that the child will flourish or dwindle with the tree. In
Mecklenburg the afterbirth is thrown out at the foot of a young
tree, and the child is then believed to grow with the tree. Near the
Castle of Dalhousie, not far from Edinburgh, there grows an
oak-tree, called the Edgewell Tree, which is popularly believed to
be linked to the fate of the family by a mysterious tie; for they
say that when one of the family dies, or is about to die, a branch
falls from the Edgewell Tree. Thus, on seeing a great bough drop
from the tree on a quiet, still day in July 1874, an old forester
exclaimed, "The laird's deid noo!" and soon after news came that Fox
Maule, eleventh Earl of Dalhousie, was dead.

In England children are sometimes passed through a cleft ash-tree as
a cure for rupture or rickets, and thenceforward a sympathetic
connexion is supposed to exist between them and the tree. An
ash-tree which had been used for this purpose grew at the edge of
Shirley Heath, on the road from Hockly House to Birmingham. "Thomas
Chillingworth, son of the owner of an adjoining farm, now about
thirty-four, was, when an infant of a year old, passed through a
similar tree, now perfectly sound, which he preserves with so much
care that he will not suffer a single branch to be touched, for it
is believed the life of the patient depends on the life of the tree,
and the moment that is cut down, be the patient ever so distant, the
rupture returns, and a mortification ensues, and terminates in
death, as was the case in a man driving a waggon on the very road in
question." "It is not uncommon, however," adds the writer, "for
persons to survive for a time the felling of the tree." The ordinary
mode of effecting the cure is to split a young ash-sapling
longitudinally for a few feet and pass the child, naked, either
three times or three times three through the fissure at sunrise. In
the West of England it is said that the passage should be "against
the sun." As soon as the ceremony has been performed, the tree is
bound tightly up and the fissure plastered over with mud or clay.
The belief is that just as the cleft in the tree closes up, so the
rupture in the child's body will be healed; but that if the rift in
the tree remains open, the rupture in the child will remain too, and
if the tree were to die, the death of the child would surely follow.

A similar cure for various diseases, but especially for rupture and
rickets, has been commonly practised in other parts of Europe, as
Germany, France, Denmark, and Sweden; but in these countries the
tree employed for the purpose is usually not an ash but an oak;
sometimes a willow-tree is allowed or even prescribed instead. In
Mecklenburg, as in England, the sympathetic relation thus
established between the tree and the child is believed to be so
close that if the tree is cut down the child will die.



3. The External Soul in Animals

BUT in practice, as in folk-tales, it is not merely with inanimate
objects and plants that a person is occasionally believed to be
united by a bond of physical sympathy. The same bond, it is
supposed, may exist between a man and an animal, so that the welfare
of the one depends on the welfare of the other, and when the animal
dies the man dies also. The analogy between the custom and the tales
is all the closer because in both of them the power of thus removing
the soul from the body and stowing it away in an animal is often a
special privilege of wizards and witches. Thus the Yakuts of Siberia
believe that every shaman or wizard keeps his soul, or one of his
souls, incarnate in an animal which is carefully concealed from all
the world. "Nobody can find my external soul," said one famous
wizard, "it lies hidden far away in the stony mountains of
Edzhigansk." Only once a year, when the last snows melt and the
earth turns black, do these external souls of wizards appear in the
shape of animals among the dwellings of men. They wander everywhere,
yet none but wizards can see them. The strong ones sweep roaring and
noisily along, the weak steal about quietly and furtively. Often
they fight, and then the wizard whose external soul is beaten, falls
ill or dies. The weakest and most cowardly wizards are they whose
souls are incarnate in the shape of dogs, for the dog gives his
human double no peace, but gnaws his heart and tears his body. The
most powerful wizards are they whose external souls have the shape
of stallions, elks, black bears, eagles, or boars. Again, the
Samoyeds of the Turukhinsk region hold that every shaman has a
familiar spirit in the shape of a boar, which he leads about by a
magic belt. On the death of the boar the shaman himself dies; and
stories are told of battles between wizards, who send their spirits
to fight before they encounter each other in person. The Malays
believe that "the soul of a person may pass into another person or
into an animal, or rather that such a mysterious relation can arise
between the two that the fate of the one is wholly dependent on that
of the other."

Among the Melanesians of Mota, one of the New Hebrides islands, the
conception of an external soul is carried out in the practice of
daily life. In the Mota language the word _tamaniu_ signifies
"something animate or inanimate which a man has come to believe to
have an existence intimately connected with his own. . . . It was
not every one in Mota who had his _tamaniu;_ only some men fancied
that they had this relation to a lizard, a snake, or it might be a
stone; sometimes the thing was sought for and found by drinking the
infusion of certain leaves and heaping together the dregs; then
whatever living thing was first seen in or upon the heap was the
_tamaniu._ It was watched but not fed or worshipped; the natives
believed that it came at call, and that the life of the man was
bound up with the life of his _tamaniu,_ if a living thing, or with
its safety; should it die, or if not living get broken or be lost,
the man would die. Hence in case of sickness they would send to see
if the _tamaniu_ was safe and well."

The theory of an external soul deposited in an animal appears to be
very prevalent in West Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the
Cameroons, and the Gaboon. Among the Fans of the Gaboon every wizard
is believed at initiation to unite his life with that of some
particular wild animal by a rite of blood-brotherhood; he draws
blood from the ear of the animal and from his own arm, and
inoculates the animal with his own blood, and himself with the blood
of the beast. Henceforth such an intimate union is established
between the two that the death of the one entails the death of the
other. The alliance is thought to bring to the wizard or sorcerer a
great accession of power, which he can turn to his advantage in
various ways. In the first place, like the warlock in the fairy
tales who has deposited his life outside of himself in some safe
place, the Fan wizard now deems himself invulnerable. Moreover, the
animal with which he has exchanged blood has become his familiar,
and will obey any orders he may choose to give it; so he makes use
of it to injure and kill his enemies. For that reason the creature
with whom he establishes the relation of blood-brotherhood is never
a tame or domestic animal, but always a ferocious and dangerous wild
beast, such as a leopard, a black serpent, a crocodile, a
hippopotamus, a wild boar, or a vulture. Of all these creatures the
leopard is by far the commonest familiar of Fan wizards, and next to
it comes the black serpent; the vulture is the rarest. Witches as
well as wizards have their familiars; but the animals with which the
lives of women are thus bound up generally differ from those to
which men commit their external souls. A witch never has a panther
for her familiar, but often a venomous species of serpent, sometimes
a horned viper, sometimes a black serpent, sometimes a green one
that lives in banana-trees; or it may be a vulture, an owl, or other
bird of night. In every case the beast or bird with which the witch
or wizard has contracted this mystic alliance is an individual,
never a species; and when the individual animal dies the alliance is
naturally at an end, since the death of the animal is supposed to
entail the death of the man.

Similar beliefs are held by the natives of the Cross River valley
within the provinces of the Cameroons. Groups of people, generally
the inhabitants of a village, have chosen various animals, with
which they believe themselves to stand on a footing of intimate
friendship or relationship. Amongst such animals are hippopotamuses,
elephants, leopards, crocodiles, gorillas, fish, and serpents, all
of them creatures which are either very strong or can easily hide
themselves in the water or a thicket. This power of concealing
themselves is said to be an indispensable condition of the choice of
animal familiars, since the animal friend or helper is expected to
injure his owner's enemy by stealth; for example, if he is a
hippopotamus, he will bob up suddenly out of the water and capsize
the enemy's canoe. Between the animals and their human friends or
kinsfolk such a sympathetic relation is supposed to exist that the
moment the animal dies the man dies also, and similarly the instant
the man perishes so does the beast. From this it follows that the
animal kinsfolk may never be shot at or molested for fear of
injuring or killing the persons whose lives are knit up with the
lives of the brutes. This does not, however, prevent the people of a
village, who have elephants for their animal friends, from hunting
elephants. For they do not respect the whole species but merely
certain individuals of it, which stand in an intimate relation to
certain individual men and women; and they imagine that they can
always distinguish these brother elephants from the common herd of
elephants which are mere elephants and nothing more. The recognition
indeed is said to be mutual. When a hunter, who has an elephant for
his friend, meets a human elephant, as we may call it, the noble
animal lifts up a paw and holds it before his face, as much as to
say, "Don't shoot." Were the hunter so inhuman as to fire on and
wound such an elephant, the person whose life was bound up with the
elephant would fall ill.

The Balong of the Cameroons think that every man has several souls,
of which one is in his body and another in an animal, such as an
elephant, a wild pig, a leopard, and so forth. When a man comes
home, feeling ill, and says, "I shall soon die," and dies
accordingly, the people aver that one of his souls has been killed
in a wild pig or a leopard and that the death of the external soul
has caused the death of the soul in his body. A similar belief in
the external souls of living people is entertained by the Ibos, an
important tribe of the Niger delta. They think that a man's spirit
can quit his body for a time during life and take up its abode in an
animal. A man who wishes to acquire this power procures a certain
drug from a wise man and mixes it with his food. After that his soul
goes out and enters into an animal. If it should happen that the
animal is killed while the man's soul is lodged in it, the man dies;
and if the animal be wounded, the man's body will presently be
covered with boils. This belief instigates to many deeds of
darkness; for a sly rogue will sometimes surreptitiously administer
the magical drug to his enemy in his food, and having thus smuggled
the other's soul into an animal will destroy the creature, and with
it the man whose soul is lodged in it.

The negroes of Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger, believe that
every person has four souls, one of which always lives outside of
his or her body in the form of a wild beast in the forest. This
external soul, or bush soul, as Miss Kingsley calls it, may be
almost any animal, for example, a leopard, a fish, or a tortoise;
but it is never a domestic animal and never a plant. Unless he is
gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a
diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is,
and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of
that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so. A
man and his sons have usually the same sort of animals for their
bush souls, and so with a mother and her daughters. But sometimes
all the children of a family take after the bush soul of their
father; for example, if his external soul is a leopard, all his sons
and daughters will have leopards for their external souls. And on
the other hand, sometimes they all take after their mother; for
instance, if her external soul is a tortoise, all the external souls
of her sons and daughters will be tortoises too. So intimately bound
up is the life of the man with that of the animal which he regards
as his external or bush soul, that the death or injury of the animal
necessarily entails the death or injury of the man. And, conversely,
when the man dies, his bush soul can no longer find a place of rest,
but goes mad and rushes into the fire or charges people and is
knocked on the head, and that is an end of it.

Near Eket in North Calabar there is a sacred lake, the fish of which
are carefully preserved because the people believe that their own
souls are lodged in the fish, and that with every fish killed a
human life would be simultaneously extinguished. In the Calabar
River not very many years ago there used to be a huge old crocodile,
popularly supposed to contain the external soul of a chief who
resided in the flesh at Duke Town. Sporting vice-consuls used from
time to time to hunt the animal, and once an officer contrived to
hit it. Forthwith the chief was laid up with a wound in his leg. He
gave out that a dog had bitten him, but no doubt the wise shook
their heads and refused to be put off with so flimsy a pretext.
Again, among several tribes on the banks of the Niger between Lokoja
and the delta there prevails "a belief in the possibility of a man
possessing an _alter ego_ in the form of some animal such as a
crocodile or a hippopotamus. It is believed that such a person's
life is bound up with that of the animal to such an extent that,
whatever affects the one produces a corresponding impression upon
the other, and that if one dies the other must speedily do so too.
It happened not very long ago that an Englishman shot a hippopotamus
close to a native village; the friends of a woman who died the same
night in the village demanded and eventually obtained five pounds as
compensation for the murder of the woman."

Amongst the Zapotecs of Central America, when a woman was about to
be confined, her relations assembled in the hut, and began to draw
on the floor figures of different animals, rubbing each one out as
soon as it was completed. This went on till the moment of birth, and
the figure that then remained sketched upon the ground was called
the child's _tona_ or second self. "When the child grew old enough,
he procured the animal that represented him and took care of it, as
it was believed that health and existence were bound up with that of
the animal's, in fact that the death of both would occur
simultaneously," or rather that when the animal died the man would
die too. Among the Indians of Guatemala and Honduras the _nagual_ or
_naual_ is "that animate or inanimate object, generally an animal,
which stands in a parallel relation to a particular man, so that the
weal and woe of the man depend on the fate of the _nagual._"
According to an old writer, many Indians of Guatemala "are deluded
by the devil to believe that their life dependeth upon the life of
such and such a beast (which they take unto them as their familiar
spirit), and think that when that beast dieth they must die; when he
is chased, their hearts pant; when he is faint, they are faint; nay,
it happeneth that by the devil's delusion they appear in the shape
of that beast (which commonly by their choice is a buck, or doe, a
lion, or tigre, or dog, or eagle) and in that shape have been shot
at and wounded." The Indians were persuaded that the death of their
_nagual_ would entail their own. Legend affirms that in the first
battles with the Spaniards on the plateau of Quetzaltenango the
_naguals_ of the Indian chiefs fought in the form of serpents. The
_nagual_ of the highest chief was especially conspicuous, because it
had the form of a great bird, resplendent in green plumage. The
Spanish general Pedro de Alvarado killed the bird with his lance,
and at the same moment the Indian chief fell dead to the ground.

In many tribes of South-Eastern Australia each sex used to regard a
particular species of animals in the same way that a Central
American Indian regarded his _nagual,_ but with this difference,
that whereas the Indian apparently knew the individual animal with
which his life was bound up, the Australians only knew that each of
their lives was bound up with some one animal of the species, but
they could not say with which. The result naturally was that every
man spared and protected all the animals of the species with which
the lives of the men were bound up; and every woman spared and
protected all the animals of the species with which the lives of the
women were bound up; because no one knew but that the death of any
animal of the respective species might entail his or her own; just
as the killing of the green bird was immediately followed by the
death of the Indian chief, and the killing of the parrot by the
death of Punchkin in the fairy tale. Thus, for example, the
Wotjobaluk tribe of South-Eastern Australia "held that 'the life of
Ngunungunut (the Bat) is the life of a man, and the life of
Yártatgurk (the Nightjar) is the life of a woman,' and that when
either of these creatures is killed the life of some man or of some
woman is shortened. In such a case every man or every woman in the
camp feared that he or she might be the victim, and from this cause
great fights arose in this tribe. I learn that in these fights, men
on one side and women on the other, it was not at all certain which
would be victorious, for at times the women gave the men a severe
drubbing with their yamsticks, while often women were injured or
killed by spears." The Wotjobaluk said that the bat was the man's
"brother" and that the nightjar was his "wife." The particular
species of animals with which the lives of the sexes were believed
to be respectively bound up varied somewhat from tribe to tribe.
Thus whereas among the Wotjobaluk the bat was the animal of the men,
at Gunbower Creek on the Lower Murray the bat seems to have been the
animal of the women, for the natives would not kill it for the
reason that "if it was killed, one of their lubras [women] would be
sure to die in consequence." But whatever the particular sorts of
creature with which the lives of men and women were believed to be
bound up, the belief itself and the fights to which it gave rise are
known to have prevailed over a large part of South-Eastern
Australia, and probably they extended much farther. The belief was a
very serious one, and so consequently were the fights which sprang
from it. Thus among some tribes of Victoria "the common bat belongs
to the men, who protect it against injury, even to the half-killing
of their wives for its sake. The fern owl, or large goatsucker,
belongs to the women, and, although a bird of evil omen, creating
terror at night by its cry, it is jealously protected by them. If a
man kills one, they are as much enraged as if it was one of their
children, and will strike him with their long poles."

The jealous protection thus afforded by Australian men and women to
bats and owls respectively (for bats and owls seem to be the
creatures usually allotted to the two sexes) is not based upon
purely selfish considerations. For each man believes that not only
his own life but the lives of his father, brothers, sons, and so on
are bound up with the lives of particular bats, and that therefore
in protecting the bat species he is protecting the lives of all his
male relations as well as his own. Similarly, each woman believes
that the lives of her mother, sisters, daughters, and so forth,
equally with her own, are bound up with the lives of particular
owls, and that in guarding the owl species she is guarding the lives
of all her female relations besides her own. Now, when men's lives
are thus supposed to be contained in certain animals, it is obvious
that the animals can hardly be distinguished from the men, or the
men from the animals. If my brother John's life is in a bat, then,
on the one hand, the bat is my brother as well as John; and, on the
other hand, John is in a sense a bat, since his life is in a bat.
Similarly, if my sister Mary's life is in an owl, then the owl is my
sister and Mary is an owl. This is a natural enough conclusion, and
the Australians have not failed to draw it. When the bat is the
man's animal, it is called his brother; and when the owl is the
woman's animal, it is called her sister. And conversely a man
addresses a woman as an owl, and she addresses him as a bat. So with
the other animals allotted to the sexes respectively in other
tribes. For example, among the Kurnai all emu-wrens were "brothers"
of the men, and all the men were emu-wrens; all superb warblers were
"sisters" of the women, and all the women were superb warblers.

But when a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his
brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem.
Accordingly in the tribes of South-Eastern Australia which we have
been considering the bat and the owl, the emu-wren and the superb
warbler, may properly be described as totems of the sexes. But the
assignation of a totem to a sex is comparatively rare, and has
hitherto been discovered nowhere but in Australia. Far more commonly
the totem is appropriated not to a sex, but to a clan, and is
hereditary either in the male or female line. The relation of an
individual to the clan totem does not differ in kind from his
relation to the sex totem; he will not kill it, he speaks of it as
his brother, and he calls himself by its name. Now if the relations
are similar, the explanation which holds good of the one ought
equally to hold good of the other. Therefore, the reason why a clan
revere a particular species of animals or plants (for the clan totem
may be a plant) and call themselves after it, would seem to be a
belief that the life of each individual of the clan is bound up with
some one animal or plant of the species, and that his or her death
would be the consequence of killing that particular animal, or
destroying that particular plant. This explanation of totemism
squares very well with Sir George Grey's definition of a totem or
_kobong_ in Western Australia. He says: "A certain mysterious
connexion exists between a family and its _kobong,_ so that a member
of the family will never kill an animal of the species to which his
_kobong_ belongs, should he find it asleep; indeed he always kills
it reluctantly, and never without affording it a chance to escape.
This arises from the family belief that some one individual of the
species is their nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great
crime, and to be carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a
vegetable for his _kobong_ may not gather it under certain
circumstances, and at a particular period of the year." Here it will
be observed that though each man spares all the animals or plants of
the species, they are not all equally precious to him; far from it,
out of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear
to him; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged
to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this
explanation of the clan totem harmonises with the supposed effect of
killing one of the totem species. "One day one of the blacks killed
a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (crow) [_i.e._ a man
of the Crow clan] named Larry died. He had been ailing for some
days, but the killing of his _wingong_ [totem] hastened his death."
Here the killing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow
clan, exactly as, in the case of the sex-totems, the killing of a
bat causes the death of a Bat-man or the killing of an owl causes
the death of an Owl-woman. Similarly, the killing of his _nagual_
causes the death of a Central American Indian, the killing of his
bush soul causes the death of a Calabar negro, the killing of his
_tamaniu_ causes the death of a Banks Islander, and the killing of
the animal in which his life is stowed away causes the death of the
giant or warlock in the fairy tale.

Thus it appears that the story of "The giant who had no heart in his
body" may perhaps furnish the key to the relation which is supposed
to subsist between a man and his totem. The totem, on this theory,
is simply the receptacle in which a man keeps his life, as Punchkin
kept his life in a parrot, and Bidasari kept her soul in a golden
fish. It is no valid objection to this view that when a savage has
both a sex totem and a clan totem his life must be bound up with two
different animals, the death of either of which would entail his
own. If a man has more vital places than one in his body, why, the
savage may think, should he not have more vital places than one
outside it? Why, since he can put his life outside himself, should
he not transfer one portion of it to one animal and another to
another? The divisibility of life, or, to put it otherwise, the
plurality of souls, is an idea suggested by many familiar facts, and
has commended itself to philosophers like Plato, as well as to
savages. It is only when the notion of a soul, from being a
quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes a theological dogma that its
unity and indivisibility are insisted upon as essential. The savage,
unshackled by dogma, is free to explain the facts of life by the
assumption of as many souls as he thinks necessary. Hence, for
example, the Caribs supposed that there was one soul in the head,
another in the heart, and other souls at all the places where an
artery is felt pulsating. Some of the Hidatsa Indians explain the
phenomena of gradual death, when the extremities appear dead first,
by supposing that man has four souls, and that they quit the body,
not simultaneously, but one after the other, dissolution being only
complete when all four have departed. Some of the Dyaks of Borneo
and the Malays of the Peninsula believe that every man has seven
souls. The Alfoors of Poso in Celebes are of opinion that he has
three. The natives of Laos suppose that the body is the seat of
thirty spirits, which reside in the hands, the feet, the mouth, the
eyes, and so on. Hence, from the primitive point of view, it is
perfectly possible that a savage should have one soul in his sex
totem and another in his clan totem. However, as I have observed,
sex totems have been found nowhere but in Australia; so that as a
rule the savage who practises totemism need not have more than one
soul out of his body at a time.

If this explanation of the totem as a receptacle in which a man
keeps his soul or one of his souls is correct, we should expect to
find some totemic people of whom it is expressly said that every man
amongst them is believed to keep at least one soul permanently out
of his body, and that the destruction of this external soul is
supposed to entail the death of its owner. Such a people are the
Bataks of Sumatra. The Bataks are divided into exogamous clans
(_margas_) with descent in the male line; and each clan is forbidden
to eat the flesh of a particular animal. One clan may not eat the
tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the dog,
another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo, and
another the locust. The reason given by members of a clan for
abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that
they are descended from animals of that species, and that their
souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they or
their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the
creatures. Sometimes, but not always, the clan bears the name of the
animal. Thus the Bataks have totemism in full. But, further, each
Batak believes that he has seven or, on a more moderate computation,
three souls. One of these souls is always outside the body, but
nevertheless whenever it dies, however far away it may be at the
time, that same moment the man dies also. The writer who mentions
this belief says nothing about the Batak totems; but on the analogy
of the Australian, Central American, and African evidence we may
conjecture that the external soul, whose death entails the death of
the man, is housed in the totemic animal or plant.

Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the
Batak does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his
totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or
plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his life
is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree
unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret. In all that
touches his inmost life and beliefs the savage is exceedingly
suspicious and reserved; Europeans have resided among savages for
years without discovering some of their capital articles of faith,
and in the end the discovery has often been the result of accident.
Above all, the savage lives in an intense and perpetual dread of
assassination by sorcery; the most trifling relics of his
person--the clippings of his hair and nails, his spittle, the
remnants of his food, his very name--all these may, he fancies, be
turned by the sorcerer to his destruction, and he is therefore
anxiously careful to conceal or destroy them. But if in matters such
as these, which are but the outposts and outworks of his life, he is
so shy and secretive, how close must be the concealment, how
impenetrable the reserve in which he enshrouds the inner keep and
citadel of his being! When the princess in the fairy tale asks the
giant where he keeps his soul, he often gives false or evasive
answers, and it is only after much coaxing and wheedling that the
secret is at last wrung from him. In his jealous reticence the giant
resembles the timid and furtive savage; but whereas the exigencies
of the story demand that the giant should at last reveal his secret,
no such obligation is laid on the savage; and no inducement that can
be offered is likely to tempt him to imperil his soul by revealing
its hiding-place to a stranger. It is therefore no matter for
surprise that the central mystery of the savage's life should so
long have remained a secret, and that we should be left to piece it
together from scattered hints and fragments and from the
recollections of it which linger in fairy tales.



4. The Ritual of Death and Resurrection

THIS view of totemism throws light on a class of religious rites of
which no adequate explanation, so far as I am aware, has yet been
offered. Amongst many savage tribes, especially such as are known to
practice totemism, it is customary for lads at puberty to undergo
certain initiatory rites, of which one of the commonest is a
pretence of killing the lad and bringing him to life again. Such
rites become intelligible if we suppose that their substance
consists in extracting the youth's soul in order to transfer it to
his totem. For the extraction of his soul would naturally be
supposed to kill the youth or at least to throw him into a
death-like trance, which the savage hardly distinguishes from death.
His recovery would then be attributed either to the gradual recovery
of his system from the violent shock which it had received, or, more
probably, to the infusion into him of fresh life drawn from the
totem. Thus the essence of these initiatory rites, so far as they
consist in a simulation of death and resurrection, would be an
exchange of life or souls between the man and his totem. The
primitive belief in the possibility of such an exchange of souls
comes clearly out in a story of a Basque hunter who affirmed that he
had been killed by a bear, but that the bear had, after killing him,
breathed its own soul into him, so that the bear's body was now
dead, but he himself was a bear, being animated by the bear's soul.
This revival of the dead hunter as a bear is exactly analogous to
what, on the theory here suggested, is supposed to take place in the
ceremony of killing a lad at puberty and bringing him to life again.
The lad dies as a man and comes to life again as an animal; the
animal's soul is now in him, and his human soul is in the animal.
With good right, therefore, does he call himself a Bear or a Wolf,
etc., according to his totem; and with good right does he treat the
bears or the wolves, etc., as his brethren, since in these animals
are lodged the souls of himself and his kindred.

Examples of this supposed death and resurrection at initiation are
as follows. In the Wonghi or Wonghibon tribe of New South Wales the
youths on approaching manhood are initiated at a secret ceremony,
which none but initiated men may witness. Part of the proceedings
consists in knocking out a tooth and giving a new name to the
novice, indicative of the change from youth to manhood. While the
teeth are being knocked out an instrument known as a bull-roarer,
which consists of a flat piece of wood with serrated edges tied to
the end of a string, is swung round so as to produce a loud humming
noise. The uninitiated are not allowed to see this instrument. Women
are forbidden to witness the ceremonies under pain of death. It is
given out that the youths are each met in turn by a mythical being,
called Thuremlin (more commonly known as Daramulun) who takes the
youth to a distance, kills him, and in some instances cuts him up,
after which he restores him to life and knocks out a tooth. Their
belief in the power of Thuremlin is said to be undoubted.

The Ualaroi of the Upper Darling River said that at initiation the
boy met a ghost, who killed him and brought him to life again as a
young man. Among the natives on the Lower Lachlan and Murray Rivers
it was Thrumalun (Daramulun) who was thought to slay and resuscitate
the novices. In the Unmatjera tribe of Central Australia women and
children believe that a spirit called Twanyirika kills the youth and
afterwards brings him to life again during the period of initiation.
The rites of initiation in this tribe, as in the other Central
tribes, comprise the operations of circumcision and subincision; and
as soon as the second of these has been performed on him, the young
man receives from his father a sacred stick (_churinga_), with
which, he is told, his spirit was associated in the remotest past.
While he is out in the bush recovering from his wounds, he must
swing the bull-roarer, or a being who lives up in the sky will swoop
down and carry him off. In the Binbinga tribe, on the western coast
of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the women and children believe that the
noise of the bull-roarer at initiation is made by a spirit named
Katajalina, who lives in an ant-hill and comes out and eats up the
boy, afterwards restoring him to life. Similarly among their
neighbours the Anula the women imagine that the droning sound of the
bull-roarer is produced by a spirit called Gnabaia, who swallows the
lads at initiation and afterwards disgorges them in the form of
initiated men.

Among the tribes settled on the southern coast of New South Wales,
of which the Coast Murring tribe may be regarded as typical, the
drama of resurrection from the dead was exhibited in a graphic form
to the novices at initiation. The ceremony has been described for us
by an eye-witness. A man, disguised with stringy bark fibre, lay
down in a grave and was lightly covered up with sticks and earth. In
his hand he held a small bush, which appeared to be growing in the
soil, and other bushes were stuck in the ground to heighten the
effect. Then the novices were brought and placed beside the grave.
Next, a procession of men, disguised in stringy bark fibre, drew
near. They represented a party of medicine-men, guided by two
reverend seniors, who had come on pilgrimage to the grave of a
brother medicine-man, who lay buried there. When the little
procession, chanting an invocation to Daramulun, had defiled from
among the rocks and trees into the open, it drew up on the side of
the grave opposite to the novices, the two old men taking up a
position in the rear of the dancers. For some time the dance and
song went on till the tree that seemed to grow from the grave began
to quiver. "Look there!" cried the men to the novices, pointing to
the trembling leaves. As they looked, the tree quivered more and
more, then was violently agitated and fell to the ground, while amid
the excited dancing of the dancers and the chanting of the choir the
supposed dead man spurned from him the superincumbent mass of sticks
and leaves, and springing to his feet danced his magic dance in the
grave itself, and exhibited in his mouth the magic substances which
he was supposed to have received from Daramulun in person.

Some tribes of Northern New Guinea--the Yabim, Bukaua, Kai, and
Tami--like many Australian tribes, require every male member of the
tribe to be circumcised before he ranks as a full-grown man; and the
tribal initiation, of which circumcision is the central feature, is
conceived by them, as by some Australian tribes, as a process of
being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical monster, whose voice is
heard in the humming sound of the bull-roarer. Indeed the New Guinea
tribes not only impress this belief on the minds of women and
children, but enact it in a dramatic form at the actual rites of
initiation, at which no woman or uninitiated person may be present.
For this purpose a hut about a hundred feet long is erected either
in the village or in a lonely part of the forest. It is modelled in
the shape of the mythical monster; at the end which represents his
head it is high, and it tapers away at the other end. A betel-palm,
grubbed up with the roots, stands for the backbone of the great
being and its clustering fibres for his hair; and to complete the
resemblance the butt end of the building is adorned by a native
artist with a pair of goggle eyes and a gaping mouth. When after a
tearful parting from their mothers and women folk, who believe or
pretend to believe in the monster that swallows their dear ones, the
awe-struck novices are brought face to face with this imposing
structure, the huge creature emits a sullen growl, which is in fact
no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men
concealed in the monster's belly. The actual process of deglutition
is variously enacted. Among the Tami it is represented by causing
the candidates to defile past a row of men who hold bull-roarers
over their heads; among the Kai it is more graphically set forth by
making them pass under a scaffold on which stands a man, who makes a
gesture of swallowing and takes in fact a gulp of water as each
trembling novice passes beneath him. But the present of a pig,
opportunely offered for the redemption of the youth, induces the
monster to relent and disgorge his victim; the man who represents
the monster accepts the gift vicariously, a gurgling sound is heard,
and the water which had just been swallowed descends in a jet on the
novice. This signifies that the young man has been released from the
monster's belly. However, he has now to undergo the more painful and
dangerous operation of circumcision. It follows immediately, and the
cut made by the knife of the operator is explained to be a bite or
scratch which the monster inflicted on the novice in spewing him out
of his capacious maw. While the operation is proceeding, a
prodigious noise is made by the swinging of bull-roarers to
represent the roar of the dreadful being who is in the act of
swallowing the young man.

When, as sometimes happens, a lad dies from the effect of the
operation, he is buried secretly in the forest, and his sorrowing
mother is told that the monster has a pig's stomach as well as a
human stomach, and that unfortunately her son slipped into the wrong
stomach, from which it was impossible to extricate him. After they
have been circumcised the lads must remain for some months in
seclusion, shunning all contact with women and even the sight of
them. They live in the long hut which represents the monster's
belly. When at last the lads, now ranking as initiated men, are
brought back with great pomp and ceremony to the village, they are
received with sobs and tears of joy by the women, as if the grave
had given up its dead. At first the young men keep their eyes
rigidly closed or even sealed with a plaster of chalk, and they
appear not to understand the words of command which are given them
by an elder. Gradually, however, they come to themselves as if
awakening from a stupor, and next day they bathe and wash off the
crust of white chalk with which their bodies had been coated.

It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea apply
the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is supposed
to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful roar is
represented by the hum of the harmless wooden instruments. Further,
it deserves to be noted that in three languages out of the four the
same word which is applied to the bull-roarer and to the monster
means also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the fourth
language (the Kai) it signifies "grandfather." From this it seems to
follow that the being who swallows and disgorges the novices at
initiation is believed to be a powerful ghost or ancestral spirit,
and that the bull-roarer, which bears his name, is his material
representative. That would explain the jealous secrecy with which
the sacred implement is kept from the sight of women. While they are
not in use, the bull-roarers are stowed away in the men's
club-houses, which no woman may enter; indeed no woman or
uninitiated person may set eyes on a bull-roarer under pain of
death. Similarly among the Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe
on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer,
which they call _sosom,_ is given to a mythical giant, who is
supposed to appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he
comes, a festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung.
Boys are presented to the giant, and he kills them, but
considerately brings them to life again.

In certain districts of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian
Islands, the drama of death and resurrection used to be acted with
much solemnity before the eyes of young men at initiation. In a
sacred enclosure they were shown a row of dead or seemingly dead men
lying on the ground, their bodies cut open and covered with blood,
their entrails protruding. But at a yell from the high priest the
counterfeit dead men started to their feet and ran down to the river
to cleanse themselves from the blood and guts of pigs with which
they were beslobbered. Soon they marched back to the sacred
enclosure as if come to life, clean, fresh, and garlanded, swaying
their bodies in time to the music of a solemn hymn, and took their
places in front of the novices. Such was the drama of death and
resurrection.

The people of Rook, an island between New Guinea and New Britain,
hold festivals at which one or two disguised men, their heads
covered with wooden masks, go dancing through the village, followed
by all the other men. They demand that the circumcised boys who have
not yet been swallowed by Marsaba (the devil) shall be given up to
them. The boys, trembling and shrieking, are delivered to them, and
must creep between the legs of the disguised men. Then the
procession moves through the village again, and announces that
Marsaba has eaten up the boys, and will not disgorge them till he
receives a present of pigs, taro, and so forth. So all the
villagers, according to their means, contribute provisions, which
are then consumed in the name of Marsaba.

In the west of Ceram boys at puberty are admitted to the Kakian
association. Modern writers have commonly regarded this association
as primarily a political league instituted to resist foreign
domination. In reality its objects are purely religious and social,
though it is possible that the priests may have occasionally used
their powerful influence for political ends. The society is in fact
merely one of those widely-diffused primitive institutions, of which
a chief object is the initiation of young men. In recent years the
true nature of the association has been duly recognised by the
distinguished Dutch ethnologist, J. G. F. Riedel. The Kakian house
is an oblong wooden shed, situated under the darkest trees in the
depth of the forest, and is built to admit so little light that it
is impossible to see what goes on in it. Every village has such a
house. Thither the boys who are to be initiated are conducted
blindfold, followed by their parents and relations. Each boy is led
by the hand of two men, who act as his sponsors or guardians,
looking after him during the period of initiation. When all are
assembled before the shed, the high priest calls aloud upon the
devils. Immediately a hideous uproar is heard to proceed from the
shed. It is made by men with bamboo trumpets, who have been secretly
introduced into the building by a back door, but the women and
children think it is made by the devils, and are much terrified.
Then the priests enter the shed, followed by the boys, one at a
time. As soon as each boy has disappeared within the precincts, a
dull chopping sound is heard, a fearful cry rings out, and a sword
or spear, dripping with blood, is thrust through the roof of the
shed. This is a token that the boy's head has been cut off, and that
the devil has carried him away to the other world, there to
regenerate and transform him. So at sight of the bloody sword the
mothers weep and wail, crying that the devil has murdered their
children. In some places, it would seem, the boys are pushed through
an opening made in the shape of a crocodile's jaws or a cassowary's
beak, and it is then said that the devil has swallowed them. The
boys remain in the shed for five or nine days. Sitting in the dark,
they hear the blast of the bamboo trumpets, and from time to time
the sound of musket shots and the clash of swords. Every day they
bathe, and their faces and bodies are smeared with a yellow dye, to
give them the appearance of having been swallowed by the devil.
During his stay in the Kakian house each boy has one or two crosses
tattooed with thorns on his breast or arm. When they are not
sleeping, the lads must sit in a crouching posture without moving a
muscle. As they sit in a row cross-legged, with their hands
stretched out, the chief takes his trumpet, and placing the mouth of
it on the hands of each lad, speaks through it in strange tones,
imitating the voice of the spirits. He warns the lads, under pain of
death, to observe the rules of the Kakian society, and never to
reveal what has passed in the Kakian house. The novices are also
told by the priests to behave well to their blood relations, and are
taught the traditions and secrets of the tribe.

Meantime the mothers and sisters of the lads have gone home to weep
and mourn. But in a day or two the men who acted as guardians or
sponsors to the novices return to the village with the glad tidings
that the devil, at the intercession of the priests, has restored the
lads to life. The men who bring this news come in a fainting state
and daubed with mud, like messengers freshly arrived from the nether
world. Before leaving the Kakian house, each lad receives from the
priest a stick adorned at both ends with a cock's or cassowary's
feathers. The sticks are supposed to have been given to the lads by
the devil at the time when he restored them to life, and they serve
as a token that the youths have been in the spirit land. When they
return to their homes they totter in their walk, and enter the house
backward, as if they had forgotten how to walk properly; or they
enter the house by the back door. If a plate of food is given to
them, they hold it upside down. They remain dumb, indicating their
wants by signs only. All this is to show that they are still under
the influence of the devil or the spirits. Their sponsors have to
teach them all the common acts of life, as if they were newborn
children. Further, upon leaving the Kakian house the boys are
strictly forbidden to eat of certain fruits until the next
celebration of the rites has taken place. And for twenty or thirty
days their hair may not be combed by their mothers or sisters. At
the end of that time the high priest takes them to a lonely place in
the forest, and cuts off a lock of hair from the crown of each of
their heads. After these initiatory rites the lads are deemed men,
and may marry; it would be a scandal if they married before.

In the region of the Lower Congo a simulation of death and
resurrection is, or rather used to be, practised by the members of a
guild or secret society called _ndembo._ "In the practice of Ndembo
the initiating doctors get some one to fall down in a pretended fit,
and in that state he is carried away to an enclosed place outside
the town. This is called 'dying Ndembo.' Others follow suit,
generally boys and girls, but often young men and women. . . . They
are supposed to have died. But the parents and friends supply food,
and after a period varying, according to custom, from three months
to three years, it is arranged that the doctor shall bring them to
life again. . . . When the doctor's fee has been paid, and money
(goods) saved for a feast, the _Ndembo_ people are brought to life.
At first they pretend to know no one and nothing; they do not even
know how to masticate food, and friends have to perform that office
for them. They want everything nice that any one uninitiated may
have, and beat them if it is not granted, or even strangle and kill
people. They do not get into trouble for this, because it is thought
that they do not know better. Sometimes they carry on the pretence
of talking gibberish, and behaving as if they had returned from the
spirit-world. After this they are known by another name, peculiar to
those who have 'died Ndembo.' . . . We hear of the custom far along
on the upper river, as well as in the cataract region."

Among some of the Indian tribes of North America there exist certain
religious associations which are only open to candidates who have
gone through a pretence of being killed and brought to life again.
In 1766 or 1767 Captain Jonathan Carver witnessed the admission of a
candidate to an association called "the friendly society of the
Spirit" (_Wakon-Kitchewah_) among the Naudowessies, a Siouan or
Dacotan tribe in the region of the great lakes. The candidate knelt
before the chief, who told him that "he himself was now agitated by
the same spirit which he should in a few moments communicate to him;
that it would strike him dead, but that he would instantly be
restored again to life; to this he added, that the communication,
however terrifying, was a necessary introduction to the advantages
enjoyed by the community into which he was on the point of being
admitted. As he spoke this, he appeared to be greatly agitated; till
at last his emotions became so violent, that his countenance was
distorted, and his whole frame convulsed. At this juncture he threw
something that appeared both in shape and colour like a small bean,
at the young man, which seemed to enter his mouth, and he instantly
fell as motionless as if he had been shot." For a time the man lay
like dead, but under a shower of blows he showed signs of
consciousness, and finally, discharging from his mouth the bean, or
whatever it was that the chief had thrown at him, he came to life.
In other tribes, for example, the Ojebways, Winnebagoes, and Dacotas
or Sioux, the instrument by which the candidate is apparently slain
is the medicine-bag. The bag is made of the skin of an animal (such
as the otter, wild cat, serpent, bear, raccoon, wolf, owl, weasel),
of which it roughly preserves the shape. Each member of the society
has one of these bags, in which he keeps the odds and ends that make
up his "medicine" or charms. "They believe that from the
miscellaneous contents in the belly of the skin bag or animal there
issues a spirit or breath, which has the power, not only to knock
down and kill a man, but also to set him up and restore him to
life." The mode of killing a man with one of these medicine-bags is
to thrust it at him; he falls like dead, but a second thrust of the
bag restores him to life.

A ceremony witnessed by the castaway John R. Jewitt during his
captivity among the Indians of Nootka Sound doubtless belongs to
this class of customs. The Indian king or chief "discharged a pistol
close to his son's ear, who immediately fell down as if killed, upon
which all the women of the house set up a most lamentable cry,
tearing handfuls of hair from their heads, and exclaiming that the
prince was dead; at the same time a great number of the inhabitants
rushed into the house armed with their daggers, muskets, etc.,
enquiring the cause of their outcry. These were immediately followed
by two others dressed in wolf-skins, with masks over their faces
representing the head of that animal. The latter came in on their
hands and feet in the manner of a beast, and taking up the prince,
carried him off upon their backs, retiring in the same manner they
entered." In another place Jewitt mentions that the young prince--a
lad of about eleven years of age--wore a mask in imitation of a
wolf's head. Now, as the Indians of this part of America are divided
into totem clans, of which the Wolf clan is one of the principal,
and as the members of each clan are in the habit of wearing some
portion of the totem animal about their person, it is probable that
the prince belonged to the Wolf clan, and that the ceremony
described by Jewitt represented the killing of the lad in order that
he might be born anew as a wolf, much in the same way that the
Basque hunter supposed himself to have been killed and to have come
to life again as a bear.

This conjectural explanation of the ceremony has, since it was first
put forward, been to some extent confirmed by the researches of Dr.
Franz Boas among these Indians; though it would seem that the
community to which the chief's son thus obtained admission was not
so much a totem clan as a secret society called Tlokoala, whose
members imitated wolves. Every new member of the society must be
initiated by the wolves. At night a pack of wolves, personated by
Indians dressed in wolf-skins and wearing wolf-masks, make their
appearance, seize the novice, and carry him into the woods. When the
wolves are heard outside the village, coming to fetch away the
novice, all the members of the society blacken their faces and sing,
"Among all the tribes is great excitement, because I am Tlokoala."
Next day the wolves bring back the novice dead, and the members of
the society have to revive him. The wolves are supposed to have put
a magic stone into his body, which must be removed before he can
come to life. Till this is done the pretended corpse is left lying
outside the house. Two wizards go and remove the stone, which
appears to be quartz, and then the novice is resuscitated. Among the
Niska Indians of British Columbia, who are divided into four
principal clans with the raven, the wolf, the eagle, and the bear
for their respective totems, the novice at initiation is always
brought back by an artificial totem animal. Thus when a man was
about to be initiated into a secret society called Olala, his
friends drew their knives and pretended to kill him. In reality they
let him slip away, while they cut off the head of a dummy which had
been adroitly substituted for him. Then they laid the decapitated
dummy down and covered it over, and the women began to mourn and
wail. His relations gave a funeral banquet and solemnly burnt the
effigy. In short, they held a regular funeral. For a whole year the
novice remained absent and was seen by none but members of the
secret society. But at the end of that time he came back alive,
carried by an artificial animal which represented his totem.

In these ceremonies the essence of the rite appears to be the
killing of the novice in his character of a man and his restoration
to life in the form of the animal which is thenceforward to be, if
not his guardian spirit, at least linked to him in a peculiarly
intimate relation. It is to be remembered that the Indians of
Guatemala, whose life was bound up with an animal, were supposed to
have the power of appearing in the shape of the particular creature
with which they were thus sympathetically united. Hence it seems not
unreasonable to conjecture that in like manner the Indians of
British Columbia may imagine that their life depends on the life of
some one of that species of creature to which they assimilate
themselves by their costume. At least if that is not an article of
belief with the Columbian Indians of the present day, it may very
well have been so with their ancestors in the past, and thus may
have helped to mould the rites and ceremonies both of the totem
clans and of the secret societies. For though these two sorts of
communities differ in respect of the mode in which membership of
them is obtained--a man being born into his totem clan but admitted
into a secret society later in life--we can hardly doubt that they
are near akin and have their root in the same mode of thought. That
thought, if I am right, is the possibility of establishing a
sympathetic relation with an animal, a spirit, or other mighty
being, with whom a man deposits for safe-keeping his soul or some
part of it, and from whom he receives in return a gift of magical
powers.

Thus, on the theory here suggested, wherever totemism is found, and
wherever a pretence is made of killing and bringing to life again
the novice at initiation, there may exist or have existed not only a
belief in the possibility of permanently depositing the soul in some
external object--animal, plant, or what not--but an actual intention
of so doing. If the question is put, why do men desire to deposit
their life outside their bodies? the answer can only be that, like
the giant in the fairy tale, they think it safer to do so than to
carry it about with them, just as people deposit their money with a
banker rather than carry it on their persons. We have seen that at
critical periods the life or soul is sometimes temporarily stowed
away in a safe place till the danger is past. But institutions like
totemism are not resorted to merely on special occasions of danger;
they are systems into which every one, or at least every male, is
obliged to be initiated at a certain period of life. Now the period
of life at which initiation takes place is regularly puberty; and
this fact suggests that the special danger which totemism and
systems like it are intended to obviate is supposed not to arise
till sexual maturity has been attained, in fact, that the danger
apprehended is believed to attend the relation of the sexes to each
other. It would be easy to prove by a long array of facts that the
sexual relation is associated in the primitive mind with many
serious perils; but the exact nature of the danger apprehended is
still obscure. We may hope that a more exact acquaintance with
savage modes of thought will in time disclose this central mystery
of primitive society, and will thereby furnish the clue, not only to
totemism, but to the origin of the marriage system.




LXVIII. The Golden Bough

THUS the view that Balder's life was in the mistletoe is entirely in
harmony with primitive modes of thought. It may indeed sound like a
contradiction that, if his life was in the mistletoe, he should
nevertheless have been killed by a blow from the plant. But when a
person's life is conceived as embodied in a particular object, with
the existence of which his own existence is inseparably bound up,
and the destruction of which involves his own, the object in
question may be regarded and spoken of indifferently as his life or
his death, as happens in the fairy tales. Hence if a man's death is
in an object, it is perfectly natural that he should be killed by a
blow from it. In the fairy tales Koshchei the Deathless is killed by
a blow from the egg or the stone in which his life or death is
secreted; the ogres burst when a certain grain of sand--doubtless
containing their life or death--is carried over their heads; the
magician dies when the stone in which his life or death is contained
is put under his pillow; and the Tartar hero is warned that he may
be killed by the golden arrow or golden sword in which his soul has
been stowed away.

The idea that the life of the oak was in the mistletoe was probably
suggested, as I have said, by the observation that in winter the
mistletoe growing on the oak remains green while the oak itself is
leafless. But the position of the plant--growing not from the ground
but from the trunk or branches of the tree--might confirm this idea.
Primitive man might think that, like himself, the oak-spirit had
sought to deposit his life in some safe place, and for this purpose
had pitched on the mistletoe, which, being in a sense neither on
earth nor in heaven, might be supposed to be fairly out of harm's
way. In a former chapter we saw that primitive man seeks to preserve
the life of his human divinities by keeping them poised between
earth and heaven, as the place where they are least likely to be
assailed by the dangers that encompass the life of man on earth. We
can therefore understand why it has been a rule both of ancient and
of modern folk-medicine that the mistletoe should not be allowed to
touch the ground; were it to touch the ground, its healing virtue
would be gone. This may be a survival of the old superstition that
the plant in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated
should not be exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the
earth. In an Indian legend, which offers a parallel to the Balder
myth, Indra swore to the demon Namuci that he would slay him neither
by day nor by night, neither with staff nor with bow, neither with
the palm of the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor
with the dry. But he killed him in the morning twilight by
sprinkling over him the foam of the sea. The foam of the sea is just
such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because
it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position
between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees
safety. It is therefore not surprising that the foam of the river
should be the totem of a clan in India.

Again, the view that the mistletoe owes its mystic character partly
to its not growing on the ground is confirmed by a parallel
superstition about the mountain-ash or rowan-tree. In Jutland a
rowan that is found growing out of the top of another tree is
esteemed "exceedingly effective against witchcraft: since it does
not grow on the ground witches have no power over it; if it is to
have its full effect it must be cut on Ascension Day." Hence it is
placed over doors to prevent the ingress of witches. In Sweden and
Norway, also, magical properties are ascribed to a "flying-rowan"
(_flögrönn_), that is to a rowan which is found growing not in the
ordinary fashion on the ground but on another tree, or on a roof, or
in a cleft of the rock, where it has sprouted from seed scattered by
birds. They say that a man who is out in the dark should have a bit
of "flying-rowan" with him to chew; else he runs a risk of being
bewitched and of being unable to stir from the spot. Just as in
Scandinavia the parasitic rowan is deemed a countercharm to sorcery,
so in Germany the parasitic mistletoe is still commonly considered a
protection against witch-craft, and in Sweden, as we saw, the
mistletoe which is gathered on Midsummer Eve is attached to the
ceiling of the house, the horse's stall or the cow's crib, in the
belief that this renders the Troll powerless to injure man or beast.

The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument of
Balder's death, but that it contained his life, is countenanced by
the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition ran that the fate
of the Hays of Errol, an estate in Perthshire, near the Firth of
Tay, was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on a certain great
oak. A member of the Hay family has recorded the old belief as
follows: "Among the low country families the badges are now almost
generally forgotten; but it appears by an ancient MS., and the
tradition of a few old people in Perthshire, that the badge of the
Hays was the mistletoe. There was formerly in the neighbourhood of
Errol, and not far from the Falcon stone, a vast oak of an unknown
age, and upon which grew a profusion of the plant: many charms and
legends were considered to be connected with the tree, and the
duration of the family of Hay was said to be united with its
existence. It was believed that a sprig of the mistletoe cut by a
Hay on Allhallowmas eve, with a new dirk, and after surrounding the
tree three times sunwise, and pronouncing a certain spell, was a
sure charm against all glamour or witchery, and an infallible guard
in the day of battle. A spray gathered in the same manner was placed
in the cradle of infants, and thought to defend them from being
changed for elfbairns by the fairies. Finally, it was affirmed, that
when the root of the oak had perished, 'the grass should grow in the
hearth of Errol, and a raven should sit in the falcon's nest.' The
two most unlucky deeds which could be done by one of the name of Hay
was, to kill a white falcon, and to cut down a limb from the oak of
Errol. When the old tree was destroyed I could never learn. The
estate has been sold out of the family of Hay, and of course it is
said that the fatal oak was cut down a short time before." The old
superstition is recorded in verses which are traditionally ascribed
to Thomas the Rhymer:


    While the mistletoe bats on Errol's aik,
    And that aik stands fast,
    The Hays shall flourish, and their good grey hawk
    Shall nocht flinch before the blast.

    But when the root of the aik decays,
    And the mistletoe dwines on its withered breast,
    The grass shall grow on Errol's hearthstane,
    And the corbie roup in the falcon's nest.


It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe.
True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with mistletoe.
But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over
the humble plant. Or, more probably, his description was based on a
popular superstition that at certain times the mistletoe blazed out
into a supernatural golden glory. The poet tells how two doves,
guiding Aeneas to the gloomy vale in whose depth grew the Golden
Bough, alighted upon a tree, "whence shone a flickering gleam of
gold. As in the woods in winter cold the mistletoe--a plant not
native to its tree--is green with fresh leaves and twines its yellow
berries about the boles; such seemed upon the shady holm-oak the
leafy gold, so rustled in the gentle breeze the golden leaf." Here
Virgil definitely describes the Golden Bough as growing on a
holm-oak, and compares it with the mistletoe. The inference is
almost inevitable that the Golden Bough was nothing but the
mistletoe seen through the haze of poetry or of popular
superstition.

Now grounds have been shown for believing that the priest of the
Arician grove--the King of the Wood--personified the tree on which
grew the Golden Bough. Hence if that tree was the oak, the King of
the Wood must have been a personification of the oakspirit. It is,
therefore, easy to understand why, before he could be slain, it was
necessary to break the Golden Bough. As an oak-spirit, his life or
death was in the mistletoe on the oak, and so long as the mistletoe
remained intact, he, like Balder, could not die. To slay him,
therefore, it was necessary to break the mistletoe, and probably, as
in the case of Balder, to throw it at him. And to complete the
parallel, it is only necessary to suppose that the King of the Wood
was formerly burned, dead or alive, at the midsummer fire festival
which, as we have seen, was annually celebrated in the Arician
grove. The perpetual fire which burned in the grove, like the
perpetual fire which burned in the temple of Vesta at Rome and under
the oak at Romove, was probably fed with the sacred oak-wood; and
thus it would be in a great fire of oak that the King of the Wood
formerly met his end. At a later time, as I have suggested, his
annual tenure of office was lengthened or shortened, as the case
might be, by the rule which allowed him to live so long as he could
prove his divine right by the strong hand. But he only escaped the
fire to fall by the sword.

Thus it seems that at a remote age in the heart of Italy, beside the
sweet Lake of Nemi, the same fiery tragedy was annually enacted
which Italian merchants and soldiers were afterwards to witness
among their rude kindred, the Celts of Gaul, and which, if the Roman
eagles had ever swooped on Norway, might have been found repeated
with little difference among the barbarous Aryans of the North. The
rite was probably an essential feature in the ancient Aryan worship
of the oak.

It only remains to ask, Why was the mistletoe called the Golden
Bough? The whitish-yellow of the mistletoe berries is hardly enough
to account for the name, for Virgil says that the bough was
altogether golden, stems as well as leaves. Perhaps the name may be
derived from the rich golden yellow which a bough of mistletoe
assumes when it has been cut and kept for some months; the bright
tint is not confined to the leaves, but spreads to the stalks as
well, so that the whole branch appears to be indeed a Golden Bough.
Breton peasants hang up great bunches of mistletoe in front of their
cottages, and in the month of June these bunches are conspicuous for
the bright golden tinge of their foliage. In some parts of Brittany,
especially about Morbihan, branches of mistletoe are hung over the
doors of stables and byres to protect the horses and cattle,
probably against witchcraft.

The yellow colour of the withered bough may partly explain why the
mistletoe has been sometimes supposed to possess the property of
disclosing treasures in the earth; for on the principles of
homoeopathic magic there is a natural affinity between a yellow
bough and yellow gold. This suggestion is confirmed by the analogy
of the marvellous properties popularly ascribed to the mythical
fern-seed, which is popularly supposed to bloom like gold or fire on
Midsummer Eve. Thus in Bohemia it is said that "on St. John's Day
fern-seed blooms with golden blossoms that gleam like fire." Now it
is a property of this mythical fern-seed that whoever has it, or
will ascend a mountain holding it in his hand on Midsummer Eve, will
discover a vein of gold or will see the treasures of the earth
shining with a bluish flame. In Russia they say that if you succeed
in catching the wondrous bloom of the fern at midnight on Midsummer
Eve, you have only to throw it up into the air, and it will fall
like a star on the very spot where a treasure lies hidden. In
Brittany treasure-seekers gather fern-seed at midnight on Midsummer
Eve, and keep it till Palm Sunday of the following year; then they
strew the seed on the ground where they think a treasure is
concealed. Tyrolese peasants imagine that hidden treasures can be
seen glowing like flame on Midsummer Eve, and that fern-seed,
gathered at this mystic season, with the usual precautions, will
help to bring the buried gold to the surface. In the Swiss canton of
Freiburg people used to watch beside a fern on St. John's night in
the hope of winning a treasure, which the devil himself sometimes
brought to them. In Bohemia they say that he who procures the golden
bloom of the fern at this season has thereby the key to all hidden
treasures; and that if maidens will spread a cloth under the
fast-fading bloom, red gold will drop into it. And in the Tryol and
Bohemia if you place fern-seed among money, the money will never
decrease, however much of it you spend. Sometimes the fern-seed is
supposed to bloom on Christmas night, and whoever catches it will
become very rich. In Styria they say that by gathering fern-seed on
Christmas night you can force the devil to bring you a bag of money.

Thus, on the principle of like by like, fern-seed is supposed to
discover gold because it is itself golden; and for a similar reason
it enriches its possessor with an unfailing supply of gold. But
while the fern-seed is described as golden, it is equally described
as glowing and fiery. Hence, when we consider that two great days
for gathering the fabulous seed are Midsummer Eve and
Christmas--that is, the two solstices (for Christmas is nothing but
an old heathen celebration of the winter solstice)--we are led to
regard the fiery aspect of the fern-seed as primary, and its golden
aspect as secondary and derivative. Fern-seed, in fact, would seem
to be an emanation of the sun's fire at the two turning-points of
its course, the summer and winter solstices. This view is confirmed
by a German story in which a hunter is said to have procured
fern-seed by shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon; three
drops of blood fell down, which he caught in a white cloth, and
these blood-drops were the fern-seed. Here the blood is clearly the
blood of the sun, from which the fern-seed is thus directly derived.
Thus it may be taken as probable that fern-seed is golden, because
it is believed to be an emanation of the sun's golden fire.

Now, like fern-seed, the mistletoe is gathered either at Midsummer
or at Christmas--that is, either at the summer or at the winter
solstice--and, like fern-seed, it is supposed to possess the power
of revealing treasures in the earth. On Midsummer Eve people in
Sweden make divining-rods of mistletoe, or of four different kinds
of wood one of which must be mistletoe. The treasure-seeker places
the rod on the ground after sundown, and when it rests directly over
treasure, the rod begins to move as if it were alive. Now, if the
mistletoe discovers gold, it must be in its character of the Golden
Bough; and if it is gathered at the solstices, must not the Golden
Bough, like the golden fern-seed, be an emanation of the sun's fire?
The question cannot be answered with a simple affirmative. We have
seen that the old Aryans perhaps kindled the solstitial and other
ceremonial fires in part as sun-charms, that is, with the intention
of supplying the sun with fresh fire; and as these fires were
usually made by the friction or combustion of oak-wood, it may have
appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically
recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak. In other
words, the oak may have seemed to him the original storehouse or
reservoir of the fire which was from time to time drawn out to feed
the sun. But if the life of the oak was conceived to be in the
mistletoe, the mistletoe must on that view have contained the seed
or germ of the fire which was elicited by friction from the wood of
the oak. Thus, instead of saying that the mistletoe was an emanation
of the sun's fire, it might be more correct to say that the sun's
fire was regarded as an emanation of the mistletoe. No wonder, then,
that the mistletoe shone with a golden splendour, and was called the
Golden Bough. Probably, however, like fern-seed, it was thought to
assume its golden aspect only at those stated times, especially
midsummer, when fire was drawn from the oak to light up the sun. At
Pulverbatch, in Shropshire, it was believed within living memory
that the oak-tree blooms on Midsummer Eve and the blossom withers
before daylight. A maiden who wishes to know her lot in marriage
should spread a white cloth under the tree at night, and in the
morning she will find a little dust, which is all that remains of
the flower. She should place the pinch of dust under her pillow, and
then her future husband will appear to her in her dreams. This
fleeting bloom of the oak, if I am right, was probably the mistletoe
in its character of the Golden Bough. The conjecture is confirmed by
the observation that in Wales a real sprig of mistletoe gathered on
Midsummer Eve is similarly placed under the pillow to induce
prophetic dreams; and further the mode of catching the imaginary
bloom of the oak in a white cloth is exactly that which was employed
by the Druids to catch the real mistletoe when it dropped from the
bough of the oak, severed by the golden sickle. As Shropshire
borders on Wales, the belief that the oak blooms on Midsummer Eve
may be Welsh in its immediate origin, though probably the belief is
a fragment of the primitive Aryan creed. In some parts of Italy, as
we saw, peasants still go out on Midsummer morning to search the
oak-trees for the "oil of St. John," which, like the mistletoe,
heals all wounds, and is, perhaps, the mistletoe itself in its
glorified aspect. Thus it is easy to understand how a title like the
Golden Bough, so little descriptive of its usual appearance on the
tree, should have been applied to the seemingly insignificant
parasite. Further, we can perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was
believed to possess the remarkable property of extinguishing fire,
and why in Sweden it is still kept in houses as a safeguard against
conflagration. Its fiery nature marks it out, on homoeopathic
principles, as the best possible cure or preventive of injury by
fire.

These considerations may partially explain why Virgil makes Aeneas
carry a glorified bough of mistletoe with him on his descent into
the gloomy subterranean world. The poet describes how at the very
gates of hell there stretched a vast and gloomy wood, and how the
hero, following the flight of two doves that lured him on, wandered
into the depths of the immemorial forest till he saw afar off
through the shadows of the trees the flickering light of the Golden
Bough illuminating the matted boughs overhead. If the mistletoe, as
a yellow withered bough in the sad autumn woods, was conceived to
contain the seed of fire, what better companion could a forlorn
wanderer in the nether shades take with him than a bough that would
be a lamp to his feet as well as a rod and staff to his hands? Armed
with it he might boldly confront the dreadful spectres that would
cross his path on his adventurous journey. Hence when Aeneas,
emerging from the forest, comes to the banks of Styx, winding slow
with sluggish stream through the infernal marsh, and the surly
ferryman refuses him passage in his boat, he has but to draw the
Golden Bough from his bosom and hold it up, and straightway the
blusterer quails at the sight and meekly receives the hero into his
crazy bark, which sinks deep in the water under the unusual weight
of the living man. Even in recent times, as we have seen, mistletoe
has been deemed a protection against witches and trolls, and the
ancients may well have credited it with the same magical virtue. And
if the parasite can, as some of our peasants believe, open all
locks, why should it not have served as an "open Sesame" in the
hands of Aeneas to unlock the gates of death?

Now, too, we can conjecture why Virbius at Nemi came to be
confounded with the sun. If Virbius was, as I have tried to show, a
tree-spirit, he must have been the spirit of the oak on which grew
the Golden Bough; for tradition represented him as the first of the
Kings of the Wood. As an oak-spirit he must have been supposed
periodically to rekindle the sun's fire, and might therefore easily
be confounded with the sun itself. Similarly we can explain why
Balder, an oak-spirit, was described as "so fair of face and so
shining that a light went forth from him," and why he should have
been so often taken to be the sun. And in general we may say that in
primitive society, when the only known way of making fire is by the
friction of wood, the savage must necessarily conceive of fire as a
property stored away, like sap or juice, in trees, from which he has
laboriously to extract it. The Senal Indians of California "profess
to believe that the whole world was once a globe of fire, whence
that element passed up into the trees, and now comes out whenever
two pieces of wood are rubbed together." Similarly the Maidu Indians
of California hold that "the earth was primarily a globe of molten
matter, and from that the principle of fire ascended through the
roots into the trunk and branches of trees, whence the Indians can
extract it by means of their drill." In Namoluk, one of the Caroline
Islands, they say that the art of making fire was taught men by the
gods. Olofaet, the cunning master of flames, gave fire to the bird
_mwi_ and bade him carry it to earth in his bill. So the bird flew
from tree to tree and stored away the slumbering force of the fire
in the wood, from which men can elicit it by friction. In the
ancient Vedic hymns of India the fire-god Agni "is spoken of as born
in wood, as the embryo of plants, or as distributed in plants. He is
also said to have entered into all plants or to strive after them.
When he is called the embryo of trees or of trees as well as plants,
there may be a side-glance at the fire produced in forests by the
friction of the boughs of trees."

A tree which has been struck by lightning is naturally regarded by
the savage as charged with a double or triple portion of fire; for
has he not seen the mighty flash enter into the trunk with his own
eyes? Hence perhaps we may explain some of the many superstitious
beliefs concerning trees that have been struck by lightning. When
the Thompson Indians of British Columbia wished to set fire to the
houses of their enemies, they shot at them arrows which were either
made from a tree that had been struck by lightning or had splinters
of such wood attached to them. Wendish peasants of Saxony refuse to
burn in their stoves the wood of trees that have been struck by
lightning; they say that with such fuel the house would be burnt
down. In like manner the Thonga of South Africa will not use such
wood as fuel nor warm themselves at a fire which has been kindled
with it. On the contrary, when lightning sets fire to a tree, the
Winamwanga of Northern Rhodesia put out all the fires in the village
and plaster the fireplaces afresh, while the head men convey the
lightning-kindled fire to the chief, who prays over it. The chief
then sends out the new fire to all his villages, and the villagers
reward his messengers for the boon. This shows that they look upon
fire kindled by lightning with reverence, and the reverence is
intelligible, for they speak of thunder and lightning as God himself
coming down to earth. Similarly the Maidu Indians of California
believe that a Great Man created the world and all its inhabitants,
and that lightning is nothing but the Great Man himself descending
swiftly out of heaven and rending the trees with his flaming arms.

It is a plausible theory that the reverence which the ancient
peoples of Europe paid to the oak, and the connexion which they
traced between the tree and their sky-god, were derived from the
much greater frequency with which the oak appears to be struck by
lightning than any other tree of our European forests. This
peculiarity of the tree has seemingly been established by a series
of observations instituted within recent years by scientific
enquirers who have no mythological theory to maintain. However we
may explain it, whether by the easier passage of electricity through
oak-wood than through any other timber, or in some other way, the
fact itself may well have attracted the notice of our rude
forefathers, who dwelt in the vast forests which then covered a
large part of Europe; and they might naturally account for it in
their simple religious way by supposing that the great sky-god, whom
they worshipped and whose awful voice they heard in the roll of
thunder, loved the oak above all the trees of the wood and often
descended into it from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning,
leaving a token of his presence or of his passage in the riven and
blackened trunk and the blasted foliage. Such trees would
thenceforth be encircled by a nimbus of glory as the visible seats
of the thundering sky-god. Certain it is that, like some savages,
both Greeks and Romans identified their great god of the sky and of
the oak with the lightning flash which struck the ground; and they
regularly enclosed such a stricken spot and treated it thereafter as
sacred. It is not rash to suppose that the ancestors of the Celts
and Germans in the forests of Central Europe paid a like respect for
like reasons to a blasted oak.

This explanation of the Aryan reverence for the oak and of the
association of the tree with the great god of the thunder and the
sky, was suggested or implied long ago by Jacob Grimm, and has been
in recent years powerfully reinforced by Mr. W. Warde Fowler. It
appears to be simpler and more probable than the explanation which I
formerly adopted, namely, that the oak was worshipped primarily for
the many benefits which our rude forefathers derived from the tree,
particularly for the fire which they drew by friction from its wood;
and that the connexion of the oak with the sky was an after-thought
based on the belief that the flash of lightning was nothing but the
spark which the sky-god up aloft elicited by rubbing two pieces of
oak-wood against each other, just as his savage worshipper kindled
fire in the forest on earth. On that theory the god of the thunder
and the sky was derived from the original god of the oak; on the
present theory, which I now prefer, the god of the sky and the
thunder was the great original deity of our Aryan ancestors, and his
association with the oak was merely an inference based on the
frequency with which the oak was seen to be struck by lightning. If
the Aryans, as some think, roamed the wide steppes of Russia or
Central Asia with their flocks and herds before they plunged into
the gloom of the European forests, they may have worshipped the god
of the blue or cloudy firmament and the flashing thunderbolt long
before they thought of associating him with the blasted oaks in
their new home.

Perhaps the new theory has the further advantage of throwing light
on the special sanctity ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an oak.
The mere rarity of such a growth on an oak hardly suffices to
explain the extent and the persistence of the superstition. A hint
of its real origin is possibly furnished by the statement of Pliny
that the Druids worshipped the plant because they believed it to
have fallen from heaven and to be a token that the tree on which it
grew was chosen by the god himself. Can they have thought that the
mistletoe dropped on the oak in a flash of lightning? The conjecture
is confirmed by the name thunder-besom which is applied to mistletoe
in the Swiss canton of Aargau, for the epithet clearly implies a
close connexion between the parasite and the thunder; indeed
"thunder-besom" is a popular name in Germany for any bushy nest-like
excrescence growing on a branch, because such a parasitic growth is
actually believed by the ignorant to be a product of lightning. If
there is any truth in this conjecture, the real reason why the
Druids worshipped a mistletoe-bearing oak above all other trees of
the forest was a belief that every such oak had not only been struck
by lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the
celestial fire; so that in cutting the mistletoe with mystic rites
they were securing for themselves all the magical properties of a
thunder-bolt. If that was so, we must apparently conclude that the
mistletoe was deemed an emanation of the lightning rather than, as I
have thus far argued, of the midsummer sun. Perhaps, indeed, we
might combine the two seemingly divergent views by supposing that in
the old Aryan creed the mistletoe descended from the sun on
Midsummer Day in a flash of lightning. But such a combination is
artificial and unsupported, so far as I know, by any positive
evidence. Whether on mythical principles the two interpretations can
really be reconciled with each other or not, I will not presume to
say; but even should they prove to be discrepant, the inconsistency
need not have prevented our rude forefathers from embracing both of
them at the same time with an equal fervour of conviction; for like
the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by
the trammels of a pedantic logic. In attempting to track his devious
thought through the jungle of crass ignorance and blind fear, we
must always remember that we are treading enchanted ground, and must
beware of taking for solid realities the cloudy shapes that cross
our path or hover and gibber at us through the gloom. We can never
completely replace ourselves at the standpoint of primitive man, see
things with his eyes, and feel our hearts beat with the emotions
that stirred his. All our theories concerning him and his ways must
therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to
in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.

To conclude these enquiries we may say that if Balder was indeed, as
I have conjectured, a personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak,
his death by a blow of the mistletoe might on the new theory be
explained as a death by a stroke of lightning. So long as the
mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning smouldered, was
suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no harm could befall
the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his life stowed away
for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite; but
when once that seat of his life, or of his death, was torn from the
branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree fell--the god died--smitten
by a thunderbolt.

And what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of Scandinavia
may perhaps, with all due diffidence in a question so obscure and
uncertain, be applied to the priest of Diana, the King of the Wood,
at Aricia in the oak forests of Italy. He may have personated in
flesh and blood the great Italian god of the sky, Jupiter, who had
kindly come down from heaven in the lightning flash to dwell among
men in the mistletoe--the thunder-besom--the Golden Bough--growing
on the sacred oak in the dells of Nemi. If that was so, we need not
wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough
which contained the god's life and his own. The goddess whom he
served and married was herself, if I am right, no other than the
Queen of Heaven, the true wife of the sky-god. For she, too, loved
the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing overhead
on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon looked down with
pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished
surface of the lake, Diana's Mirror.



LXIX. Farewell to Nemi

WE are at the end of our enquiry, but as often happens in the search
after truth, if we have answered one question, we have raised many
more; if we have followed one track home, we have had to pass by
others that opened off it and led, or seemed to lead, to far other
goals than the sacred grove at Nemi. Some of these paths we have
followed a little way; others, if fortune should be kind, the writer
and the reader may one day pursue together. For the present we have
journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part. Yet before we
do so, we may well ask ourselves whether there is not some more
general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of hope and
encouragement, to be drawn from the melancholy record of human error
and folly which has engaged our attention in this book.

If then we consider, on the one hand, the essential similarity of
man's chief wants everywhere and at all times, and on the other
hand, the wide difference between the means he has adopted to
satisfy them in different ages, we shall perhaps be disposed to
conclude that the movement of the higher thought, so far as we can
trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to
science. In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the
difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes
in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely
count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order
of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed
himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely
on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws
himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind
the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching
powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds
magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the
succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the
passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though
vastly superior to him in power.

But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be
unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events
is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable
and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by closer
observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession
the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual
precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of
nature are carried on. Every great advance in knowledge has extended
the sphere of order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of
apparent disorder in the world, till now we are ready to anticipate
that even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to
reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos
to cosmos. Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper
solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the
religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure
to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in
magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible
regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully
observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to
act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of
nature, is displaced by science.

But while science has this much in common with magic that both rest
on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things,
readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order
presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis
of science. The difference flows naturally from the different modes
in which the two orders have been reached. For whereas the order on
which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of the
order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order laid
down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the
phenomena themselves. The abundance, the solidity, and the splendour
of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to
inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its
method. Here at last, after groping about in the dark for countless
ages, man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden key that
opens many locks in the treasury of nature. It is probably not too
much to say that the hope of progress--moral and intellectual as
well as material--in the future is bound up with the fortunes of
science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific
discovery is a wrong to humanity.

Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that
because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet
been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must
remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common
parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to
explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we
dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe.
In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but
theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors,
so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect
hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the
phenomena--of registering the shadows on the screen--of which we in
this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an
infinite progression towards a goal that for ever recedes. We need
not murmur at the endless pursuit:


    Fatti non foste a viver come bruti
    Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.


Great things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy
them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future--some
great Ulysses of the realms of thought--than shine on us. The dreams
of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark
shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however
vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may
have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of
those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly
for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth
swims as a speck or mote. In the ages to come man may be able to
predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds
and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed
afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire
of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such
distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these
gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are
only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up
out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress
has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that
to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

Without dipping so far into the future, we may illustrate the course
which thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of
three different threads--the black thread of magic, the red thread
of religion, and the white thread of science, if under science we
may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature,
of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then
survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably
perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork
of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of
religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will
remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through
it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion has
entered most deeply into its texture, a dark crimson stain, which
shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as the white thread of
science is woven more and more into the tissue. To a web thus
chequered and stained, thus shot with threads of diverse hues, but
gradually changing colour the farther it is unrolled, the state of
modern thought, with all its divergent aims and conflicting
tendencies, may be compared. Will the great movement which for
centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of thought be
continued in the near future? or will a reaction set in which may
arrest progress and even undo much that has been done? To keep up
our parable, what will be the colour of the web which the Fates are
now weaving on the humming loom of time? will it be white or red? We
cannot tell. A faint glimmering light illumines the backward portion
of the web. Clouds and thick darkness hide the other end.

Our long voyage of discovery is over and our bark has drooped her
weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It
is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to
the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset,
its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome
and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter's. The sight
once seen can never be forgotten, but we turn from it and pursue our
way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look
down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast disappearing in the
evening shadows. The place has changed but little since Diana
received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The
temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of
the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi's
woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the
west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound
of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. _Ave Maria!_
Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die
lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. _Le roi est
mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!_








End of Project Gutenberg's The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer