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The Golden
Bough
By
Sir James
George Frazer
Published 1922
PREFACE
THE primary aim of this book
is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succes-sion
to the priesthood of Diana at
Aricia. When I first set myself to solve the problem more
hthan 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 condesed. In order to
keep as much of the text as possible I have sacrificed all the
notes, and with them all exact
reference 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 princi-ples.
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 aug-mented
in the interval. A striking
instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the
powerful mediaeval kingdom of
the Khazars in
to be put to death either on
the expiry of a set of terms 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 Khazar kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab
travellers, has been collected
by me elsewhere. Africa, again, has supplied several fresh
examples of a similar practice
of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps is the cus-tom
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. 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. The festival in its turn has lately received fresh light
from certain Assyrian
inscriptions, 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.
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 inter-
-------
Page
1?val to be attacked and
killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or
the kingdom.
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
the existence of an African
population in
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 wor-ship
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 primi-tive
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 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 compari-son
with my own express
declaration.
J.G. FRAZER
I
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Page 2?CONTENTS
Chapter
I. THE KING OF THE WOOD
1. Diana and Virbius
2. Artemis and Hippolytus
3. Recapitulation
II. PRIESTLY KINGS
III. SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
1. The Principles of Magic
2. Homoeopathic or Imitative
Magic
3. Contagious Magic
4. The Magician’s Progress
IV. MAGIC AND RELIGION
V. 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
VI. MAGICIANS AS KINGS
VII. INCARNATE HUMAN GODS
VIII. DEPARTMENTAL KINGS OF
NATURE
IX. THE WORSHIP OF TREES
1. Tree-spirits
2. Beneficent Powers of
Tree-spirits
X. RELICS OF TREE WORSHIP IN
MODERN
XI. THE INFLUENCE OF THE SEXES
ON VEGETATION
XII. THE SACRED MARRIAGE
1. Diana as a Goddess of
Fertility
2. The Marriage of the Gods
XIII. THE KINGS OF
1. Numa and Egeria
2. The King as Jupiter
XIV. THE SUCCESSION TO THE
KINGDOM IN ANCIENT
XV. THE WORSHIP OF THE OAK
XVI. DIANUS AND DIANA
XVII. THE BURDEN OF ROYALTY
1. Royal and Priestly Taboos
2. Divorce of the Spiritual
from the Temporal Power
XVIII. 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
XIX. 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
-------
Page 3?XX. 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
XXI. 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
XXII. 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
XXIII. OUR DEBT TO THE SAVAGE
XXIV. 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
XXV. TEMPORARY KINGS
XXVI. SACRIFICE OF THE KING’S
SON
XXVII. SUCCESSION TO THE SOUL
XXVIII. THE KILLING OF THE
TREE-SPIRIT
1. The Whitsuntide Mummers
2. Burying the Carnival
3. Carrying out Death
4. Bringing in Summer
5.
6. Death and Resurrection of
Kostrubonko
7. Death and Revival of
Vegetation
8. Analogous Rites in
9. The Magic Spring
XXIX. THE MYTH OF ADONIS
XXX. ADONIS IN
XXXI. ADONIS IN
XXXII. THE RITUAL OF ADONIS
XXXIII. THE GARDENS OF ADONIS
XXXIV. THE MYTH AND RITUAL OF
ATTIS
XXXVI. ATTIS AS A GOD OF
VEGETATION
-------
Page 4?XXXVI. HUMAN REPRESENTATIVES OF ATTIS
XXXVII. ORIENTAL RELIGIONS IN
THE WEST
XXXVIII. THE MYTH OF OSIRIS
XXXIX. THE RITUAL OF OSIRIS
1. The Popular Rites
2. The Official Rites
XL. 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
XLI.
XLII. OSIRIS AND THE SUN
XLIII. DIONYSUS
XLIV. DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
XLV. THE CORN-MOTHER AND THE
CORN-MAIDEN IN NORTHERN EUROPE
XLVI. THE 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
XLVII. 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
XLVIII. 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
XLIX. 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
L. EATING THE GOD
1. The Sacrament of
First-Fruits
2. Eating the God among the
Aztecs
3. Many Manii at Aricia
LI. HOMOEOPATHIC MAGIC OF A
FLESH DIET
LII. KILLING THE DIVINE ANIMAL
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
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Page 5?2. Killing the Sacred Ram
3. Killing the Sacred Serpent
4. Killing the Sacred Turtles
5. Killing the Sacred Bear
LIII. THE PROPITIATION OF WILD
ANIMALS BY HUNTERS
LIV. TYPES OF ANIMAL SACRAMENT
1. The Egyptian and the Aino
Types of Sacrament
2. Processions with Sacred
Animals
LV. 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
LVI. THE PUBLIC EXPULSION OF
EVILS
1. The Omnipresence of Demons
2. The Occasional Expulsion of
Evils
3. The Periodic Expulsion of
Evils
LVII. 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
LVIII. HUMAN SCAPEGOATS IN
CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
1. The Human Scapegoat in Ancient
2. The Human Scapegoat in
Ancient
3. The Roman Saturnalia
LIX. KILLING THE GOD IN
LX. 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
LXI. THE MYTH OF BALDER
LXII. THE FIRE-FESTIVALS OF
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.
LXIII. 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
LXIV. 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
LXV. BALDER AND THE MISTLETOE
-------
Page 6?LXVI. THE EXTERNAL SOUL IN FOLK-TALES
LXVII. 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
LXVIII. THE GOLDEN BOUGH
LXIX. FAREWELL TO NEMI
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Page 7?Chapter 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
”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 vil-lages
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
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 relax-ation
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 sin-ister
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 melan-choly
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
-------
Page 8?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 cus-tom,
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 sub-ject.
According to one story the
worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who,
after killing Thoas, King of
the Tauric Chersonese (the
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
on the Capitoline slope,
beside the
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
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
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
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Page 9?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 per-petual
holy fire in her sanctuary. A
large circular basement at the north-east corner of the tem-ple,
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 mis-tress
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 mor-tal
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 mod-els
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 likeness-es
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
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Page 10?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 dif-ferences
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
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Page 11?its sponsor too respectable, to allow us to dismiss it as an idle
fiction. Rather we may sup-pose
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
obe-dience
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
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Page 12?ensuring good crops. In the story of the tragic death of the youthful
Hippolytus we may dis-cern
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 embodi-ment,
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 her-self
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 succes-sion
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 our-selves.
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
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Page 13?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.
Chapter 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 pre-vailed
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 slaugh-tered
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 immola-tion
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 hav-ing
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
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Page 14?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 expect-ed
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 proba-bly
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 inter-vention
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 extraordi-nary
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.
Chapter 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 prin-ciple
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 nar-rowly.
For the same principles which
the magician applies in the practice of his art are implic-itly
believed by him to regulate
the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly
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Page 15?assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal
application and are not limit-ed
to human actions. In short,
magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a falla-cious
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 igno-rance
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 sci-ence
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 appli-cations;
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 appli-cation
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 peo-ple
everywhere. Both branches of
magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious, may conve-niently
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)
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Page 16?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 injur-ing
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 per-son
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 slow-ly
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 com-bines
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 prac-tice
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 suf-fer.
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 mid-dle
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
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Page 17?great deal better able to bear it than you are.
If homoeopathic or imitative
magic, working by means of images, has commonly been prac-tised
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 suf-ferer.
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 estab-
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Page
18?lished between the two by
this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence commit-ted
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 yel-low
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 yel-low
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 tem-perament
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 prop-erty
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 jaun-dice.
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
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Page 19?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 corre-sponding
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 cere-monies
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, espe-cially
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
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Page 20?the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the
bird as it stands aim-lessly
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 spir-its
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 ani-mal
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 pan-tomime
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 scrupu-lous
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
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Page 21?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 con-ceived
in the abstract by the savage,
they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regu-late
the course of nature quite
independently of human will. He thinks that if he acts in a cer-tain
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 dan-gerous,
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 conse-quences,
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 con-ception
of the association of ideas.
Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the nega-tive
pole. If we give the general
name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoreti-cal
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 pseudo-science)
(Magic as a pseudo-art)
|
|
_____________________
|
|
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Page 22?Positive
Negative
Magic or
Magic or
Sorcery
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 harpoon-line
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
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Page 23?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 nega-tive
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 forbid-den
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 sol-dier
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 fight-ing,
their kinsfolk at home are
often expected to do certain things or to abstain from doing
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Page 24?certain others, for the sake of ensuring the safety and success of the
distant hunters or war-riors.
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 run-ning,
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, more-over,
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 ben-efit
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.
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Page 25?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 dis-tance,
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 rela-tions
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 think-ing
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 posi-tive,
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 win-dows
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
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Page 26?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 hus-band
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 befall 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 wav-ing
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 pro-
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Page
27?fusely adorned with white
circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffa-lo
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 hus-band
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 suc-cess
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 sea-son.
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 festi-val
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 pro-
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Page
28?fusion, 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 fruit-ful
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
watermelon 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 29?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 fall-en
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 ren-der
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 sweet-heart’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 profes-sion.
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 can-dle
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, howev-er,
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 pre-sented;
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
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Page 30?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 centu-ry
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 short-ening
its tether and drawing nearer
to the centre at every circuit. So by virtue of homoeopath-ic
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 point-ed
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
repre-sentative
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
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Page 31?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 mar-riage.
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 partic-ular
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
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Page 32?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 expecta-tion,
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 milk-stone 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 clear-ly
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
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Page 33?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 peo-ple
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 turn-ing
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 con-centrate
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 per-son.
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
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Page 34?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 char-acter.
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 occa-sion,
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 accomplish-ing
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 real-ly
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 contin-ue
their mourning till death releases
them from their pain; and having bound up her dishev-elled
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
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Page 35?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 sympa-thetic
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 similar-ly
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 sympa-thy
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 communi-ty,
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 magi-cal
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 sub-stances,
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
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Page 36?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 simi-lar
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 fol-lowing
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, includ-ing
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 proper-ly
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 concep-tion
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 watch-ful
eye on the fortunes of its
comrade. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other
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Page 37?peoples of the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child’s
younger brother or sis-ter,
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 sup-posed
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 con-cerned
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 nec-essarily
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
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Page 38?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 recov-er.
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 peo-ple,
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
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Page 39?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 car-pet
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 there-after
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 hap-pened,
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.
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Page 40?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 sympa-thetic
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 pur-pose
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 fur-ther
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, sup-posing
that this would soon bring the
animal into sight, even if it were two or three days’ jour-ney
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 forefa-
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Page
41?thers 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 sup-posed
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 saga-cious
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, con-scious
or unconscious. Accordingly
the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extrava-gant
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 incanta-tions
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 intelli-gent
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
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Page 42?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 what-ever
the character of the early
rulers, was on the whole very beneficial. For the rise of monar-chy
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 suf-ficed
to effect; and if, as will
often happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the com-mon,
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 neigh-bours
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
dis-interested
pursuit of knowledge which is
the noblest and most powerful instrument to amelio-rate
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
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Page 43?it an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation
have been made under despot-ic
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 liber-ty
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 free-dom
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.
Chapter 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 identi-cal
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, accompa-nied
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 anoth-er
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 neg-lect
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 seek-
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44?er, 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 pro-duces
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 natu-ral
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 gold-en
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 reli-gion.
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 reli-gion,
and to frame a definition of
it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossi-ble.
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
under-stand
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 ele-ments,
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
lan-guage
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
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Page 45?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 persua-sion
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 gov-ern
the world conscious and
personal, or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a concili-ation
of the superhuman powers,
assumes the former member of the alternative. For all con-ciliation
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 direc-tion
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 propiti-ating
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 submis-sively
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.”
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Page 46?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-suf-ficiency
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 sacri-fice,
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 incan-tations
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 primi-tive
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 mix-ture
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 effi-cacy
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
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Page 47?who, in some of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular
means to take the king-dom
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 counter-part
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 rec-tor,
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 par-don
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 conse-crates
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 tran-scended
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 attrib-utes
to the animals a belief that
the phenomena of nature are worked by a multitude of invisi-
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Page
48?ble 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 ele-mentary
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 reli-gion
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, capri-cious,
or irascible deity by the soft
insinuation of prayer and sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have
thus reached deductively from a consideration of the funda-mental
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 con-spicuously
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 dif-fer
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
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Page 49?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 minis-ter,
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 accom-plished,
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 states-man,
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 per-manence
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 por-tion
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 haz-ard
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 pro-duce
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
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Page 50?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 sover-eignty
over nature which he had
reluctantly abdicated. If the great world went on its way with-out
the help of him or his
fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like him-self,
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 sor-row,
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 thun-der,
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 sur-rounded.
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
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Page 51?absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged
for an attitude of lowli-est
prostration before the
mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit
his will to theirs: In la sua
volontade č 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 little-ness
of man. Small minds cannot
grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their pur-blind
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 reli-gion,
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 fail-ure
by no means obvious, since in
many, perhaps in most cases, the desired event did actu-ally
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 intend-ed
to make the wind blow or the
rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will always be fol-lowed,
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 pos-sible
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 per-haps
continue to rise and trees to
blossom though the ceremonies were occasionally intermit-ted,
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 two-penny
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
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Page 52?wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage?
Chapter 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 con-sideration
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 mira-cles
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 incar-nate
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 dab-ble
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, howev-er
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 individ-uals
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 reputa-tion
as magicians.
Among the objects of public
utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essen-tial
is an adequate supply of food.
The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the pur-veyors
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 them-selves,
but by professional magicians
on their behalf. In primitive society, where uniformity of
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Page 53?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 commu-nity
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 manu-al
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 sea-sons,
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 perpet-ually
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 hypothe-ses,
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 pur-suit
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 just-ly
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 predeces-sors,
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
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Page 54?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 ham-mer
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 ves-sel
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 resort-
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Page
55?ed 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 cere-monies
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 feath-ers
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
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Page 56?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 repre-sents
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, vil-lage
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 them-selves
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, especial-ly
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 weath-er;
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 dis-eases
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 repre-sent
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
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Page 57?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 differ-ent
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 gar-ments
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 signif-icance;
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 antiqui-ty,
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
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Page 58?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 con-sents
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 produc-ing
it. The Indian sage is
commanded to touch water thrice a day regularly as well as on vari-ous
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 pro-duce.
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 mak-ing
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:
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 59?“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 dis-guised
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 vari-ous
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 natu-ral
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 fin-
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Page
60?gers.
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 har-nessed
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-mak-ers
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, con-verted
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 vil-lage
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 continual-ly.
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 custom-ary
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,
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Page 61?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 com-mon
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 sor-cerer
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 sor-cerers
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 defile-ment.
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 wide-
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62?spread 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 win-nowing
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 pub-licly
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
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Page 63?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 procur-ing
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 cus-tom,
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 mira-cle
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 heav-en
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 fol-low.
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 bleat-ing
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 cere-monies
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
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Page 64?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 moun-tains,
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 proces-sion
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 Collobričres and Carpentras a simi-lar
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 obsti-nate,
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
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Page 65?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 thun-der
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 impi-ous
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 sup-posed
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 walk-ing-
stick,” because, as the
luminary declined daily in the sky, and his light and heat dimin-ished,
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
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Page 66?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 reli-gious,
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 disas-trous
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 sink-ing
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 con-trary,
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
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Page 67?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 lumi-nary.
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” light-ly
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 com-ing
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 man-ner
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 moder-ate
wind sprang up; if the second,
it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane. Indeed the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 68?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 neigh-bourhood
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 69?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 threat-eningly
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 mov-ing
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 treat-ed
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 dis-appearing,
in battle array, with drums
and cymbals beating, into the red cloud of whirling
sand.
Chapter 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 sur-prise
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 delibera-tive
assembly answers to the senate
of later times: if we had to coin a word for such a gov-ernment
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 70?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 magi-cal.
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 com-munication
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 suffi-cient
price.”
Still rising in the scale of
culture we come to Africa, where both the chieftainship and the king-ship
are fully developed; and here
the evidence for the evolution of the chief out of the magi-cian,
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 prin-cipal
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 71?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 cun-ning
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.”
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 72?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 govern-ment.
He, too, must know how to make
rain and drive away the locusts. If he and his medi-cine-
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 ban-ished
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 peo-ple
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 responsi-ble
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 threat-ened
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.
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Page 73?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 abun-dance.
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 rev-erence
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 shabbi-ly
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 vener-ation
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 pro-lific
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
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Page 74?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 pre-viously
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 fer-tilise
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 cus-toms
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 some-times
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 lay-
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75?ing 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 scrof-ula
and cases of indurated liver by
the touch of their feet; and the cure was strictly homoeo-pathic,
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 intel-lectual
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 chap-ter.
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 slow-ly
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
help-lessness
does not, however, carry with
it a corresponding belief in the impotence of those
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Page 76?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 dark-ened
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 pow-erful
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 sacri-fice
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 implic-itly
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 inves-tigating
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 common-ly
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 incar-nate
deity. Thus beginning as
little more than a simple conjurer, the medicine-man or magi-cian
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 controver-sy
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 confu-
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77?sion 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 probabili-ty
the germ out of which the civilised
peoples have gradually evolved their own high concep-tions
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 unbro-ken.
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 incar-nation-
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 tempo-rary,
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 vio-lently
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 peo-ple,
the declarations which had
been thus received. When the priest had uttered the response
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Page 78?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 inspira-tion
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 tem-porary
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 inhabi-tants
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,
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Page 79?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 supernat-ural.
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 unde-fined
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 restrict-ed
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 enclo-sure
except the persons dedicated
to the service of the god; only on days when human vic-tims
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 offer-ings
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 some-times
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.
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Page 80?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 contempo-rary
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 wor-shipped
women as true and living goddesses.
For example, in the reign of Vespasian a cer-tain
Veleda, of the tribe of the
Bructeri, was commonly held to be a deity, and in that charac-ter
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 conduct-ed
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
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Page 81?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 mission-ary
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 cas-tanettes,
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 com-mand
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
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Page 82?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 sover-eign,
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
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Page 83?described as an innocent pleasure in the divine honours paid him by his
confiding worship-pers.
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 con-tinued
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 can-not
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 incarna-tions
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 fel-low-
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 four-teenth
century.
In the thirteenth century
there arose a sect called the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit,
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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 clam-our,
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 excur-sions
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 acceler-ated
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 preten-sions
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 fel-low-
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 con-fessed
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 cara-van
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,
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Page 85?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 discover-ing
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 any-where
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 gov-ernment
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 practi-tioners,
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 histori-cal
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 exten-sion
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 heav-en.
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 con-querors
were astonished to find, in
contrast to the savage hordes they had left in the swelter-ing
jungles below, a people
enjoying a fair degree of civilisation, practising agriculture, and liv-ing
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 capi-tals
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 wor-
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86?shipped 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 offi-cial
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 monar-chies
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 associ-ation
of ideas. Men mistook the
order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imag-ined
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, con-sists
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 gradual-
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87?ly develops into a sacred
king, his old magical functions falling more and more into the back-ground
and being exchanged for
priestly or even divine duties, in proportion as magic is slow-ly
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 var-ied
greatly in different
societies. I merely mean to indicate in the broadest outline what I con-ceive
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.
Chapter 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
combi-nation
of spiritual and temporal
power, of which Graeco-Italian tradition preserved the memo-ry,
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 sanctu-ary
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, name-ly,
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
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Page 88?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 broth-er
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 moun-tains,
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 counte-nance
the report of their
hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it represents the peo-ple
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 col-
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Page
89?lected 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 con-taining
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 tal-ismans
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 reli-giously
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.
Chapter 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 impor-tant
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
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Page 90?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 disap-peared.
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 moun-tains,
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 crip-pled
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
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Page 91?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 for-mer
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 accord-ingly.
“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 pos-sess
an intelligence which, if
properly approached, may help the Indians in certain undertak-ings;
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 cur-rent,
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 fall-en
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 sim-ply
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
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Page 92?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 spe-cially
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 sup-posed
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 oper-ator.
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 for-give
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 anoth-
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Page
93?er 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 inter-cedes
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 sil-ver
trinkets, and to borrow all
the money they could in order to marry a mango-tree to a jas-mine
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 mar-ried.
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 breed-ing
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
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Page 94?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 vil-lage.
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 cus-tomary
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 prefer-ence
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 inhabit-ed
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
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Page 95?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 endeav-our
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 imagi-nary
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. BENEFICIENT 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
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Page 96?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 mul-titude
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 vil-lage
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 liba-tions
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 sacri-ficing
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 farm-house
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
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Page 97?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 vil-lage
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 cov-ered
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 accord-ing
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 gar-ments
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 facili-tate
delivery.
Chapter 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
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Page 98?figured so prominently in the popular festivals of European peasants.
In spring or early sum-mer
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 morn-ing,
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 gar-lands;
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 gener-ally
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 cov-ered
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
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Page 99?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 gar-lands
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 rain-charm.
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 thor-oughly
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 thou-sands
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
spruce-pine 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, rep-resenting,
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 vari-ous
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
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Page 100?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 hous-es:
that is the May or Whitsuntide
trees, which are mentioned in documents from the thir-teenth
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 mid-dle
of the village or in the
market-place of the town. It had been chosen by the whole commu-nity,
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
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Page 101?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 fruc-tifying
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, peo-ple
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 dec-orated
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 restrict-ed
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 some-times
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, there-fore,
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
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Page 102?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 twenty-third 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 mead-ows
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
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Page 103?to the tree-spirit regarded as incorporate in the tree, are also
attributed to the tree-spirit repre-sented
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 gar-ments
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 simi-larly
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 him-self
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 repre-sentative
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 per-sonification
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
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Page 104?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 vil-lage.
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 collect-ed.
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 horse-back
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 cov-ered
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 per-son
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.
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Page 105?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 car-ries
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 oth-ers,
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 unsuc-cessful
guesser. At Wahrstedt the boys
at Whitsuntide choose by lot a king and a high-stew-ard.
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 after-noon
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 dis-guise
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 hol-iday
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 proces-sion
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
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Page 106?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 mer-ryandrew,
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 per-haps
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 neigh-bourhood.
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 pinch-ing
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 bal-lads,
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; feast-ing,
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 pro-vide
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
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Page 107?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 brides-maids,
and they go from house to
house collecting gifts. A regular feature in the popular cele-bration
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 dismount-ed
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 bot-tles
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 dis-posed
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 pro-cession
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 brides-maids,
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 108?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
Briancon (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 follow-ing
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 fol-lowed
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 repre-sented
on St. Bride’s Day, the first
of February. Thus in the Hebrides “the mistress and ser-vants
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
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Page 109?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 cus-tom
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 car-rying
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.
Chapter 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 sup-pose
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 notori-ously
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 fruit-fulness
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 110?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 pas-sions
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 reli-gious
duty, in default of which it
was not lawful to sow the seed. The only possible explana-tion
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 hea-then
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 planta-tions
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 inter-course
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 increas-ing
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
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Page 111?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, appar-ently
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 clear-ly
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 influ-ence
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 absti-nence.
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 conti-nence
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 him-self
from the methods which nature
adopts to ensure the reproduction of plants and animals,
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Page 112?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 propa-gating
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 expla-nation
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, fur-nishes
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 for-mer
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.
Chapter 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 stimu-lated
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
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Page 113?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 blos-soms,
of grass and flowers and
fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape of pas-toral
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 pag-eants,
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 crop-ping
the herbage in the open glades
and dells. Thus she might come to be the patron god-dess
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 ani-mals
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
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Page 114?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 wor-shipped
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 god-dess
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 sup-posed
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 theo-ry,
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 degen-erate,
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 cer-
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Page
115?emony; 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 sus-pense
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 glam-our
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 festi-vals
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 har-vests.
They did not know what to do,
but at last concluded that their powerful but mischievi-ous
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
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Page 116?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 morn-ing
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 four-teen
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 wed-ding
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 fish-ing
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 sal tree is in blossom. The ceremony is as fol-lows.
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 per-formed
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
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Page 117?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); cer-tainly
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 destruc-tion
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 con-version
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 per-ceived
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 per-ished,
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, inter-poses
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.
Chapter XIII
The Kings of Rome and Alba
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Page 118?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 them-selves
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 con-ception
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 partic-ular,
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 dis-charge
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 leg-endary
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
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Page 119?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 knowl-edge
of the Roman kingship is far
too scanty to allow us to affirm any one of these proposi-tions
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 bor-rowed
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 tradi-tionary
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 tri-umphal
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 regard-ed
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 over-awe
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
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Page 120?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 pretend-ing
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 mois-ture.
At Rome the sluices of heaven
were opened by means of a sacred stone, and the cere-mony
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 cere-mony
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 sum-mit
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 moun-tain-
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 luxu-riant
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.”
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Page 121?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 che-quered
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 arch-es
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 sup-pose
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 periodical-ly
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 sup-pose
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 reminis-cence
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 per-formed
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 vegeta-tion
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 most-ly
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.
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Page 122?Chapter 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 remark-able
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 for-mer
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 kin-ship
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 relation-ship
and transmitting the family
name through women instead of through men. If these princi-ples
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 suc-cessor.
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,
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Page 123?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 easi-ly
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 festi-vals
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 god-dess
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 fantas-tic
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
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Page 124?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, pro-vided
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 nec-essary
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 pro-creation.
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 anoth-er.
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 evolu-tion,
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
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Page 125?Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth
of Hermutrude, a leg-endary
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 wor-thy
of her bed was at once a king,
and she yielded her kingdom with herself. Thus her scep-tre
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 deter-mined
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 con-sidered
a part of the form of marriage
among the Kirghiz. In this the bride, armed with a for-midable
whip, mounts a fleet horse,
and is pursued by all the young men who make any pre-tensions
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 succeed-ing
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 con-ferred
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 mar-riage
for the purpose of causing the
crops to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multi-ply.
Thus they did what in more
northern lands we may suppose the King and Queen of May
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Page 126?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 reduc-ing
the annual race or flight to
the empty form which it seems always to have been within his-torical
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 reg-ularly
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
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Page 127?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 suf-fer
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 jus-tice
of his cause beyond the reach
of cavil.
Chapter 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 enclo-sures
and sacrifices offered on
them. Several such places are known from inscriptions to
have existed in Athens.
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Page 128?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 high-lands
of Greece. Like their kinsmen
the Irish kings, they were expected to be a source of fer-tility
to the land and of fecundity
to the cattle; and how could they fulfil these expectations bet-ter
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 equiv-alent
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
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Page 129?burned day and night in his honour; and if ever it went out the
attendants paid for their negli-gence
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 com-plained
that their sylvan deities were
destroyed. Perpetual fires, kindled with the wood of cer-tain
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.
Chapter 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 mis-takes
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 pene-trate,
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 pow-erless
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.
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Page 130?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 sub-stratum
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 predeces-sor
the magician. Like him, they
are expected to guard their people against hostile enchant-ments,
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 ani-mals.
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 mani-fold
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 fertil-ity,
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
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Page 131?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 repre-sentative
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 brig-ands
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 for-mer.
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 sub-stance
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 puz-zled;
and where they hesitated, it
is not for us confidently to decide. But the view mentioned
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Page 132?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 con-vert
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 fore-fathers
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 hum-ble,
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 fam-ily
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 corre-sponding
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
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Page 133?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 some-times
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 pow-ers
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 testi-mony
of classical writers to prove
that in later times it was one of the greatest and most popu-lar
shrines in Italy. Even in the
old days, when the champaign country around was still par-celled
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
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Page 134?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.
Chapter 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
accord-ingly
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 sup-posed
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—instanta-neously
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 mon-archs
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
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Page 135?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 holi-ness
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 stir-ring
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, unfor-tunately,
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 misfor-tune
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 com-mon
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 lay-men,
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 con-sidered
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, includ-ing
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 mar-
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136?ried 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 theocra-cies
like those of Japan; in
particular, the high pontiff of the Zapotecs appears to have pre-sented
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 impossi-ble,
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 shoul-ders
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 gener-ally
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 beauti-ful
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 succeed-ed
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 cen-tre,
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, there-fore,
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 order-ing
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 con-trary,
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
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Page 137?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 uni-verse
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 stand-ing,
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 there-fore
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
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Page 138?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 gar-ment
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 pre-scribed
for the Flamen Dialis at Rome,
who has been interpreted as a living image of Jupiter,
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Page 139?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 installa-tion
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
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Page 140?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 neces-sary
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 hon-ours
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 con-duct,
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
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Page 141?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 govern-ment
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 peo-ple.
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 threat-ens
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.
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Page 142?Chapter 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 phe-nomena
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
illustrat-ed
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 mis-sionary,
“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 sub-tle
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
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Page 143?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; chil-dren
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 jour-ney,
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 initiat-ed,
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 ene-mies
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 leav-ing
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
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Page 144?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
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Page 145?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 morn-ing,
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 tread-ing
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 waken-ing
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 proba-bly
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 black-en
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 bod-
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Page
146?ies, 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 knock-ing
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 shel-ter
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 sorcer-er.
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 wher-ever
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 wan-dering
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 doc-tor
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 fol-low
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 pur-pose
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
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Page 147?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 intel-ligence
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 lit-tle
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 pro-vides
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 convul-sions,
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
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Page 148?gong in the hope of attracting the attention of the strayed soul,
which is supposed to recog-nise
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 put-ting
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 sac-rifice
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 total-ly
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
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Page 149?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 crimi-nal
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 sorcer-ers
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 what-ever
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 cal-abashes,
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.
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Page 150?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 incanta-tion:
“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 physi-cian
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 ablu-tion
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
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Page 151?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 him-self,
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 magi-cians
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 circum-stances
be as hazardous to be touched
by it as it would be to come into contact with the per-son
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 dan-gerous
classes he commonly ranks
mourners and women in general, but especially his moth-er-
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 untu-tored
savage contemplates his
mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthro-pology.
In the Yuin tribes of New
South Wales the rule which forbade a man to hold any com-
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Page
152?munication 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 lit-tle
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 nec-essary
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 liv-ing
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.
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Page 153?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 see-ing
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
reflec-tion
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 steal-ing
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
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Page 154?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 cam-era,
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 land-scape.
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 por-traits
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 per-mitted
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 pho-tographed.”
Chapter 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 protec-tion
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
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Page 155?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 inhab-itants,
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 peo-ple
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 neigh-bourhood
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 pep-per
into the nails of the fingers
and toes of the sufferer; the pungency of the pepper is sup-posed
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
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Page 156?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 direc-tions,
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 enter-ing
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 trans-formed
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 cere-
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157?monies. 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 sor-cery.”
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 malig-nant
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 ret-inues
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 occa-sions
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
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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 vict-uals
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, doubt-less
to prevent them from falling
into the hands of sorcerers, who by means of these frag-ments
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 hand-kerchiefs
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 com-monly
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.
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Page 159?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 meas-ured
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 stop-ping
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 simulta-neously
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 some-body,
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 sorcer-er.
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 hav-ing
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
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Page 160?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 supersti-tion;
curiously enough the same
baseless dread, the same false notion of causation, has indi-rectly
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 prin-ciples
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.
Chapter 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 com-moners
who were exempt from this
danger. I was talking about this once to Thakombau. ‘Oh
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Page 161?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; after-wards
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 con-sisted
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 eat-ing
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 scrofu-la,
which they often attributed to
a failure to perform the requisite expiation after having inad-vertently
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 sub-jects
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
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Page 162?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 regard-ed
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 stom-ach,
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 per-sons
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
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Page 163?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, gar-ments,
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 men-struation,
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, with-out
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 mis-erable
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 ves-sels
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
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Page 164?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 pun-ishment
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 him-self
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 cer-tain
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 han-dle
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
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Page 165?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 recov-ered
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 tem-porary
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 consid-ered
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 menstrua-tion.
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 cere-mony
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
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Page 166?months after the birth. But the secretion of childbed is particularly
terrible when it is the prod-uct
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 curi-ous
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 medi-cine-
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 mois-tened
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 noth-ing
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 charac-ters.
Thus when the Maoris went out
on the war-path they were sacred or taboo in the high-est
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 lan-guage
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 menstrua-
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Page
167?tion: 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 sancti-ty
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 equal-ly
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 distin-guish
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 disas-trous
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 fin-gers
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 inconti-nence
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 can-not
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 femi-nine
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
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Page 168?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 strin-gently
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 sepa-rate
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 accompa-nied
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 possi-ble
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 kan-garoo
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 strad-dle-
legs in it washes himself. All
the young untried warriors swim between his legs. This is
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Page 169?supposed to impart courage and strength to them. The following day, at
early dawn, he dash-es
out of his house, fully armed,
and calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied him-self
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 bam-boos,
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 dis-mantled
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 inharmo-nious
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 nec-essary
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 slum-bers.
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 cur-rent.
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
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Page 170?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 ceremo-nial
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 por-ridge,
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 pur-pose.
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 cer-tain
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
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Page 171?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 con-firmed
if we can show that savages
have actually imposed certain restrictions on the murder-er
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 mur-derer
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 lament-ing
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 dis-tance
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 seclu-sion
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 def-
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172?erence 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 danger-ous
beasts are subject to more
elaborate rules and ceremonies than the slaughter of compar-atively
useless and insignificant
creatures. Thus the Indians of Nootka Sound prepared them-selves
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 him-self
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 offer-ing.
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
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Page 173?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 prob-able
that the rule is always based
on a superstition rather than on a consideration of the tem-porary
weakness which a breach of the
custom may entail on the hunter or fisherman. In gen-eral
it appears to be supposed that
the evil effect of incontinence is not so much that it weak-ens
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 neg-lect
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 mak-ing
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 poi-son
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 poi-son-
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 conju-gal
relations with each other. If
it were discovered that any couple had broken this rule, the
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Page 174?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 maintain-ing
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 offend-ed
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 look-ing
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
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Page 175?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 par-ticularly
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 power-ful
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 ordi-nary
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 hencefor-ward
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
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Page 176?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 sac-rilegious
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 con-firmation
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.
Chapter 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 dis-tinction
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
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Page 177?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 prohibi-tion
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 commemora-tion
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 com-mon
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 con-structed
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,”
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Page 178?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 experi-enced
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 sea-sons
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 introduc-tion
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 hus-bandry,
will use no iron tools in
tilling their fields.
The general dislike of
innovation, which always makes itself strongly felt in the sphere of reli-gion,
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 intensi-fied
in places by some such accidental
cause as the series of bad seasons which cast dis-credit
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 sup-posed
to be so great that they will
not approach persons and things protected by the obnox-ious
metal, iron may obviously be
employed as a charm for banning ghosts and other danger-ous
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 pil-low.
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 meas-ures
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
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Page 179?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 instru-ments
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 upper-most
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 cer-tain
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
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Page 180?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 posses-sion
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 unwilling-ness
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 arrest-ed,
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
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Page 181?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 swal-lowed
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
dis-respect.
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
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Page 182?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 mean-est
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 for-gotten.”
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 any-thing
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 opera-tion.
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 diffi-culty
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
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Page 183?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 per-sons
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
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Page 184?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 (spir-it);
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 dispos-ing
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 par-ings
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.
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Page 185?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-cut-ting
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
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Page 186?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 pos-session,
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 resur-rection),
‘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 hin-der
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 sympa-thetic
connexion between them and the
man from whom they were severed. And if this sym-pathetic
connexion still exists,
clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without
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Page 187?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 spit-tle
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 spit-toon,
and the deposit was carefully
buried every morning to put it out of the reach of sorcer-ers.
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 suit-able
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 par-ties
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 sim-ply
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 them-selves,
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
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Page 188?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 ordi-nary
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 STRINGS 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 togeth-er.
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, mar-riage,
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 homoeo-pathic
or imitative magic: by
releasing her limbs from their bonds the magician imagines that
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Page 189?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 for-ward
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 coun-cil
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 eigh-teenth
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,
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Page 190?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 knot-ted
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 celebra-tion
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 gar-ments
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 hand-kerchief
remains tied, so long will the
bridegroom remain powerless to consummate the mar-riage.
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 com-mentator
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 experi-enced
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 tak-ing
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.
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Page 191?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 afflu-ence
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 pad-lock
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 scar-latina
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 constric-tion,
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
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Page 192?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.
Chapter 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 mali-cious
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 occa-sioned
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 sor-
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193?cerers.” 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 our-selves.
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 respec-tively
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 care-fully
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 them-selves.
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 him-self,
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 disci-ples
as a fearful example of the
fate that must sooner or later overtake the profligate who
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Page 194?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
per-son
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 indi-cate
that he is to answer for him,
or he will say straight out, “Ask him.” The superstition is cur-rent
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 circum-stances,
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 homoeo-
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195?pathically 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 cus-tomary,
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 per-sons
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 moth-er’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 previ-ously,
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 possi-ble,
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
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Page 196?It might naturally be expected that the reserve so commonly maintained
with regard to per-sonal
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 ordi-nary
words which resemble or have a
single syllable in common with these names. The per-sons
who are thus mutually debarred
from mentioning each other’s names are especially hus-bands
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 hus-band
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 sylla-ble
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 substitut-ed
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 them-selves.”
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 hus-band,
nor even use words which
resemble them in sound. For example, if one of these rela-tions
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.
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Page 197?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 broth-er;
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 intermar-ried
are also debarred from
mentioning each other’s names. And not only are all these per-sons
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.
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Page 198?3. NAMES OF THE DEAD TABOOED
The custom of abstaining from
all mention of the names of the dead was observed in antiqui-ty
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 vio-lation
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 indiscre-tion;
“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 per-son
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 sepa-rated
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
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Page 199?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 per-sons,
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 fight-ing
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
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Page 200?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 mem-bers
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 hon-ourable
name of Turkey Bustard, the
proper name for turkey bustards, which was barrim bar-rim,
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 repeat-ed
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 croco-dile,
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 hav-ing
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 car-ried
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
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Page 201?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 his-torical
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 peo-ple.
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 mourn-ers
have forgotten their grief;
and if the deceased was a famous warrior, one of his descen-dants,
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 mission-ary
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 div-ination,
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
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Page 202?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 king-dom
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 men-tioned
it was clapped into gaol. The
king might only be referred to under certain high-sound-ing
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 men-tion
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 unit-ed
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 amak-wata,
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
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Page 203?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 pos-sesses
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 chief-tains,
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 for-bidden
words were looked on not only
as grossly rude, but even as felons; they had commit-ted
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 hap-pens
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 syn-onyms
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
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Page 204?in sound must be changed for others. In former times, if any man were
so rash as to disre-gard
this custom and to use the
forbidden words, not only he but all his relations were imme-diately
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 person-ages
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 sor-cerers
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 effec-tually
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,
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Page 205?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 stead-fast,
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 poi-son
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 inextrica-bly
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,
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Page 206?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 person-ages
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.
Chapter 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 con-ducted
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 supersti-tions,
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 pat-tern
after which every man strove
to shape his life; a faultless model constructed with rigor-ous
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
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Page 207?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 prem-ises;
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 predeces-sors
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 inad-equate.
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.
Chapter 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 sup-posed
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
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Page 208?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 them-selves
immortal by virtue of their
sorceries. Now primitive peoples, as we have seen, some-times
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 pre-vent
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 formida-ble
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 endan-gered.
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 dis-ease,
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
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Page 209?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, there-fore,
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 com-mand.
This command the kings always
obeyed down to the reign of Ergamenes, a contempo-rary
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 pre-vailed
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 found-ed
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 precau-tion
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 vir-gin:
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
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Page 210?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 reign-ing
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 dis-missed
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 occu-pied
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
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Page 211?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 com-monly
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 speak-ing
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 dis-appearance
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 lat-ter
is correct. In both we see a
series of divine kings on whose life the fertility of men, of cat-tle,
and of vegetation is believed
to depend, and who are put to death, whether in single com-bat
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 transmit-ting
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 regu-larity
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
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Page 212?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 ene-mies.
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 fol-lows.
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
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Page 213?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 immedi-ately
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 pro-claimed.
This is what has happened to
many Matiamvos, and what must happen to the pres-ent
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 occa-sioned
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 especial-ly
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 indis-pensable
that their king should never
exhibit those proofs of having become unfit and incom-petent
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 anal-ogy
we may conjecture that he was
killed.
The custom of putting kings to
death as soon as they suffered from any personal defect pre-vailed
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 phys-ical
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
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Page 214?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 per-son
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 abdicat-ed.
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
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Page 215?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 eld-ers
(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 poi-son
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 him-self
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 light-ing
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 innu-merable
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 per-forms
this sacrifice to the idol,
and whoever desires to reign another twelve years and under-take
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 pre-tention
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
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Page 216?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 cus-tom
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 hap-pened,
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
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Page 217?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 fes-tival
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 north-ern
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 Fernăo 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 every-thing
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 ele-vation
and followed each other in the
dusty road of death in a single day. The people defend-ed
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
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Page 218?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 shout-ed
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
decapi-tation....
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 roy-alty
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 discom-fited
rival retired to Sweden and
was afterwards slain in an attempt to repair his shattered for-tunes.
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
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Page 219?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 him-self
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 stand-ing
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 com-munity.
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 maid-ens
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
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Page 220?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 slop-ing
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 resem-blance
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 circum-stances
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 sea-
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Page
221?son 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 con-demned
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 substitu-tion
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 inno-cent
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 exam-ples
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 cus-tom
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 jest-ing
in the business. Having caught
it, he carries it under his arm, with the sharp end down-wards,
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
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Page 222?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.”
Chapter XXV
Temporary Kings
IN some places the modified
form of the old custom of regicide which appears to have pre-vailed
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 rev-enues
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 present-ed
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 scatter-ing
the first seed of the season.
As soon as the nine furrows are drawn, the crowd of specta-tors
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
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Page 223?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, por-tending
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, ostensi-bly
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 per-sonage
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 per-formance
are blocked with carriages:
lamp-posts and telegraph posts, to which eager specta-tors
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 trum-pets
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 govern-ment
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
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Page 224?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 shop-keepers
and householders, against whom
they trump up various humorous charges. The tem-porary
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 stu-dents
have enough to furnish forth a
magnificent banquet; and altogether they enjoy them-selves
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 them-selves
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 begin-ning
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
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Page 225?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 appar-ently
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 ban-ishing
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 trans-ferred
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
anx-iously,
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
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Page 226?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 inten-tion
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.
Chapter 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 pur-pose
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 supernatu-ral
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 sup-posed
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.
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Page 227?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 ora-cle
at Delphi to enquire the cause
of the dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the mes-senger
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 grand-son
Cytisorus, who arrived in the
nick of time from Colchis, or by Hercules, who brought tid-ings
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 attempt-ed
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 sacri-ficed
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 sacri-ficed.
These instances appear to have
been notorious, if not frequent; for the writer of a dia-logue
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
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Page 228?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 pro-fessed
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.
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Page 229?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.
Chapter 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 ful-fil
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 heed-ful
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, with-out
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 sui-cide,
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 occa-sion
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
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Page 230?Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected
in this work should suf-fice
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 succes-sor.
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 funda-mental
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 want-ing.
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 nat-ural
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 transmit-ted
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 prede-cessors
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.
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Page 231?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.
Chapter 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 spe-cial
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 reason-ing
would apply to the King of the
Wood; he, too, had to be killed in order that the divine spir-it,
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 intelligi-ble.
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 mitiga-tion
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
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Page 232?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 vil-lage
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 execu-
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233?tioner 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 compan-ions
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 head-less
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 rep-
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234?resentatives 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 vigor-ous
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 incar-nation,
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
rep-resentative
of the tree-spirit or spirit
of vegetation in spring. For the decay of plant life in win-ter
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 prob-ably
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 resurrec-tion
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 north-ern
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 con-
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Page
235?dition 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 broth-er.
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
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Page 236?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-mov-ing
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 trou-bled
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 hom-age
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 anxi-ety
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 effi-gy
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
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Page 237?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 tri-umphal
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 horse-men
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 extin-guished.
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 sen-tenced
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
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Page 238?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 bur-den,
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 rab-ble,
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 bro-ken-
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
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Page 239?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 phan-tom
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 pro-cession,
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 profess-es
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
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Page 240?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 fas-tening
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 flow-ers
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 pup-pet
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 effi-gy
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 visit-ed
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
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Page 241?Mid-Lent. This they carried through all the streets with songs and
showed it to the young mar-ried
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 dis-tricts
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 sick-ness
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 vil-lage,
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
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Page 242?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 omi-nous
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 pur-pose
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 expul-sion
of Death, is only implied or
at most announced. In the following ceremonies it is plainly
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Page 243?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 ever-greens,
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, repre-senting
Death, to a wheel, which they
trundled to the top of a hill. Then setting fire to the fig-ure
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 instru-ment
of the general revival. Thus
in some parts of Lusatia women alone are concerned in car-rying
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
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Page 244?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 cere-mony
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 holi-day
attire of a young peasant
woman, with a red hood, silver brooches, and a profusion of rib-bons
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 gaz-ing
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 vil-lage,
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 them-selves
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 destruc-tion
of the figure of Death is
plainly equivalent to the trees or branches which, in the preced-ing
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
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Page 245?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 frag-ments.
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 previ-ously
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 pro-fess
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 some-times
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
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Page 246?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 enact-ed
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 fer-tilising
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 comparative-ly
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, per-haps
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 247?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 con-test
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 represen-tative
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 com-rade,
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 dis-guise.
Among the Central Esquimaux of
North America the contest between representatives of sum-mer
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 ptarmi-gans
get the worst of it, then
summer has won the game and fine weather may be expected
to prevail through the winter.
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Page 248?6. DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF KOSTRUBONKO
In 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 rep-resented
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
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Page 249?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 nec-essary
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 mid-summer
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 con-fined
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 dűb
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Page 250?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 vegeta-tion
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 corre-sponds
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 equiva-lents
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 cere-monies
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 ver-dure,
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 our-selves
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
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Page 251?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 terri-fied
when in the darkness of night
a streak of sky is suddenly illumined by the flash of a mete-or,
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, elat-ed
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 van-ished,
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 fail-ure.
With the advance of knowledge
these ceremonies either cease to be performed altogeth-er
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
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Page 252?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 disap-pearance
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 remem-ber
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 trap-pings—
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 senti-mental
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.
Chapter XXIX
The Myth of Adonis
THE spectacle of the great
changes which annually pass over the face of the earth has pow-erfully
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
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Page 253?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 vegeta-tion
menace him with extinction. At
a certain stage of development men seem to have imag-ined
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 reli-gious
theory. For although men now
attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corre-sponding
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 mar-riage,
the death, and the rebirth or
revival of the gods, their religious or rather magical dra-mas
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 dra-matic
representation of reviving
plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for the pur-pose
of furthering at the same time
and by the same act the multiplication of fruits, of ani-mals,
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
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Page 254?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 misunderstand-ing
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 pres-ence
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,
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Page 255?‘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 descrip-tions
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 hunt-ing
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 pos-session
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.
Chapter 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 counter-part,
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
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religious capital of the country, the
Mecca or Jerusalem of the
Phoenicians. The city stood on a height beside the sea, and con-tained
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 jour-ney
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 veg-etation.
The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite gran-ite
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 moun-tain
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 con-vent
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
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Page 257?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.
Chapter 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 compari-son
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 wor-shipped
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.
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Page 258?In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly
obliged by custom to pros-titute
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 serv-ice
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 god-dess.
A Greek inscription found at
Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious prosti-tution
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 sup-ported
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 neigh-bouring
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 sub-stantial
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
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Page 259?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 out-bursts
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 personat-ed
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 con-nect
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 cere-mony
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 com-mon
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;
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Page 260?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 inno-cent
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 con-firmed
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 instru-ment
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 wilder-ness
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 suc-cess
of modern dowsers, though his
mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he ren-dered
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 per-
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Page
261?haps 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 can-not
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.
Chapter 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 differ-ent
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 sanc-tuary
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
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Page 262?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 argu-ment
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 perma-nently
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 effi-gies,
and the air was rent with the
noise of women wailing for the dead Adonis. The circum-stance
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 lamenta-tion
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
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Page 263?obviously the idea of death and resurrection as the disappearance and
reappearance of veg-etation
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 con-ceived
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 phe-nomenon
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 explana-tion
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-Bűgât, 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 particu-lar
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
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Page 264?harvest rite designed to propitiate the corngod, who was then either
perishing under the sick-les
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 herds-man
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 whenev-er,
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 accord-ingly,
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 liv-ing
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-spir-it,
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 vic-tims
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 opportu-nity
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
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Page 265?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 cen-tury
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 nat-ural
interpretation, means the Festival
of Flowers, and the title would fit well with the sub-stance
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, con-ceived
not as the King of Terrors,
but as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to him-self
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 vege-tation
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.
Chapter 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 mani-
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266?festations 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 duck-ing
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 vege-tation,
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 danc-ing-
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 fes-tival,
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 pre-senting
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
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Page 267?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 ensur-ing
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 fes-tival
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 sweet-heart),
offering to be her compare. The
invitation is considered as an honour by the girl’s fam-ily,
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 fea-tures.
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-
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268?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 festi-val.
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 sup-poses,
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 lamen-tation.
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
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Page 269?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 vis-ible
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 tem-perament
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 Pietŕ 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 wonder-fully
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 cele-brated
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 east-ern
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
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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 plan-et
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 disappear-ance.
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 nat-urally
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 guid-ed
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.
Chapter 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 cus-tom,
or rather both were probably
invented to explain certain customs observed by the wor-shippers.
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 worship-pers,
especially the people of
Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the wor-shippers
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.
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Page 271?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 non-sense,
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 god-dess
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 dis-tance,
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 cym-bals
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 trum-pets.
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 cym-bals,
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 prob-ably
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
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Page 272?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 resem-bled
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 sub-sided,
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
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Page 273?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 mor-row,
the twenty-fifth day of March,
which was reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resur-rection
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 preced-ing
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 instru-ments
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 eager-ness
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 adora-tion,
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 cen-
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Page
274?tre 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.
Chapter 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 pre-served
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, per-haps,
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 useful-ness.
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 fecundi-ty,
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 fer-tility
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
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Page 275?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.
Chapter XXXVI
Human Representatives of Attis
FROM inscriptions it appears
that both at Pessinus and Rome the high-priest of Cybele regu-larly
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, hang-ing
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 bar-barous
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
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Page 276?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 her-self
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 sacri-fice
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.
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Page 277?Chapter 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 establish-ment
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 lit-tle
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 pre-ferred
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 exis-tence
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 exis-tence
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, for-getful
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 individ-
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Page
278?ual 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 inter-ests
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 phi-losophy,
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 pop-ularity
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 con-querors
of Mexico and Peru many of the
native heathen rites appeared to be diabolical coun-terfeits
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 aspi-rations
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 reck-oned
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 sol-stice,
they brought forth and
exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus con-ceived
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?
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Page 279?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 affec-tions
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 wide-spread
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 his-torical
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 com-bined
in himself the characters of
the divine Father and the divine Son, was officially celebrat-ed
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
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Page 280?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 conjectur-ing
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 celebra-tion
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 sea-son
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 wor-ship
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 resur-rection
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 coin-cidence
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 inflex-ible
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 nar-row
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
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Page 281?compassion of their noble Founders, two of those beautiful spirits who
appear at rare inter-vals
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 antithe-sis
the one sought that salvation
in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffer-ing,
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 meas-ure
with the prejudices, the
passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of accom-modation
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.
Chapter XXXVIII
The Myth of Osiris
IN ancient Egypt the god whose
death and resurrection were annually celebrated with alter-nate
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 bor-rowed
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
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Page 282?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 mar-ried
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 intro-duced
the cultivation of these
grains amongst his people, who forthwith abandoned cannibal-ism
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 cof-fer
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 con-ceived
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.
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Page 283?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 cof-fer
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 hin-dered
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 peo-ple
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
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Page 284?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 ded-icated
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 numer-ous,
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.
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Page 285?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 profession-al
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 thou-sands
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 associat-ed
with his myth or memory. One
of them was Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to pos-sess
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 trans-port
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.
Chapter 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
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Page 286?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 fella-heen.
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 inun-dation
of the Nile, which, regulated
by an elaborate system of dams and canals, was distrib-uted
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 sub-merged,
and presents the appearance of
a sea of turbid water, from which the towns and vil-lages,
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
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Page 287?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 sum-mer.
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 com-monly
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
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Page 288?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 wan-dering
elsewhere.” “Another curious
ceremony, of which even the memory is now almost for-gotten,
was enacted after the first
working of the corn, when the owner or priest stood in suc-
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289?cession 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 lamenta-tions
and the invocations of the Old
Woman of the Corn resemble the ancient Egyptian cus-toms
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 per-form
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 bas-ketful
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
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Page 290?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 sol-stice,
when the gilt cow was carried
seven times round the temple. A great feature of the festi-val
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 occa-sion
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 repre-sentative
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 pro-fessed
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.
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Page 291?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 situ-ated
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 fea-tures
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 oper-ation
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 gar-den
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 subter-ranean
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 bur-ial
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 high-er,
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 por-
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292?trayed 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 inscrip-tion,
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 cen-tral
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 sup-port
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 sow-ing
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.
Chapter 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
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Page 293?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 sow-ing,
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 off-spring
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 sup-ported
by the tale that Isis placed
the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sieve. Or more proba-bly
the legend may be a
reminiscence of a custom of slaying a human victim, perhaps a rep-resentative
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 sen-ators,
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 sacrific-ing
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 indi-cate
that he too perished in the character
of the god whose death he died. It is significant that
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Page 294?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 bar-rows
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 gar-dens
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 gar-den.
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 dis-qualified
it for the sacrifice. If, as I
conjecture, these human sacrifices were intended to pro-mote
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 represen-tative
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 some-times
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
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Page 295?religion than the worship of the cereals. The character of Osiris as a
tree-spirit was represent-ed
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 cut-ting
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 superflu-ous
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 expres-sive
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 impor-tant
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 profli-gate
the emblems and the ceremonies
which the Egyptians employed for the purpose of giv-ing
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 reli-
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296?gions 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 inde-pendent
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 peo-ple
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 instru-ment
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.
Chapter 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 hiero-glyphics
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 dis-covery
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
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Page 297?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 compo-sure,
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 won-der,
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 symbol-ism
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.”
Chapter 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.
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Page 298?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 rea-son
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 phe-nomenon
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-cus-tom.
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 reject-ed
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 bor-rowed,
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 witness-es
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
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Chapter 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 intend-ed,
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 consider-ation
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
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Page 300?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 hus-bandmen,
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 par-ticularly
sacred to him, in addition to
the vine, was the pine-tree. The Delphic oracle com-manded
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 sanctu-ary
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 agricul-tural
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
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Page 301?looking at himself in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by
turning himself into vari-ous
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 murder-ous
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 trans-ferred
the throne and sceptre to the
youthful Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno cher-ished
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
satel-lites,
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 vio-lets
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 suf-fered
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 car-ried
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 daugh-ter,
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 resurrec-tion
of Dionysus is that he
descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the
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Page 302?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 hang-ing
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 rep-resented
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 con-sider
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 ani-mals
and of men and then devouring
them raw has been practised as a religious rite by sav-ages
in modern times. We need not
therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity to
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Page 303?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 veg-etable
husk, and to leave their human
attributes (which are always the kernel of the concep-tion)
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 relation-ship
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 for-mer
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 injur-ing
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 sup-posed
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 sub-stituted.
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 sacri-ficing
divine kings in the character
of Dionysus and of dispersing the fragments of their bro-ken
bodies over the fields for the
purpose of fertilising them. It is probably no mere coinci-dence
that Dionysus himself is said
to have been torn in pieces at Thebes, the very place
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Page 304?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 proba-ble,
that these curious rites were
themselves mitigations of an older and ruder custom of sac-rificing
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.
Chapter 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 counter-parts,
a goddess mourns the loss of a
loved one, who personifies the vegetation, more espe-cially
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 com-plete
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 car-ried
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
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Page 305?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 command-ed
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 god-desses
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 liveli-hood
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 tradi-tional
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 tri-umphal
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 festi-val.
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 partici-pation
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 consist-ed
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 per-
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Page
306?son. 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, confi-dently
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 fig-ures
of the two goddesses, the
mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into personifica-tions
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 per-sonification
of the young corn of the
present year, may not the mother goddess be a personi-fication
of the old corn of last year,
which has given birth to the new crops? The only alterna-tive
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 accord-ingly
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 discov-ery
far and wide through the
agency of Triptolemus, whom she sent forth as an itinerant mis-sionary
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
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Page 307?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 associa-tion
with the corn in the clearest
manner.
How deeply implanted in the
mind of the ancient Greeks was this faith in Demeter as god-dess
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 nine-teenth
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 persua-sion
that their rich harvests were
the effect of her bounty, and since her removal, their abun-dance,
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
nine-teenth
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 them-selves
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 opin-ion,
“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 fecun-dity
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 moth-er
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
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Page 308?Persephone militates decidedly against the view that the two goddesses
are mythical embodi-ments
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
main-tain
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 reflec-tion
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 ini-tiation
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 logi-cal
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.
Chapter 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
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Page 309?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-moth-er,”
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 neighbour-hood
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 pup-pet
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
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Page 310?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 part-ner.
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, rib-bons,
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 neigh-bourhood
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.
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Page 311?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 sin-gle
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 iden-tification
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 regu-lar
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 grum-bles
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
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Page 312?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 har-vest.
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 per-sons
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 reap-
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Page
313?ing 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 common-ly
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 fig-ure
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-wag-gon,
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 neigh-bouring
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
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Page 314?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, car-ried
or carted about the village,
and set down at last on the dunghill, or taken to the thresh-ing-
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 win-nowing
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 whim-pers
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
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Page 315?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 rea-sons
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 wit-nessed
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 sick-le
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 rib-bons,
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 pre-served
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
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Page 316?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 fig-ure
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
com-pletely
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
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Page 317?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 “pro-viding
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 pass-ing
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 repre-sented
both by a tree and by a
person, so in the harvest customs the corn-spirit is represent-ed
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 per-sonal
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 vegeta-tion
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.
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Page 318?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 defi-nite
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 individ-ual
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 mead-ows,
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 rit-ual
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.
Chapter XLVI
The Corn-Mother in Many Lands
1. THE CORN-MOTHER IN MANY
LANDS
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 illus-trate,
beginning with the American
personification of the maize.
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Page 319?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
repre-sentative
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 cus-tom
from another source. The
Peruvians, we are told, believed all useful plants to be animat-ed
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 repre-sented
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 dis-
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320?pelled 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 ren-der
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 peo-ple
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 com-pletely
separated from it without
fatal effects, though if its absence be prolonged beyond cer-tain
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 vari-ous
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 com-parisons
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 reap-ing
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
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Page 321?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 pro-vided
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 har-vesting
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 culti-vation
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
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Page 322?of; but before harvest another Rice-mother is found. When the crop is
ripe for cutting, the old-est
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 prac-tice
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
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Page 323?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-pe˘ngantčn, that is, the Rice-bride and the Rice-bride-groom;
their wedding feast is
celebrated, and the cutting of the rice begins immediately after-wards.
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 rep-resent
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
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Page 324?whole party eat, drink, and make merry. This ceremony at the
threshing-floor is the only occa-sion
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 thresh-ing
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 represent-ed
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 messen-gers
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 bear-ing
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 per-formance
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 pur-pose
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 sym-bols
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 rep-
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325?resented 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 clas-sical
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-moth-er
(Zˇytniamatka); the
pretended child represents the Corn-baby, and the whole cere-mony
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 repre-sented
either by a Corn-mother (Old
Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, etc.), not
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Page 326?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 lat-ter
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 reappear-ance
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 person-ified
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 con-ception
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 some-what
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 succes-sion
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 disap-pears
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 person-ifications
(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 con-ceived
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 con-
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Page
327?ceived 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 represent-ed
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 prob-lem
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 produc-ing
the object in question, the
problem is easily solved. Since the object is believed to be pro-duced
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 pro-ducer
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 personifica-tion
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.
Chapter 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
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Page 328?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 reli-gion
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 misun-derstanding
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 treat-ed
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
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Page 329?for him, calling him in plaintive strains, which they continued to
chant at harvest ever after-wards.
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 com-pelled
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 descrip-tion
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-spir-it,
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 successive-ly,
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 fel-low-
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 suf-fer
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 fac-ing
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
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Page 330?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 fol-lows.
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 har-vesters
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 striv-ing
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.”
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Page 331?II. Passing to the second point of comparison between the Lityerses
story and European har-vest
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 thresh-ing-
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
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Page 332?visitor entering it for the first time. All over Germany it is customary
for the reapers or thresh-ers
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 thresh-ing-
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 pay-ment
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:
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Page 333?“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 har-vest-
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 Cańar (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 togeth-er.
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 correspon-ding
to the age of the corn; for
they sacrificed new-born babes at sowing, older children when
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Page 334?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 pre-served
as a powerful talisman. They
thought that an omission of this sacrifice would be fol-lowed
by the total failure of the
crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The victim was a cap-tive
of either sex. He was clad in
the gayest and most costly attire, was fattened on the choic-est
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 sacri-fice
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 war-riors.
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 fer-tilise
them. By this sacrifice they
hoped to obtain plentiful crops.
AWest 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
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Page 335?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 plant-ing
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 fash-ion.
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 vic-tims
to be sacrificed on various
occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal proces-sion,
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 perpe-trated.
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 cultiva-tion
of turmeric, the Khonds
arguing that the turmeric could not have a deep red colour with-out
the shedding of blood. The
victim or Meriah, as he was called, was acceptable to the god-dess
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
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Page 336?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 danc-ing,
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 sacri-fice
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 cus-tom,
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 con-summate
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 pro-cession
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 neces-sary,
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 com-monest
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, sur-rounded
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
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Page 337?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 scat-tered
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 vic-tim.
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 red-ness
of the turmeric and his tears
producing rain; for it can hardly be doubted that, originally
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Page 338?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 vegeta-tion;
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 slaugh-ter
in this sense, and to suppose
that wherever such slaughter takes place, there must neces-sarily
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 identifi-cation
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 corre-spondence
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 sup-pose,
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
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Page 339?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 cus-tom
of pretending to kill him with
the scythe or the flail. Once more the Khond custom of pour-ing
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 improb-ability
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-cus-toms
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 vic-tim
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 har-vest-
field. Grounds have been
already shown for believing that similarly in Europe the repre-sentative
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 fur-nish
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 counte-nanced
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 van-quished
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 represen-tative
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
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Page 340?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 remem-bered
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 spir-its
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
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Page 341?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 har-vester
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 per-mitted
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 sim-ilarity
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 annu-ally
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
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Page 342?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 him-self.
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 leg-end
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 resem-blance
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
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Page 343?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 repre-sents,
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 dis-tance;
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 cen-tre,
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 pro-
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Page
344?longed 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 ‘cry-ing
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 some-times
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 flow-ers,
shouting and singing. The
manservant who attended Mrs. Bray said ‘it was only the peo-ple
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 farm-ing-
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 con-ceived
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
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Page 345?luck till the next harvest came round. Near Trčves, 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 exam-ples
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.
Chapter 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 rejoic-ings
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 sup-posed
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 fin-ished,
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
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Page 346?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 neighbour-hood
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 reap-ing
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 partic-ular
crop. The reaper of the last
corn is himself called Wolf or the Rye-wolf, if the crop is rye,
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Page 347?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 har-vesters
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 mid-winter,
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
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Page 348?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, espe-cially
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 sick-le
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
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Page 349?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 activi-ty
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,
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Page 350?“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 mid-dle
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
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Page 351?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 other-wise,
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 rep-resented
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, bend-ing
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 fel-lows
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 har-vesters
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 rea-son
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.
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Page 352?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 neigh-bour
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 effi-gy
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 dis-trict
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 dis-trict
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
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Page 353?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 represent-ed
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 vari-ous
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 neigh-bours,
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 immediate-ly
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 ŕ 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 fin-ished
threshing. So at
Herbrechtingen, in Thüringen, the effigy of a ragged old woman is flung
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Page 354?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 fol-lows,
they say “He (or she) is
giving birth to the Calf.” In some parts of Prussia, in similar cir-cumstances,
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 sup-posed
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 har-vest
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 farm-house
to which he paid his unwelcome
visit.
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Page 355?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, gen-erally,
in Swabia the man who gives
the last stroke with the flail is called Sow. He may, how-ever,
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 dirty-ing
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 “car-ried
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 black-ened,
and is set on a cart and drawn
round the village by his fellows, followed by a crowd cry-ing
“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
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Page 356?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 reap-pears
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 twen-ty-
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 morn-ing
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 dis-tributed
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 crum-bled
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
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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 continu-ance
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 representa-tive;
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 primi-tive
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 common-ly
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
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Page 358?often stand round the last patch of corn armed with sticks or guns,
with which they kill the ani-mals
as they dart out of their last
refuge among the stalks. Now, primitive man, to whom mag-ical
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 escap-ing
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 explana-tion
of the latter identification
are bound to show that their theory covers the former identifica-tion
also.
Chapter 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 represent-ed
more or less completely in the
form of goats. Thus, Pan was regularly portrayed in sculp-ture
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 wood-land
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 pleas-ure;
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
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Page 359?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 obvi-ous
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 conclud-ing
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 origi-nally
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 expres-sion
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 affini-ties.
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 vegeta-tion.
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 fol-lows.
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.
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Page 360?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 sacri-lege
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 sup-ported
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 per-son
who plucks the first fruit
from the tree and thereby receives the name of “the great mon-dard”
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 regard-ed
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
sacri-fice
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, espe-cially
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 rep-resent
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-
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361?stalks instead of blood
are seen issuing from the wound inflicted by the knife. Such represen-tations
certainly suggest that the
bull, whose sacrifice appears to have formed a leading fea-ture
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 prognos-ticate
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 frag-ments
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 wor-shippers
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 ani-mal
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 ani-mal,
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
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Page 362?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 cus-tomary
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 obvi-ously
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 foot-prints
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 pur-pose
of securing a good crop; so in
the neighbourhood of Grenoble the goat killed on the har-
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363?vest-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 hys,— “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 per-ished
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 sto-ries
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
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Page 364?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 abomi-nated
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 partak-en
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 sacri-ficed
them, but ate of their flesh,
though on any other day of the year they would neither sac-rifice
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 suppo-sition
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 ani-
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365?mals 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 capiaď (an animal like a pig) it would give them leprosy;
perhaps the capiaď 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 min-gle
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 rid-ding
themselves of the sacred
contagion, if it may be so called, which they caught by touch-ing
sacred objects. Various
ceremonies were performed for the purpose of removing this con-tagion.
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, whatev-er
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 but-terfly
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
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Page 366?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 ani-mal
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 equal-ly
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 hostili-ty
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 rela-tion
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 origi-nally,
if I am right, the very
freedom with which the boar ranged at will through the corn led
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Page 367?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 pro-found
reverence, he was not suffered
to live beyond a certain length of time which was pre-scribed
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 repre-sented
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 contin-ue
to do what their fathers did
before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted
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Page 368?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 excep-tion
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 vic-tim
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 char-iot-
race was run on the Field of
Mars. Stabbed with a spear, the right-hand horse of the victo-rious
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 car-ried
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
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Page 369?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 fod-der
to the horses in spring or the
cattle at Christmas, and giving the Yule Boar to the plough-ing
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 commu-nity
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 celebra-tion
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 har-vest
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.
Chapter L
Eating the God
1. THE SACRAMENTS OF
FIRST-FRUITS
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Page 370?WE have now seen that the corn-spirit is represented sometimes in
human, sometimes in ani-mal
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 representa-tives
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 togeth-er.
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 lift-ed
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 occa-sion.
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 fol-lowed
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
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Page 371?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 clergy-man
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 nour-ish
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 regard-ed
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 com-mon
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
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Page 372?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 obla-tion,
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 har-vest.
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 after-wards
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 festi-val
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 par-
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Page
373?take 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 pur-pose,
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 peo-ple
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 chil-dren,
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 fur-niture;
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
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Page 374?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 post-ed
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 decoc-tion
of button-snake root “in order
to vomit and purge their sinful bodies.” That the people out-side
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 gen-eral
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 offer-ing,
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 cus-toms,
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 indispensa-ble.
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.
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Page 375?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 performanc-es
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 suck-ers.
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 rever-ently
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 sea-son,
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 instruc-tive,
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 over-come
their scruples, are due at
least in large measure to a notion that the plant or tree is ani-mated
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 sacra-ment
or communion with a deity, or
at all events with a powerful spirit.
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Page 376?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 divin-ity.
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 purga-tive
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 princi-pal
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 reli-gious
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 maid-ens
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
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Page 377?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 minis-ters,
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 strict-ly.
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 orna-ments
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 con-version
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
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Page 378?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 noth-ing
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 knead-ed
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 fif-teen
of them. Having been made,
they were placed in the oratory of each house and wor-shipped.
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 ser-vants,
“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,
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Page 379?like the paste figures of the gods in Mexico, and were eaten
sacramentally by his worship-pers.
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 rec-ollection
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 put-ting
up dummies to divert the
attention of ghosts or demons from living people is not uncom-mon.
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 fore-going
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 espe-cial
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 dis-tricts
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 lit-tle
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.
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Page 380?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; fortu-nately,
however, the magician can
induce these maleficent beings to come out of the sick per-son
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 lur-ing
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 evi-dence
of Plutarch, who speaks of the
ceremony as “the greatest of purifications.”
Chapter 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
transfer-ring
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 worship-pers
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 char-
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Page
381?acteristic 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 pecca-ry,
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 them-selves
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 sav-age
philosophy. They imagined that
the game which they pursued would be influenced sym-pathetically
by the food in the body of the
hunter, so that if he had eaten of swift-footed ani-mals,
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 over-take
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 will-ing
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
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Page 382?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 exceed-ingly
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.
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Page 383?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 sup-posed
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 mem-bers,
which are viewed as the seat
of other virtues, are cut from his body and baked to cin-ders.
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 par-celled
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 notori-ous
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 fore-head
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
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Page 384?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?”
Chapter 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 ani-mals
and men. It remains to show
that hunting and pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peo-ples,
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 shep-herds
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 liv-ing
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 prin-cipal
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
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Page 385?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 ani-mal;
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 sup-ported
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.
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Page 386?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 fur-nished
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 perma-nent
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 represen-tative
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 dis-ease
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 plac-ing
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 pecu-liar
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
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Page 387?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 posi-tion.
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 grab-bing
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 mem-ory
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 pathetical-
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Page
388?ly, 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 broth-er’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 proba-bly
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
occa-sionally
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.
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Page 389?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, wor-ship
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 treat-ed
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 regard-
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Page
390?ed and honoured as a
fetish, or even as a sort of higher being.” In Yezo the festival is gener-ally
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 mas-ters,
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 pur-pose
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 help-ing
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 suc-cess
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 equiva-lent
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
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Page 391?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 hop-ping
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 cou-ple
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
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Page 392?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 ora-tor.
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 con-viction;
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
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Page 393?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 festi-vals
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 vil-lage
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
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Page 394?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 ani-mals.
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 ani-mals
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 assem-bled
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,
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Page 395?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 accom-paniment
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 disap-pears
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 privi-leged
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 kin-dled
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 call-ing
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
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Page 396?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 partic-ularly
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 regard-ed
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 sick-ness
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 ani-mal’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 sacri-ficed:
“Beloved deity, we have
brought you up because we loved you, and now we are about
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Page 397?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, neverthe-less,
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 bod-ies
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 anoth-er
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 espe-cially
to the sacrifice of bears.
Thus among the benefits which
the Aino anticipates from the slaughter of the worshipful ani-mals
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 ani-mals.
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 proba-
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398?bly 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 rit-ual,
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.
Chapter 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 sav-age
is not so proud; he commonly
believes that animals are endowed with feelings and intelli-gence
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 philoso-
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399?phy 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 con-siders
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 rela-tives,
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 destruc-tion
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 rela-tions
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 considera-tion
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 car-case
and invoke God, declaring that
they slew the animal in retaliation for the loss of a kins-man.
Vengeance having been thus
taken, they swear not to attack another tiger except under
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Page 400?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 kin-dred
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 crav-ing
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 some-times
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 peo-ple
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 tri-fles.
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 wan-dering
ghost of the slain bear would
attack them on the first opportunity, if they did not thus
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Page 401?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 ceremo-ny
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 after-wards
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
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Page 402?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, pro-fessing
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 trem-bling,
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 fol-lowing
year; that it will induce its
relatives to come along, telling them of the hospitable recep-tion
that has been accorded to it.
According to the Koryak ideas, the whales, like all other ani-mals,
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 decapi-tated
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;
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Page 403?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 pre-pared
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 ani-mal,
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 rela-tion.
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 propor-tioned
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 dis-tinctions
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 hom-age....
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 aston-ishment
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
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Page 404?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 pre-serve
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 com-manded
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 fisher-man
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
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Page 405?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 wor-shipped
sardines in one region, where
they killed more of them than of any other fish; in oth-ers,
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 servicea-ble
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
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Page 406?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 high-est
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 sym-metrical
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 sacri-ficing
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 subter-ranean
world of the dead. Sometimes,
as after feasting on a bear, they seem to have content-ed
themselves with thus burying
the bones. Thus the Lapps expected the resurrection of the
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Page 407?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 ani-mal’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 sacri-fice.
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 imi-tating
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
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Page 408?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 exces-sive
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 exor-cism
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 ver-min
(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 cele-brating
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.
Chapter LIV
Types of Animal Sacrament
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Page 409?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 behav-iour
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 ani-mal,
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 ani-mal
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 wor-shipping
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
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Page 410?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 sacri-fices,
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 indi-vidual
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 dis-tinction—
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 ceremoni-ous
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 individu-als.
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 consecrat-ing
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 exclud-ed
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 prac-tise
agriculture, appear to kill a
lamb sacramentally on certain solemn occasions. The custom
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Page 411?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 sad-ness,
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 peo-ple
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 prom-enading
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, how-ever,
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
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Page 412?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 exam-ple
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 cus-tom
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.
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Page 413?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 pro-cession
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 broom-stick,
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 car-ried
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 wor-shipful
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 por-tion
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 pre-historic
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
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Page 414?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 dis-eases
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.
Chapter 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 accu-mulated
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 physi-cal
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 fan-cies
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 per-son
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 abscess-es:
“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 con-tracts
the disease, and the original
patient recovers.”
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Page 415?Sometimes in case of sickness the malady is transferred to an effigy
as a preliminary to pass-ing
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 or hide 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 par-ticular
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 some-times
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
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Page 416?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, repre-senting
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 omi-nous
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 bid-den
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 house-hold.
The Huzuls of the Carpathians
imagine that they can transfer freckles to the first swal-low
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 repeat-ed.
“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 con-fession
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 sec-ular
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 disap-pears,
and that it is never heard
of.”
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Page 417?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 per-formed
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 emer-gencies
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 ora-cles
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.
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Page 418?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 cer-tain
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 scor-pion,
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
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Page 419?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 commun-ion
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.
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Page 420?Chapter 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 accu-mulated
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 sus-tains,
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
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Page 421?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 hap-pened,
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 quar-ters
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 mock-ing
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 more-over
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,
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Page 422?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 address-es
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 climb-ing
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 proceed-ings
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 popula-tion,
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 vil-lage
gate. Its blood, mixed with
small river pebbles, was sprinkled on the houses, the thresh-old
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 prin-cipal
invention and most proper
means, so they say, to expel from the town or village the dev-ils
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
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Page 423?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 congratula-tions
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 pre-vent
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 thick-ets
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 per-forming
the same ceremony at every
station along the river, and I am told it is an annual cus-
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Page
424?tom.”
Certain seasons of the year
mark themselves naturally out as appropriate moments for a gen-eral
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 Tuńa 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 Tuńa 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 vio-lently,
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 Tunńa 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 anoth-er,
the Esquimaux of Baffin Land
fancy they hear the voices of the spirits who people the mis-chief-
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 visi-tants
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 pray-ing,
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
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Page 425?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 cer-emonies
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 mes-senger
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 foun-tain,
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
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Page 426?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 mes-sengers
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 run-ners
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 preced-ed
by a feast of eight days,
during which mirth and jollity, skipping, dancing, and singing pre-vail,
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 ves-sels,
“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 cus-tom
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 annu-
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Page
427?ally before the people
partake of the new yams. The chiefs summon the priests and magi-cians
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, smit-ing
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 peo-ple
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 rich-es,
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 per-son
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 ser-vants
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
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Page 428?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 simi-larly
employed. The next day is
spent in rejoicings. In Chitral this festival is called “devil-driv-ing.”
On the other hand the Khonds
of India expel the devils at seed-time instead of at har-vest.
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 spir-its,
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 prin-cipal
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 cry-ing,
“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 them-selves
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 mali-
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Page
429?cious 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 suf-fered,
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 cere-mony
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 feast-ing,
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 larce-ny,
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 begin-neth
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), invit-ing
them to eat and drink, when
presently he accuses them in a strange language, by charac-ters
and figures, etc., of many
offences and crimes committed by them, as to their having dis-quieted
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
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Page 430?remains of the groats and the other food are then distributed among
all the houses in propor-tion
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
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Page 431?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 spir-its
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 lit-tle
fruit that year. Again, in
Labruguičre, 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.
Chapter 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
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Page 432?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 maraud-ing
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 cele-brated
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 per-formed.
These ceremonies last for five
nights and consist of dances, in which only men, fan-tastically
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 lit-tle
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
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Page 433?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 con-vey
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 peo-ple
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 vil-lage
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 immedi-ately
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 peo-ple
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 dis-tricts
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
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Page 434?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 scape-goat.
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
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Page 435?immediate expulsion of them in invisible form, tends to become
periodic, and for a like rea-son.
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 appro-priate
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 lit-tle
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 dev-ils.
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 dis-tributed
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 grave-yard.
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 cere-
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Page
436?monies 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, bul-locks,
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 pos-sible
for them to raise. The hubbub
goes on till the approach of dawn, when it gradually sub-sides
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 mem-ber
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
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Page 437?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 resi-dence
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, con-fessed
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 Ł2. 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 dis-tance
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 merci-less
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 sup-
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Page
438?plied 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, forbid-ding
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 rever-ence
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 circum-stances
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 sacri-ficed,
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, espe-cially
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 col-lected
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
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Page 439?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 car-ried
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 misfor-tunes
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 hom-age.
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 con-duct
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 build-ing,
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
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Page 440?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, say-ing
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 pro-vided
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 pur-chase
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 con-ditions
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
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Page 441?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 neces-sary
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 coun-tenance
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 him-self,
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 unillu-mined
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 con-ceived
of as invisible or as embodied
in a material form, is a circumstance entirely subordi-nate
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 prim-itive
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 expul-sion
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
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Page 442?involves any alteration in the time of celebrating this great annual
rite. Some of the agricultur-al
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 com-monly
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 expul-sion
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 har-vest-
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 suspect-ed
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 ordi-nary
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 inde-pendent.
On the one hand we have seen
that it has been customary to kill the human or ani-mal
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
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Page 443?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 explica-ble
on this hypothesis alone. Such
are the marks of joy with which the effigy of Death is car-ried
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 dis-ease-
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.
Chapter 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 har-vest.
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 conse-cration
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
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Page 444?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 scape-goats.
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 festi-val
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 excom-municated,
“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 con-vey
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.
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Page 445?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 suf-fered
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 ceremo-ny
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 har-vest
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 weak-ness
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 expecta-tion
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 prop-erties
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
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Page 446?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 caprifi-cation
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 vic-tims,
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 influ-ences;
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
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Page 447?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 vindi-cated
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 scape-goats,
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 out-casts
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 cus-tom
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 popula-tion
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 poi-son
in the blood of the
industrious and contented peasantry. Slavery and private property
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Page 448?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 sev-enteenth
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 inver-sion
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 sup-posed
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 mul-titude
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
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Page 449?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 martyrolo-gist
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 fol-lowed
his martyrdom, when Moesia was
occupied and ravaged by successive hordes of bar-barian
invaders. At all events it
appears certain from the independent and mutually confirma-tory
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 sol-diers
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 fes-tive
crowds, and through the clear
frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte showed his coro-nal
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 emascu-lated
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 assum-ing
that in an earlier and more
barbarous age it was the universal practice in ancient Italy,
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Page 450?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 trans-formed
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.
Chapter 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 wor-shipped
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)
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Page 451?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 annual-ly
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 gar-land
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 exqui-site
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 peo-ple
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 suc-cession
and at appointed places. On
the last day the young man, attended by his wives and
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Page 452?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 com-mon
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 com-pelled,
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, put-ting
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 mid-night,
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 out-side
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 ban-nisters
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 solem-nity
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.
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Page 453?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 profu-sion
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 squat-ted
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 incar-nate
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 god-dess;
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 god-dess,
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 imita-tion
(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 repre-sent
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 peo-ple,
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
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Page 454?Goddess, but on the piles of maize, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and
vegetables, can seem-ingly
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 indis-putable,
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 resur-rection.
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 pre-vailed
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.
Chapter 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 relation-ship
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
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Page 455?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 suc-cessor.
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
read-er’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 any-where
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; out-side
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 bear-ers
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
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Page 456?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 ques-tion
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 dis-charged
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 power-ful
explosive which the smallest
touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the gen-eral
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
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Page 457?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 kin-dred
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 con-fined,
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 some-thing
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,
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Page 458?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 out-side,
that I might inspect the
inside of the cages. This desire of mine gave rise to another diffi-culty,
as these girls were not
allowed to put their feet to the ground all the time they were con-fined
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 noth-ing
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 pur-poses.
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 com-plexion
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 dis-tance
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 orna-
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Page
459?ments 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 fresh-water
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 puber-ty
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 seclu-sion
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 con-nection
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 altogeth-er.”
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
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Page 460?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 vil-lage.
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 dur-ing
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,
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Page 461?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 abat-ed,
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 sepa-rate
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 for-bidden
to see the sun. She is
regarded as unclean; no one may touch her. Her diet is restrict-ed
to boiled rice, milk, sugar,
curd, and tamarind without salt. On the morning of the fifth day
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Page 462?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 for-bidden
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 spir-its
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 daugh-ter,
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 leg-ends,
and there are even traces of
it in marriage customs.
4. REASONS FOR THE SECLUSION
OF GIRLS AT PUBERY
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
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Page 463?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 fur-ther
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 cir-cuit
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
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Page 464?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 pollu-tion
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, men-struous
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 com-mon
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 impor-
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Page
465?tance; 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 menstrua-tion
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 appre-hended
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 iso-late
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 harm-less
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 trans-gress
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 destruc-tive
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 manifesta-tions
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
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Page 466?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 per-formance
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 harm-less
as when it is neither in
heaven nor in earth, but, as far as possible, suspended between
the two.
Chapter 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 dissolv-ing
into spray before they reach
the dark water of the fiord far below, Balder had a great
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Page 467?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 cere-monies
for the sake of producing
those natural effects which they describe in figurative lan-guage.
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 cere-monies
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 mistle-toe,
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.
—————————————————————
Chapter 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 bon-fires
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 midsum-mer;
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
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Page 468?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 vil-lage
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 cus-tom
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 witch-craft.
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 gar-ments
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
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Page 469?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 vil-lage,
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 torch-es
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 val-leys.
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 suf-fer;
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.
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Page 470?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 vil-lage
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 winnow-ing-
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
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Page 471?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 cer-emony
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 cere-mony
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 bun-dles
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 consecrat-ed,
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 conse-crated
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 abol-
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472?ished 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 associ-ate
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 pre-serve
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 sup-ported
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 con-flagration
will break out. At Braunröde,
in the Harz Mountains, it was the custom to burn squir-rels
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 dis-
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473?tance. 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 conse-crated
taper which he had brought
from the church and lighted. The rest stood at equal inter-vals
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 gath-ered
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 hal-lowed
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 dis-charged
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 kin-dled
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 degrad-ing
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 fes-tival
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
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Page 474?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 preser-vative
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 distrib-uted
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 mem-ory,
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 possi-ble
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 sacri-ficed
to Baal, whose favour they
mean to implore, in rendering the year productive of the sus-
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475?tenance 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 sacrific-ing,
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 pur-pose;
but on the next Sunday they
reassemble, and finish the reliques of the first entertain-ment.”
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 deter-mining
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 eigh-teenth
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 authori-ty,
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
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Page 476?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 grand-mother
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 pock-ets
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 influ-ence
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 dis-eases
of the year.” The custom of
driving cattle through or between fires on May Day or the
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Page 477?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 togeth-er,
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 emi-nences,
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 bless-ing
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 pur-pose
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 midsum-mer
celebration were the bonfires,
the procession with torches round the fields, and the cus-tom
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, excit-ed
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
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Page 478?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 vil-lage
situated on a hillside
overlooking the Moselle, the midsummer festival used to be cele-brated
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 fel-lows,
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 inhabi-tants
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 extin-guished
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 six-
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Page
479?teenth 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 mid-summer
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 abun-dant
harvest; and on the other
hand, if a man contributed nothing to the bonfire, it was imag-ined
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 tarbar-rel
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 cel-ebrated
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 won-derful
medicinal virtues, and many
sick people resort to them for the healing of their infirmi-ties.
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
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Page 480?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 mead-ows,
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 midsum-mer
fire is burning, for this is
supposed to be a protection against ghosts, witches, and sick-ness;
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 bon-
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Page
481?fire 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 pro-tection
against witchcraft, thunder,
hail, and cattle disease, especially if next morning the cat-tle
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 sup-posed
to be a preservative against
witchcraft. In Masuren, a district of Eastern Prussia inhab-ited
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 morn-ing.
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Page 482?When we pass from the east to the west of Europe we still find the
summer solstice celebrat-ed
with rites of the same general
character. Down to about the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury
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 pro-tect
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 cat-tle
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 Jumičges 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 consist-ing
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 fol-lowing
year. Though only the first
and the last man of the chain had a hand free, their busi-ness
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 pre-vailed.
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 fid-dle
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
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Page 483?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 destroy-ing
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 assem-bly
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 celebrat-ed
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 dif-ferent
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
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Page 484?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 wind-ward
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 bar-ren
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 straight-way
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 pos-sess
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 mis-fortune,
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.
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Page 485?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 through-out
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 sur-vived,
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 heav-en.
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 agri-cultural
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 occu-pied
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
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Page 486?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 begin-ning
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 char-acter
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 imagi-nation
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 com-fort
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 hol-lows?
and could the good-man and the
good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the wel-come
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
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Page 487?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 gŕinisg, 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 emi-nences,
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 cir-cle,
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 vil-lages
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 scat-ter
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 occa-sionally
made to frighten children. We
can now understand why in Lower Brittany every per-son
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
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Page 488?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 tech-nical
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 celebra-tions
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 thunder-storm
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 tré-foir,
as it was called in many
places, was long observed. A French writer of the seventeenth
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Page 489?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 can-dles
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 fruitful-ness
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
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Page 490?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 per-forming
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 kin-dled
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 per-haps
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
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Page 491?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 coun-sel
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 occasion-ally
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 vil-lage
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 sick-ness,
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 domes-tic
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-
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492?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.
Chapter 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 observa-tions.
In the first place we can
hardly help being struck by the resemblance which the cere-monies
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
dis-tinction
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 cere-monies
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 car-ried
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 sup-posed
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 enquir-ers.
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 concep-tions
of the fire which plays the
principal part in the rites. On the one view, the fire, like sun-shine
in our latitude, is a genial
creative power which fosters the growth of plants and the
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Page 493?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 pri-mary
and original, the purification
attributed to them was secondary and derivative. Such a
conclusion, occupying an
intermediate position between the two opposing theories and recog-nising
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 theo-ry
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 discus-sion,
and accordingly I propose to
adduce the considerations which tell for it before proceed-ing
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 prac-tices
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 con-jecture
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 con-scious
imitation of the sun. The
custom of rolling a burning wheel down a hill, which is often
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Page 494?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 sup-posed
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 lumi-nary
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 occa-sions
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 fric-tion
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 indicat-ed,
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 chil-dren
on foggy days for the purpose
of clearing away the mist may very naturally be interpret-ed
as a sun-charm. In the Vosges
Mountains the people believe that the midsummer fires
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Page 495?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 rem-nant
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 bon-fire
with the seed-corn at sowing,
of scattering the ashes by themselves over the field to fer-tilise
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 vine-yards.
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 vil-lagers
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 for-ward
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 driv-ing
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
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Page 496?marry and become the mother of many children; in Flanders women leap
over the midsum-mer
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 gener-ative
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 hol-iday-
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 associ-ated
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 bon-fires,
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 multiplica-tion
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 invo-cations
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 repre-sented
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.
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Page 497?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-festi-vals
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 ele-ments,
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 peo-ple
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 pri-mary
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 steal-ing
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 peo-ples
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
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Page 498?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 glow-ing
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 connex-
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499?ion with the sun.
Chapter 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 repre-sentative
of the fertilising tree-spirit
or spirit of vegetation. This character of the effigy, as rep-resentative
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 equiva-lent
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 simultane-ously
with a May-tree, the former
being carried by the boys, the latter by the girls; and, sec-ond,
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 repre-sentative
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 misin-terpretation.
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 preced-
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500?ing 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 back-wards
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 pre-tence
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 Jumičges 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 mid-summer
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 vege-tation.
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,
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Page 501?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 influ-ence,
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
inde-pendently
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 crimi-nals
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 vic-tims
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 con-tents.
Such were the great festivals
held once every five years. But besides these quinquennial fes-tivals,
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 sacri-
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502?fices, 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, occa-sionally
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 gaz-ing
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 carry-ing
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 counter-part
at the spring and midsummer
festivals. At Luchon in the Pyrenees on Midsummer Eve “a
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Page 503?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, com-posed
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 sur-rounding
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 for-merly
kindled on the Place de Grčve
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 some-times
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 depart-ment
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 popu-lar
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 cus-toms,
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 solem-nised
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.
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Page 504?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-festi-vals
as attempts to break the power
of witchcraft by burning or banning the witches and war-locks,
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 pleas-ure,
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 ration-alism
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 per-sons
they sentenced to death, the
greater would be the fertility of the land. To a modern read-er
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 calcu-lated
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 repre-sented
the spirits of vegetation, and
accordingly that the custom of burning them was a magi-cal
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 sup-posed
to furnish protection against
witchcraft. On the other hand there is little to show that the
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Page 505?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 evi-dence
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.
Chapter 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 vic-tims,
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 sup-posed
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 con-ceive;
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
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Page 506?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 mil-let
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 dis-ease,
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 talis-mans
(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 pre-scribed
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
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Page 507?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 posses-sor
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 dis-eases,
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-mistle-toe,
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 stom-ach
of the sufferer or give him a
decoction of it to drink. Again, the ancient belief that mistle-toe
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.
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Page 508?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 par-asitic
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 nec-essary
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 pro-tects
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 mistle-toe
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
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Page 509?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 culmi-nate
with the culmination of the
sun on the longest day of the year. Hence it seems reason-able
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 coun-terpart
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 for-gotten.
And the name of Balder’s
balefires (Balder’s Ba˘lar), by which these midsum-mer
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 fol-lowed
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 midsum-mer
bonfire in Normandy, may
naturally be interpreted as traces of an older custom of actual-ly
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 cere-mony.
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.
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Page 510?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 rep-resentative
was burned at the
fire-festivals. For we may be quite sure that it was not as a rep-resentative
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 particu-lar
kind of sacred tree. But of
all European trees none has such claims as the oak to be con-sidered
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 con-clude
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 conser-vatism.
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 occa-sional
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
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Page 511?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 light-ing
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 sub-sist
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 unin-jured
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 invulnera-ble;
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 cus-tom.
The result will be to show
that, in assuming this idea as the explanation of Balder’s rela-tion
to the mistletoe, I assume a
principle which is deeply engraved on the mind of primitive
man.
Chapter LXVI
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Page 512?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 tem-porarily
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 indefi-nite
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 possi-bility
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 circum-stances
in which, if the life or soul
remains in the man, it stands a greater chance of sustain-ing
injury than if it were stowed
away in some safe and secret place. Accordingly, in such cir-cumstances,
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 discov-er
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 exter-nal
soul is one which has had a
powerful hold on the minds of men at an early stage of histo-ry.
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 fea-tures
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
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Page 513?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 par-rot.
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, bran-dishing
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 trav-els,
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 mis-chance
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.
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Page 514?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 mod-ern
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 dis-consolate
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
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Page 515?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 bas-ket
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; there-fore
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 war-lock’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
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Page 516?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 cap-tive
queen as to where he keeps his
soul. At last, after deceiving her several times, he con-fides
to her the fatal secret:
“There is 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-foot-ed
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, dis-covered
that the only way to kill him
was to rub a mole on the giant’s right breast with a cer-tain
egg, which was in a duck, which
was in a chest, which lay locked and bound at the bot-tom
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 predeces-sors,
“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
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Page 517?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 cir-cumambient
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 stran-gled
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 immedi-ately,
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 con-trived
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 cas-ket.
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
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Page 518?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
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Page 519?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.
AWest 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 aston-ishment,
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.
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Page 520?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 fin-ished
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.
Chapter 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 medi-cine-
man is sent for, who conjures
the soul of the infant into half a coco-nut, which he there-upon
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 cere-mony
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
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Page 521?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 emper-or
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
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Page 522?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 incanta-tions....
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 bro-ken.”
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 SOULS 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 with-ered
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
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Page 523?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 wag-gon
on the very road in question.”
“It is not uncommon, however,” adds the writer, “for per-sons
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 sympa-thetic
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 per-son
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.
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Page 524?Often they fight, and then the wizard whose external soul is beaten,
falls ill or dies. The weak-est
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 myste-rious
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 exis-tence
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 croc-odile,
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 individ-ual,
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 525?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 exter-nal
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 hap-pen
that the animal is killed
while the man’s soul is lodged in it, the man dies; and if the ani-mal
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 leop-ards
for their external souls. And
on the other hand, sometimes they all take after their moth-er;
for instance, if her external
soul is a tortoise, all the external souls of her sons and daugh-ters
will be tortoises too. So
intimately bound up is the life of the man with that of the animal
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Page 526?which he regards as his external or bush soul, that the death or
injury of the animal necessar-ily
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 sev-eral
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 croco-dile
or a hippopotamus. It is
believed that such a person’s life is bound up with that of the ani-mal
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 ani-mal’s,
in fact that the death of both
would occur simultaneously,” or rather that when the ani-mal
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 ani-mals
in the same way that a Central
American Indian regarded his nagual, but with this differ-ence,
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 ani-mal
of the species, but they could
not say with which. The result naturally was that every man
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Page 527?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 ani-mal
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 rea-son
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 respec-tively
(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
rela-tions
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 ani-mals,
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.
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Page 528?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 com-paratively
rare, and has hitherto been
discovered nowhere but in Australia. Far more com-monly
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 him-self
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 circum-stances,
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 after-wards
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 fur-nish
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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 529?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 suppos-ing
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 prac-tises
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 noth-ing
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 tri-fling
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
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Page 530?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 sav-age’s
life should so long have
remained a secret, and that we should be left to piece it togeth-er
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 explana-tion,
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 possi-bility
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 con-sists
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
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Page 531?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 exhib-ited
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 sub-stances
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 dis-gorged
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 chil-dren,
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 erect-ed
either in the village or in a
lonely part of the forest. It is modelled in the shape of the mythi-cal
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
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Page 532?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 prodi-gious
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 secret-ly
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-roar-er
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 resur-rection
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
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Page 533?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 con-sumed
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 for-eign
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 par-ents
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 mus-cle.
As they sit in a row
cross-legged, with their hands stretched out, the chief takes his trum-pet,
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 tradi-tions
and secrets of the tribe.
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Page 534?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 mes-sengers
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 spir-its.
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 cer-tain
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 gib-berish,
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
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Page 535?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 “dis-charged
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
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Page 536?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 char-acter
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 exist-ed
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 occa-sions
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 apprehend-ed
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.
Chapter 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
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Page 537?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 encom-pass
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 morn-ing
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 intermedi-ate
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 mistle-toe
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 con-
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Page
538?tained 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 for-gotten;
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 supersti-tion
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 neces-sary
to break the mistletoe, and
probably, as in the case of Balder, to throw it at him. And to
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Page 539?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 perpetu-al
fire which burned in the
temple of Vesta at Rome and under the oak at Romove, was prob-ably
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 after-wards
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, especial-ly
about Morbihan, branches of
mistletoe are hung over the doors of stables and byres to pro-tect
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 yel-low
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 who-ever
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 hid-den
treasures can be seen glowing
like flame on Midsummer Eve, and that fern-seed, gath-ered
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
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Page 540?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 kin-dled
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 periodi-cally
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 ema-nation
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 splen-dour,
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 observa-tion
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
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Page 541?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, fol-lowing
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 “pro-fess
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
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Page 542?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 con-cerning
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 estab-lished
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
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Page 543?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 con-nexion
of the oak with the sky was an
after-thought based on the belief that the flash of light-ning
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 wor-shipped
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 para-sitic
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 prop-erties
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 midsum-mer
sun. Perhaps, indeed, we might
combine the two seemingly divergent views by suppos-ing
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 tak-ing
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 theo-ries
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
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Page 544?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 light-ning
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.
Chapter 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 pres-ent
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 suc-cession
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 545?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 uni-formity,
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 discov-ery
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 per-fect
hypothesis, perhaps by some
totally different way of looking at the phenomena—of regis-tering
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
Page 546?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 apprehen-sions,
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
tomorrow. 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 per-ceive
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 gold-en
glory resting like the aureole
of a dying saint over
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!
-------
Page 547
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
Devachan
Cycles
Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
Differentiation Of Species Missing Links
Psychic Laws, Forces, and Phenomena
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What is Theosophy ? Theosophy Defined (More Detail)
Three Fundamental Propositions Key Concepts of Theosophy
Cosmogenesis Anthropogenesis Root Races
Ascended Masters After Death States
The Seven Principles of Man Karma
Reincarnation Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
The Start of the Theosophical
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History of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society Presidents
History of the Theosophical
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The Three Objectives of the
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Explanation of the Theosophical
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A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom
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The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3
A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s
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Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
The Early Teachings of The Masters
A Collection of Fugitive Fragments
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy
Mystical,
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From Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II
In the Twilight”
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Letters and
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Theosophische
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An Outstanding
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Elementary Theosophy Who is the Man? Body and Soul
Body, Soul and Spirit Reincarnation Karma
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